On March 1, a new Russian law came into force targeting “propaganda for narcotic drugs, psychoactive substances, their analogs and precursors,” and psychoactive plants, especially all public statements that are judged to promote “tolerance toward” or “the attraction or necessity” of using these substances. Initially, the bill, which the Russian Duma passed back in 2024, amends the existing regulation on drugs. But hiding in the fine print of the new law is an unprecedented attempt to rewrite the entire cultural history of post-Soviet Russia.
The most important part of the amendment is the widely expanded scope: While online drug advertising was previously restricted, the amendment aims to “all literary and artistic works” to be reviewed for consideration. In other words, it affects anything in the entire post-Soviet stockpile of Russian print, music and film that could be clearly interpreted as drug promotion. Content deemed offensive under the new law must carry a special warning. Offenders face heavy fines and even prison terms for repeat offenses.
On March 1, a new Russian law came into force targeting “propaganda for narcotic drugs, psychoactive substances, their analogues and precursors,” and psychotropic plants, especially all public statements that are considered to promote “tolerance toward” or “attraction or importance” of use these things. Initially, the bill, which the Russian Duma passed back in 2024, amends the existing regulation on drugs. But hiding in the fine print of the new law is an unprecedented attempt to rewrite the entire cultural history of post-Soviet Russia.
The most important part of the amendment is the widely expanded scope: While online drug advertising was previously restricted, the amendment aims to “all literary and artistic works” to be reviewed for consideration. In other words, it affects anything in the entire post-Soviet stockpile of Russian print, music and film that could be clearly interpreted as drug promotion. Content deemed offensive under the new law must carry a special warning. Offenders face heavy fines and even prison terms for repeat offenses.
Disguised as a simple legal measure to protect public health—who would object to making drugs unattractive?—the new law will place a heavy burden on Russian songwriters, film producers and writers, as well as record labels, publishing companies and online streaming platforms.
The new law follows a familiar pattern of Russian censorship, most notably a 2013 ban on “propaganda of non-traditional romantic relationships,” which outlawed any depictions of gay or lesbian life. Popular, the biography of the gay Italian writer and film director Pier Paolo Pasolini is sold in Russian bookstores. with entire pages turned offand a lot of Vito Spatafore characteristic series in Sopranos modified or edited on Amediateka, a popular Russian video streaming service.
The new law adds to the already widespread restrictions that content creators and publishers in Russia must adhere to, including restrictions on anything related to suicide, “childfree life,” on-screen smoking, criminal subculture, “extremist” content, anything that could be seen as “disparaging the armed forces,” and many other issues that fall outside the purview of Putin’s government. What these prohibitions—some enshrined in law, some unwritten—have in common is that they are vaguely defined, leaving framers unsure of what is offensive and what is not. What’s more, no one can tell you in advance: The obligation to comply with the law is being pushed into media outlets, book publishers, film distributors, and other platforms, creating a pervasive culture of self-regulation. The law empowers Russia’s Ministry of Digital Development and Ministry of Culture to maintain lists of violators, while the Ministry of Internal Affairs can issue orders to remove products based on unclear criteria. There is no judicial review.
The anti-drug law applies to all content released since August 1, 1990. Note the date: That’s the day the Soviet Union officially ended censorship and disbanded Glavlit, the dreaded communist agency that could decide the fate of every cultural work. With its choice of date, Putin’s administration makes an unequivocal statement: An immediate success, a free period of control in the history of Soviet and post-Soviet Russia did not exist. The two eras are now seamlessly intertwined in the suppression of cultural expression, re-legitimizing the apparatus of Soviet control. The burst of free artistic expression in the 1990s is explained from the Russian cultural memory.
This makes legislation a more ambitious project than regulation. It is an old Russian construction that has been brought in accordance with the current Russian. One of the most notable victims of the new law is “Opium for Nobody,” a 1995 song by the post-punk band Agata Kristi that remains a top 25 hit in Russian popular music today. million plays YouTube. On Yandex Music, Russia’s main streaming service, the title has been changed to “For Nobody,” and the song’s references to drugs (such as “Music is nobody’s opium, just for us”) have all been redacted. For anyone behind Russia’s new digital metal curtain without access to the original recordings, the song has always sounded that way. Russian hip-hop are among the biggest offenders in terms of offensive language retroactively: Legal professionals predict that up to 80 percent of songs in some streaming catalogs will have to be changed, removed or otherwise censored.
A record label asking a musician to delete the lyrics of a song they wrote in 1995—because the 2024 law outlaws lyrics that didn’t violate any laws when they were written and have been sung by millions of Russians for 30 years—is something completely different from what investigators usually do. Artists now need to accept that the cultural memory of their country is not a record of what Russians have created, sung and written for decades, but a temporary document that can be revised at any time at the discretion of the government.
Sweeping has moved beyond music. The Follow-up list of the Union of Russian Books ready flag offensive works by Stephen King, Sergei Lukyanenko, Haruki Murakami, Chuck Palahniuk, and Viktor Pelevin, as well as post-1990 translations by John Steinbeck and Erich Maria Remarque. Biographies of writer Mikhail Bulgakov and singer-songwriter Vladimir Vysotsky—two Soviet-era artists whose drug addiction is an important biographical fact—now require warning labels. Online bookstores have scoured the 19th century for offensive content, placing narcotic content warnings on works by Alexander Pushkin and Nikolai Gogol. The head of Eksmo, Russia’s largest publishing group, said The law affects technically more than 3 million names. Books marked under the new rules are automatically classified as 18+, sealed in sealed packaging, and taxed at 22 percent VAT instead of the normal 10 percent rate for literary works. That makes the law, among other things, a revenue mechanism for the government.
The monitoring mechanism for cleaning up online streaming catalogs of fakes is artificial intelligence, which has gone wrong. Eksmo’s in-house AI compliance system marked author Denis Dragunskiy as a perpetrator of drug propaganda—because his algorithm recognized the first syllable of his last name as sounding like the English word “drug.” Some authors have refused to review their own text. Publishers, found among the authors of the refusal and a million-ruble fine, have remained to negotiate a compromise that no one can define, under the rules that even the Ministry of Digital Development has failed to define. Editor of a literary magazine YunostSergei Shargunov, explained the situation in simple terms: “What I see can only be described as a witch hunt.”
As a result, as one journalist he told it Forbesis that “there will be two true states”: one version of every song, every book, every movie available on legitimate Russian platforms and the other version to be kept as pirated downloads or in personal archives. The piracy that the Russian publishing industry spent two decades trying to suppress has become the only way for Russians to maintain access to their cultural history in its original form. Antiquities preserved and protected from government suppression include popular culture long enjoyed by the Russian middle class, such as the Soviet Union. friendly (an underground publishing network to evade official censorship) not only includes long-prohibited literature such as Gulag islands but also yoga guides for smuggling, sewing stitches, and emotions.
32 years after the release of “Opium for Nobody,” band member Vadim Samoylov—who has spoken out in support of Ukraine’s war and anti-LGBT laws—justified the song’s removal to a radio interviewer: “We’re going to make a change soon. Just give a few words.” He said without any concern, he even added that the law saw him as reasonable. This must be how Soviet self-regulation worked too: Don’t upset the powers that be, just make sure you can get back to work. At the same time, the band’s audience is save old MP3 players and tossing Torrent customers to collect the samizdat archive at a time when modern Russian culture is splitting into two parts: the raw and clean version that existed before March 1 and the sanitized version approved by the Kremlin.
