A press founded on a specific impossibility
Freedom Letters opened in 2023 with a premise stated plainly in its founding documents: to publish Russian-language literature that cannot appear inside Russia. The press is registered in Germany. Its founders are Russian-speaking; its primary readership is Russian-speaking diaspora communities across Europe, Israel, and North America. The catalogue is not a collection of dissident chic or nostalgia publishing. It is, title by title, a record of what the post-2022 designation system has made unpublishable at home.
The mechanism that shapes that catalogue is specific. Since February 2022, Russia's foreign-agent register has expanded rapidly, bringing with it requirements that any material by a designated individual carry conspicuous labelling on every page. The extremist register — a separate instrument — goes further: domestic publication, distribution, or even quotation from a designated writer's work can carry criminal liability. When Boris Akunin and Dmitry Glukhovsky were added to that register, their backlists did not simply go out of print. They became legally hazardous to stock. Freedom Letters exists, in large part, to handle material that has fallen into that hazard zone.
The catalogue as evidence
The press works across prose, essay, and poetry. Among its early titles were works by Dmitry Bykov, who holds a foreign-agent designation, and by Lyudmila Ulitskaya, whose refusal to endorse the war cost her the domestic distribution relationships her earlier fiction had built over decades. A Freedom Letters edition carries no mandatory warning label, because German law requires none. The implied contrast with a hypothetical Russian edition — shrink-wrapped, labelled, legally fraught — is structural to the press's identity.
Dmitry Glukhovsky's name on the extremist register makes his new prose effectively stateless inside Russia. The pre-2022 editions of his Metro trilogy continue to circulate in grey-market secondhand channels, but a new title from Glukhovsky requires an outlet prepared to publish in Russian without Russian retail access. Freedom Letters provides that outlet. The same logic applies to Sasha Filipenko, whose fiction has attracted consistent prize attention and whose willingness to write about political trauma — Belarus as much as Russia — had already complicated his domestic publishing position before the war narrowed it further.
The press has also taken on Boris Akunin, whose historical mystery series built one of the largest popular readerships in post-Soviet Russian fiction. Akunin's designation is not a literary judgment; it is a legal one, generated by a state apparatus and recorded in a dated official entry. What Freedom Letters offers is not rehabilitation — he needs none — but a functional publication address. His new manuscripts reach readers in Riga, in Berlin, in Tel Aviv, in print runs that would have been inconceivable for an exile-format press a decade ago.
The infrastructure that makes it possible
What has changed since the Soviet-era precedents of samizdat and tamizdat is the logistics. Tamizdat — texts smuggled abroad for foreign publication, sometimes repatriated illicitly — was a practice defined by scarcity: limited paper, limited channels, limited typewriter access. Freedom Letters operates with print-on-demand capacity, digital distribution, and a diaspora that is large enough, literate enough, and solvent enough to sustain a catalogue commercially. Russian-speaking emigration since 2022 has created, almost overnight, concentrations of readers in cities — Berlin, Tbilisi, Vilnius, Tel Aviv — that function as a distributed domestic market.
The press does not translate. Its output is Russian-language, aimed at readers who left with their language intact. This distinguishes it from presses like Pushkin Press or NYRB Classics, which work in English translation and reach a different readership entirely. Freedom Letters is not competing with Anglophone publishers for the same reader; it is substituting for Eksmo-AST and the domestic market those publishers can no longer serve. That substitution is the point.
Print runs are not publicly disclosed in detail, but the press has indicated that demand has exceeded initial projections for several titles — a statement consistent with what independent booksellers in Berlin and Riga have reported about Russian-language book sales generally since 2022. A community that could previously order from Russian online retailers with fast delivery lost that access through a combination of logistics disruption and the retailers' own legal exposure. Freedom Letters, and a handful of comparable small presses in Riga and Vilnius, moved into that gap.
What the catalogue cannot fix
The limitation Freedom Letters cannot overcome is reach inside Russia itself. A press in Berlin publishing in Russian is accessible to the diaspora and, through VPN-mediated digital channels, to some readers still in Russia. But physical distribution inside Russia is closed. A reader in Moscow cannot walk into a bookshop and buy a Bykov title from a German imprint; the legal risk sits with the retailer, not only the publisher. The Glavlit apparatus that once read manuscripts before publication has no direct successor, but the extremist and foreign-agent registers function as a distributed prior-restraint system whose enforcement is delegated to retailers, platforms, and employers rather than concentrated in a single office.
The press also cannot address the writers who remain inside Russia and cannot or will not leave. Eugene Vodolazkin and Guzel Yakhina continue to publish domestically. Their situation — navigating what can be said inside a contracted but still-functioning literary market — is distinct from that of the writers Freedom Letters serves. The press's catalogue is self-selecting: it represents the writers for whom remaining inside that market was impossible, not all the writers for whom the market is difficult.
What the catalogue does, cumulatively, is document the shape of the impossibility. Each title added is a title that the Russian publishing infrastructure — the thick journals, the major chains, the online retailers, the state-aligned distribution networks — declined or was legally prevented from carrying. Assembled together, the Freedom Letters list reads less like a publisher's seasonal programme and more like an itemised receipt for what the designation system has cost Russian literary life. The press publishes what it can print. The record of what it cannot print is, in a different sense, equally part of its catalogue.