The Weight of One Catalogue
Eksmo-AST is not one publisher but two legacy houses — Eksmo and AST — that merged operations progressively through the 2000s and now function as a single vertically integrated group, handling editorial, printing, and distribution. Industry estimates place its share of the Russian print market at around 40–50 percent, a concentration with no close equivalent among the major European book markets. That scale gives it leverage over retail chains, freight networks, and the decisions every smaller domestic press must make about what can realistically reach a shelf.
The group's list is deliberately wide: genre fiction, self-help, children's books, and mainstream literary titles sit alongside one another. Eugene Vodolazkin and Guzel Yakhina, two of the writers still publishing within Russia, appear in its catalogue — evidence that literary prestige and commercial volume are not, for Eksmo-AST, mutually exclusive. What the list does not carry, since the legal environment shifted after February 2022, is work by writers now designated as foreign agents or placed on the extremist register. Boris Akunin and Dmitry Glukhovsky, both listed on Russia's terrorist and extremist register, are absent; their continued publication happens entirely outside Russia.
That absence is structural rather than incidental. Eksmo-AST does not editorially refuse such writers — they are legally unpublishable domestically under current designations. The result is a catalogue shaped partly by affirmative choices and partly by a perimeter the law draws around it.
The Exile Houses as a Negative Space
Freedom Letters, founded in 2022 and operating from outside Russia, and Vidim Books have each positioned their lists in explicit relation to what the dominant domestic market cannot hold. Their catalogues are small by any commercial measure, but they function as an index of the gap: writers whose Russian-language work needs a press, a printer, and a distribution network that none of the domestic majors can now provide.
Babel Books, operating from Tel Aviv in a city with a substantial Russian-speaking diaspora, occupies a related but distinct position — publishing for readers already outside Russia rather than trying to move copies in.
None of these presses competes with Eksmo-AST commercially. The comparison is structural: the exile houses collectively publish what the dominant group is legally barred from printing. That is not a criticism of Eksmo-AST's editorial choices; it is a description of how the Russian-language literary field has reorganised itself around a legal and political boundary that runs through the middle of any complete catalogue.