Material as of 11 August 2025
Between July and August 2025, 34 new titles were added to the “National List of Extremist Materials”. Among them was Gene Sharp’s essay From Dictatorship to Democracy – a text that has served as a roadmap for peaceful change across the world yet is deemed unacceptable in today’s Belarus.
The authorities are deliberately eradicating dissent and suppressing free expression. Almost two hundred books – from historical studies to works of fiction – now bear the black mark of prohibition. What unites and divides them? What exactly does the regime fear in these works? Which ideas does it find most threatening?
Two lists: “extremist” and “harmful to national interests”
Belarusian books became targets of wholesale purges after the presidential elections, as the authorities moved to eliminate anything that contradicted the official image of a “stable country”.
The so-called “National List of Extremist Materials” was created in 2008 and updated through court rulings based on statements from the Ministry of Information or other state bodies. The updates were steady but relatively slow.
That changed after the 2020 protests, when a sweeping campaign against dissent – on a scale reminiscent of Stalinist times – was launched. Since then, 77 works have been added to the list.
Question: Is this a lot or a little? The authorities’ answer: there ought to be far more, but… The sluggishness of the process, its lack of dynamism, is explained not by the supposed leniency of the ideologues. Even with the highest-level approval (“sometimes the law doesn’t matter”), the campaign against free expression is slowed down by bureaucratic procedures, however perfunctory or imitated they may be.
Is this not why, in November 2023, yet another list appeared – of printed publications said to “pose a threat to national interests”? Its peculiarity lies in the fact that the relevant decisions are formalised not by courts, but merely through administrative procedure – no public hearings, and often without even clearly defined criteria – just a censor’s designation. If a publication is sniffed out or suspected, it is quietly and automatically added to the “potentially dangerous” list. This designation functions as a warning label, signalling the risk of criminal prosecution for every link in the chain: publishers, authors, readers, shops, and libraries alike.
The dynamics of these bans can be illustrated with the following statistics: by the end of 2024, 35 books had been branded with the “anti-national” label. Just two months later, the number had risen to 65 – almost double. By early August 2025, the list had already included 144 titles, significantly surpassing the “extremist” list, which until recently was regarded as the primary tool of literary prohibition.
This is not a matter of competing lists, but of a single, interconnected repressive mechanism. One list is formalised through judicial rulings, the other through administrative procedure, yet both serve the same purpose: to mark certain books as “enemies”. In this context, it makes little difference whether a work is deemed “dangerous” or “harmful”. The essential point is that the state, for its own reasons, has decided to deny access to something it considers hostile or unacceptable.
The focus falls on humanitarian and political literature written or published by Belarusians about Belarus. These books rarely contain explicitly anti-state or traditionally extremist content. Instead, they are targeted for something else: free thought and reflections on contemporary challenges. Censors are alarmed by discussions of democracy and peaceful resistance, unsettled by thoughtful lines on the Belarusian language and historical or national memory, and uneasy about themes of religious pluralism or questions of personal identity. They are equally suspicious of both newly published works and older ones – including those on Soviet and WWII realities – that fail to align with the regime’s current ideological stance.
On the PEN Belarus website, we maintain a list of selected works of fiction, history, and scientific literature that, since 2020, have been designated “extremist materials”. We deliberately exclude, for instance, specific religious texts and other publications where interpretation of the content may be open to dispute or divergence.
Chronicles of censorship: when time becomes the key to meaning
The banning of books is by no means a uniquely Belarusian know-how; censorship exists in both authoritarian and democratic states. Across the world, some works are deemed unacceptable for various reasons, ranging from heresy, immorality and corruption of morals to undermining state systems or inciting hatred. Yet the experience of bans in Belarus has its own distinctive character.
Trying to discern even a trace of logic – let alone clear criteria – in the bottomless and murky “National List of Extremist Materials” is no simple task. The collection is riddled with chaos and inconsistency: religious publications stand alongside political manifestos, poetry next to polemics, books from London and Minsk, memoirs and textbooks, works from the early twentieth century and bestsellers of the 2020s. The day’s political agenda also plays its role: when a criminal investigation into the so-called genocide of the Belarusian people was launched, memoirs of German generals, inconvenient Belarusian accounts, and Russian books containing uncomfortable truths about the Second World War were swiftly added to the list.
At first glance, the result is a mosaic without logic. Many works appear to be banned arbitrarily “by eye” – condemned for their title, a back-cover summary, or even the colour of their design. What is evident is a lack of consistency: the ideological machine does not function on principles but on instinct. Yet behind this chaos lies not randomness but a deep, often subconscious ideological motivation.
The greatest perceived threat has never come from external concepts but from internal affirmations of identity. Most often, those targeted by the state are the authors who assert Belarus as a historical reality, a national subject, or a cultural community. Book bans are not just a tool of control; they are part of a continuous struggle against the people – and against the individual as the bearer of freedom.
To understand the regime’s stance on the idea of Belarus, chronological analysis proves more revealing than thematic categorisation. Here, chronology is not mechanical but a key to meaning. Today’s wave of bans continues a historical campaign of cultural warfare against the assertion of Belarusian identity. It therefore makes sense to assess the situation through the lens of time and generations, from contemporary authors to pre-revolutionary writers.
Alongside this, it is vital to examine how “others” are persecuted in parallel – foreign authors who embody values and experiences that contradict the imperial worldview of the authorities. At the root of this persecution lies the desire to protect a closed, insular world from ideas that threaten to undermine it from within: human rights, emotional sensitivity, responsibility for the past, and personal autonomy. By banning such works, the regime prevents these “viruses of freedom” from penetrating its autocratic biosphere. Here, censorship is not only about the past, but about the future – to stop dissent from corroding the very foundations of dictatorship.
Map of cultural absurdity
In Belarus in the early 2020s, we witness a striking phenomenon: the state declares hostile the very books it once published itself. Works bearing the logos of state publishing houses, books that until 2020 were part of the school curriculum, sat on the shelves of public libraries, and were even used to promote patriotism, are now included in the list of “extremist materials”. In this way, the authorities appear to be conducting a retrospective purge, erasing everything that might have contributed to the formation of Belarusians as a nation – and which, ultimately, could have led to the peaceful protests of 2020.
This mechanism of prohibition reveals a complete absence of consistency. Each year, the “front line” shifts: what was acceptable yesterday is treated as hostile today. The authorities lack a coherent cultural vision and do not know what to consider truly “their own”.
The lists of “extremist” and “anti-national” materials have become mirrors of intellectual disorientation. They show that there is no well-thought-out cultural policy; instead, fear, paranoia, and raw emotion dominate. Unsubstantiated and unexamined accusations replace any genuine cultural assessment.
The regime reveals not only its repressive nature but also its systematic disorientation. This is not an ideological struggle in the strict sense, but a rejection of memory, logic, and everything that exists beyond the framework of ideological instruction. These lists target not only dissent but the very capacity for thought itself. The banning of books is less about fear of the author than about restricting access to an alternative vision of the world.
The banlists show precisely what the state seeks to expel from the cultural sphere – and what we must preserve.
For authors, this means that their work has meaning even, and sometimes especially, when it is banned. At times, prohibition marks the moment when their words become most significant.
For readers, it means that reading transforms from a private act into one of resistance. Each “undesirable” book becomes a key to understanding what the regime fears most – and why those texts are all the more essential.
In a play about Francysk Skaryna – the man who printed the first Belarusian book in 1517 – written by Aleś Pietraškievič during the Soviet era, there is a simple line that today carries renewed strength and resonance: “What is written remains.” Appropriately, Pietraškievič’s own collection of selected works, published in 2017 (though the texts themselves were written in Soviet times), has now also been added to the “National List of Extremist Materials”.