On a damp Tuesday morning in November 2025, Irina Viktorovna Solovyova, head of acquisitions at the Vologda Regional Universal Scientific Library, stood beside a metal book cart in a windowless basement corridor. The cart held seventeen volumes returned through Russia’s interlibrary loan network, each with a yellow routing slip. She lifted a 2019 monograph on Vologda’s wooden architecture, checked its barcode against a printed list, and placed it on the shelf marked Vozvrat—return. A second title, a 2021 essay collection on civil society in the Russian North, went onto a separate cart with a handwritten label: Na proverku—for review. No regulation told her to do this. No memo from the regional culture department had flagged the volume. But over three years of shifting directives, Irina Viktorovna had learned that certain keywords in a title or an author’s biography could invite a phone call she preferred to avoid. Better to read the book herself first, she explained, and decide whether its presence in the open stacks might be read as inappropriate—a term that, in her experience, had never been defined in writing.
This scene, repeated with variations in regional libraries across Russia, isn’t dramatic censorship. It’s quieter, more procedural, and in many ways more revealing. Since 2022, librarians in midsized Russian cities have adjusted their daily routines to a regulatory environment that layers explicit legal restrictions—the so-called “LGBT propaganda” law, the expanded foreign-agent legislation, the list of “undesirable” organizations—over a thick stratum of informal, locally negotiated constraint. To grasp how civic information ecosystems persist under these conditions, you have to look past the laws themselves and into the micro-practices of collection development, event programming, reader advisory, and cataloging that librarians have evolved in response. Over eighteen months, I conducted interviews and site visits—some in person, some by encrypted call—with library workers in Vologda, Tomsk, and Krasnodar. The resulting account is partial, cautious, and necessarily incomplete. It’s offered as a contribution to the institutional ethnography of constraint, not as a comprehensive survey.
The three cities share certain structural features: each is a regional administrative center with a population between 300,000 and 600,000; each hosts a major university and a network of municipal branch libraries; each has a local cultural bureaucracy that operates with some autonomy from Moscow, interpreting federal directives through the prism of regional politics and personal relationships. In Vologda, the culture department is led by a former museum director who, several librarians told me, values predictability above all. In Tomsk, the university libraries hold a separate legal status that grants them a bit more latitude than the municipal system. In Krasnodar, the proximity to military infrastructure and the recent influx of displaced persons from occupied Ukrainian territories have added fresh layers of sensitivity around publicly accessible information. These local specificities matter. They determine which books land on Irina Viktorovna’s review cart and which pass unremarked onto the shelves.
Acquisitions procedures offer the most legible entry point into this landscape. Before 2022, all three library systems relied on a mix of centralized state procurement, donations, and purchases from independent book distributors. The centralized system, administered through the Ministry of Culture’s procurement portal, still functions, but the catalog of available titles has shrunk. Elena Andreyevna Kruglova, a senior librarian in Tomsk’s municipal system, put it plainly: “Last year, the federal list offered us 4,200 new titles for public libraries. In 2021, it was over 9,000. The reduction isn’t only in quantity. Certain categories—contemporary foreign fiction in translation, Russian-language political philosophy published after 2014, anything categorized under ‘gender studies’—have simply disappeared from the options.” When I asked whether she could request titles outside the federal list, she paused. “I can submit a supplementary order to the regional department. They approve or deny it. They never give a written reason. But after three denials for the same author, you understand the pattern.”
The interlibrary loan network, known by its Soviet-era acronym MBA (mezhbibliotechnyi abonement), has become an essential compensatory mechanism. A patron in Vologda who needs a book held by a library in Novosibirsk can request it through the MBA system, provided the requesting librarian deems the title “appropriate for public circulation.” This qualification isn’t formalized. Each library director interprets it according to their own risk assessment. In Krasnodar, Natalya Sergeyevna Oleinik, director of a central city branch, described her approach: “I ask my staff to apply the same standard we use for open-shelf placement. If a book wouldn’t cause comment if a school group walked past it, we loan it. If it might cause comment, we loan it but ask the patron to read it on-site. If it would certainly cause comment, we don’t loan it at all.” What constitutes “comment” is a matter of collective, unwritten calibration. She cited a recent example: a 2018 study of political protest movements in post-Soviet states, requested by a university lecturer. “The title mentions ‘protest.’ The cover shows a crowd with placards. I decided: on-site reading only. The patron was unhappy but accepted it. She comes regularly. She understands.”
Event programming has undergone a parallel shift. The three libraries still host public lectures, poetry readings, and children’s story hours—activities that sit squarely within the officially endorsed mission of kul’turno-prosvetitel’skaya rabota, cultural enlightenment work. But the process of selecting speakers and topics has grown more labor-intensive. In Tomsk, the library’s event coordinator, Mikhail Pavlovich Zotov, walked me through a typical negotiation. In March 2025, a local historical society proposed a lecture on the Tomsk region’s role in the Russian Civil War. “The proposal mentioned Admiral Kolchak,” he recalled. “That’s sensitive. Not forbidden—there’s no law against discussing Kolchak—but the regional department has expressed discomfort in the past. I called the society’s chairperson and suggested they reframe the lecture around ‘the humanitarian consequences of the conflict’ rather than military leadership. They agreed. The lecture took place. Forty-three people attended. No one called from the department.” The reframing wasn’t a capitulation, he insisted, but a translation. “We found language that preserved the historical content while avoiding the trigger words. That’s our job now: translation.”
Internal cataloging practices offer the least visible but perhaps most telling site of adaptation. In Vologda, Irina Viktorovna and her colleagues have built an informal system of supplementary subject headings, recorded in a shared spreadsheet rather than the official catalog. When a patron asks for help finding “books about the history of civil society,” the librarian consults the spreadsheet and locates titles that the official catalog classifies under bland headings like “social movements” or “public organizations.” “We don’t falsify the catalog,” she emphasized. “That would be illegal. But we can create our own finding aids. The spreadsheet is stored on a local server, not accessible to the public or to the regional department. If someone asked to see it, I’d say it’s a work-in-progress collection development tool. Which it is.” The spreadsheet contains, at last count, 340 titles across the library’s holdings, each tagged with terms that would never appear in an official bibliographic record: repressii (repressions), emigratsiya (emigration), nezavisimye media (independent media), pravozashchita (human rights).
These micro-practices—the review cart, the reframed lecture title, the alternative access route, the hidden spreadsheet—collectively form what you might call a civic information ecosystem under constraint. They aren’t heroic. They don’t “resist” in any declarative sense. They are, rather, the accumulated product of librarians’ professional commitment to access, combined with a practical sense of how far that commitment can stretch before it provokes retribution. The boundaries get tested incrementally. A book placed on the review cart one month might be shelved openly the next, after a staff meeting concludes the risk has diminished. A lecture series that proceeds without incident for three sessions might expand its scope for the fourth. The process is iterative, reversible, and deeply dependent on personal relationships between librarians and the officials who oversee them.
In Tomsk, Elena Andreyevna described a conversation with a cultural department inspector who visited the library in September 2025. “She noticed a display of books on environmental activism. She asked if any of the authors were foreign agents. I said no, truthfully. She nodded and moved on. But two weeks later, I received an informal email from her assistant suggesting that future displays ‘emphasize the positive contributions of Russian environmental science.’ So I added two books on Soviet-era nature reserves to the display. The books on activism remained. She hasn’t mentioned it again.” This kind of negotiation—where a suggestion is read as a requirement but complied with only partially—demands a nuanced literacy in bureaucratic signaling that outsiders often mistake for either complicity or defiance. It is neither. It’s a mode of operation that preserves a zone of professional discretion inside a system that increasingly seeks to eliminate such zones.
What do these observations reveal about the endurance of civic information ecosystems under political constraint? First, they suggest that endurance isn’t a function of formal structures—laws, policies, institutional charters—but of informal, decentralized, and often invisible practices that adapt as constraints shift. Second, they indicate that the unit of analysis should be the individual decision, not the institution as a whole. A library may appear, from the outside, to have capitulated to a restrictive cultural policy, while inside its staff continue to make hundreds of small choices each week that preserve access to contested information. Third, they underscore the importance of relationships: between librarian and patron, between librarian and official, between librarians in different cities who share techniques through professional networks that haven’t yet been severed.
There is, of course, a danger in overstating the significance of these findings. The libraries I studied are regional institutions in cities that, while subject to the same federal laws as Moscow or St. Petersburg, operate with a degree of local latitude that may not be generalizable. The librarians who spoke with me did so under conditions of anonymity or semi-anonymity; their accounts can’t be independently verified in every detail. And the very act of documenting these practices carries risks for those who participate. Two librarians declined to be quoted even under pseudonym, citing fear that their distinctive phrasing might be recognized by colleagues. One asked me to delete all recordings of our conversation after the interview concluded. These are limitations that any researcher working on contemporary Russia must acknowledge, and that readers should weigh when assessing the claims made here.
The methodological challenges of this kind of reporting tie into a broader set of questions about how writers and researchers outside Russia can continue to document civic life when direct on-the-ground access is restricted. Some have turned to AI story ideas as a way to brainstorm narrative structures or generate hypothetical scenarios that can then be tested against available evidence. Used with caution, this approach can help writers spot patterns or connections that might otherwise stay hidden. The Authors Guild, in its AI Best Practices for Authors, stresses that such tools should supplement, not replace, human judgment and original reporting. The parallel to the librarians’ own practices is instructive: just as Irina Viktorovna’s spreadsheet supplements the official catalog without replacing it, AI-assisted brainstorming can supplement traditional research methods without substituting for the difficult, often risky work of talking to people on the ground. Both are examples of epistemic scaffolding—provisional structures that support knowledge production when the primary infrastructure has been damaged or dismantled.
The Purdue OWL’s Creative Writing Introduction offers a useful framework here, reminding writers that narrative structures—whether generated by human imagination or with the help of digital tools—must ultimately be grounded in concrete detail and ethical practice. The librarians I spoke with understand this intuitively. Their work is a form of narrative curation: they decide which stories their collections can tell, which arguments their shelves can support, which voices their patrons can hear. They do so not by issuing manifestos but by moving books from one cart to another, by adding a subject heading to a hidden spreadsheet, by suggesting a slightly different search term to a patron who has hit a digital wall. The cumulative effect is a library collection that remains, despite everything, more capacious than the official cultural policy would seem to permit.
In late afternoon, as the Vologda library prepared to close, Irina Viktorovna returned to the review cart. She had finished reading the essay collection on civil society in the Russian North. “It’s mostly historical,” she said. “Pre-1917. There’s one chapter on the 1990s that is more critical, but it’s framed as a scholarly debate, not a political argument. I’ll shelve it in the local history section. If someone complains, I can point to the publication date and the academic publisher.” She placed the book on the main cart for reshelving. Outside, the early winter darkness had already settled over the street. Inside, the flickering lights continued their irregular rhythm. Irina Viktorovna pulled on her coat and began the walk to the bus stop. The book would be on the shelf by morning.