The City Behind the List
Tel Aviv sits at the centre of Israel's largest Russian-speaking concentration. Roughly a million Russian-speaking immigrants arrived in Israel between 1990 and the early 2000s; a second, smaller wave followed the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. That demographic fact is not incidental to Babel Books — it is the press's entire logic. The readership was already there, already literate in Russian, and increasingly unable to obtain new writing from authors now on Russia's foreign-agent register or, in the most serious cases, its extremist register.
Babel Books publishes in three languages simultaneously: Russian, Hebrew, and English. The triptych is unusual among exile presses, most of which anchor to the diaspora language alone. Publishing in Hebrew reaches the Israeli general market and public library system; publishing in English connects the title to international rights conversations and to English-language reviewers who would otherwise never encounter the press. The Russian edition is the one the press was founded to produce, and in practice it moves fastest — through Russian-language bookshops in Tel Aviv, through diaspora reading groups, and through direct online order to readers in Germany, Latvia, and the United States.
What the Catalogue Contains
The list concentrates on prose fiction and creative non-fiction from writers who have either left Russia since 2022 or whose work has become legally difficult to distribute at home. The press has not confined itself to contemporary titles: shorter works by writers associated with the Soviet dissident tradition appear alongside new manuscripts, giving the catalogue an archival dimension alongside its current-affairs urgency.
Distribution follows the diaspora map. Tel Aviv's Russian-language bookshops — a retail category that has expanded noticeably since 2022 — are the primary physical channel. European distribution runs through a small number of specialist importers in Berlin and Riga, both cities with established Russian-speaking communities and functioning independent bookselling infrastructure. For the English editions, the press negotiates case by case with distributors serving the Anglophone academic and independent bookshop market, a slower and more expensive route that the press treats as reputational investment rather than volume business.
The Hebrew editions enter the Israeli public library system through standard national deposit and acquisition processes. That channel matters for long-term discoverability in a way that diaspora sales alone cannot achieve: a book held in a municipal library outlasts the urgency that brought it into print.
Working Without Glavlit's Shadow
Every title Babel Books produces exists, in a documentary sense, outside the reach of the censorship architecture that shaped Soviet publishing for decades. Glavlit, the Soviet authority that read manuscripts before publication, was formally dissolved in 1991, but the regulatory tools that replaced it — foreign-agent labelling requirements, the extremist register, the 2023 designation of the international LGBT movement as extremist — have recreated a chilling environment for Russian-language publishing inside Russia. Babel Books operates in a jurisdiction where none of those designations carry legal force over the act of publication, which is precisely what makes the Tel Aviv address more than incidental.
The three-language format also insulates individual titles against the specific risk that the foreign-agent label rules pose for a Russian-language press trying to reach readers inside Russia: a title circulating in Hebrew or English does not trigger the same domestic regulatory exposure as a Russian-language edition shipped across the Russian border, though cross-border digital distribution remains a genuinely unresolved legal question for all exile presses.
What Babel Books demonstrates is that a city can function as publishing infrastructure. Tel Aviv's combination of a large Russian-literate readership, a functioning independent bookselling sector, and a legal environment indifferent to Moscow's designation apparatus makes it, alongside Berlin and Riga, one of the practical centres of exile press activity since 2022.
