Russian e-book services began labeling the works of Pushkin, Gogol and Tolstoy due to the law banning “drug propaganda”

Russian e-book and audiobook services have begun to label the works of Russian classics with warnings about the dangers of drugs, including Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol and Mikhail Bulgakov, Nesting noted.

Thus, warnings appeared on Gogol’s stories “The Nose” and “Viy”. Books - both text versions and audiobooks - were marked in the Liters and KION Strings electronic libraries, as well as in separate product cards on Ozon.

Readers of Pushkin are warned about the dangers of drugs in a collection of poems from the period 1814–1836. “Litres” is also marked with a collection of children's stories by Leo Tolstoy and a collection of works by Ivan Turgenev, including the novel “Fathers and Sons” and the story “Asya”.

In the library catalog on the Moscow City Hall website , labels were added to Mikhail Bulgakov’s collection with the works “Morphine,” “Notes of a Young Doctor,” and “Notes on Cuffs.”

The reasons for marking specific works are unknown. None of the works mentioned are included in the list of books that the Russian Book Union previously recommended labeling amid the adoption of a new law banning “drug propaganda.”

At the same time, the head of the State Duma Committee on State Construction, Pavel Krasheninnikov, previously promised that the works of Tolstoy and Bulgakov would not be labeled in accordance with the law.

“Layout” suggests that the labeling may be associated with single mentions of narcotic substances in the text or with erroneous automatic classification.

• On March 1, 2026, amendments to the law banning “drug propaganda” came into force in Russia. They prohibit references to drugs in the media, books, music and films without special labeling. It must accompany all works published in Russia after August 1, 1990.
• The list of books that are subject to labeling in accordance with the new law previously included biographical books about the life and work of the poet Vladimir Vysotsky and writer Mikhail Bulgakov, as well as books by Victor Pelevin, Sergei Lukyanenko, Stephen King, Chuck Palahniuk and Haruki Murakami.
• The Russian authorities have developed a special program for publishing houses that censors books based on artificial intelligence. She has already made at least one mistake : she banned the writer Denis Dragunsky because of the word “drug” - translated from English as “medicine” or “drug”.