Banned Books: From the Vatican Index to Russia’s List of Extremist Materials

Two hundred and nineteen years on a list

On 5 March 1616 a decree of the Congregation of the Index appeared in Rome. Among other things it named a book by the canon Nicolaus Copernicus, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres: suspended, donec corrigantur, “until corrected”. Its author had been dead for seventy-three years. The book would stay on the list for 219 years and disappear from the Index only in 1835.

It is the most famous entry in the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, the catalogue the Catholic Church kept from 1559. The twentieth and last edition came out in 1948 and held about four thousand titles. Descartes, Kant, Flaubert and Sartre were among the authors. On 14 June 1966 the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith announced that the Index no longer had the force of ecclesiastical law.

Three machines under one word

The word “banned” hides three different mechanisms. The Index was a church list for believers, printed openly, with titles and edition numbers. Soviet censorship, Glavlit, created on 6 June 1922, worked before publication: a manuscript simply never reached the printing house, and books that did appear ended up in closed library departments called spetskhrans. Today’s Russian system is built differently. Nobody bans a book in advance; a court recognises a material as extremist.

That answers the most common search: the “list of banned books in Russia”. The country has no single list of banned books. It has the Federal List of Extremist Materials, kept by the Ministry of Justice on the basis of court decisions; on 16 October 2026 its numbering reaches No. 5519. It is not a library: the list holds leaflets, brochures, newspaper issues, audio recordings, videos and web pages, and books are only part of the entries. Article 20.29 of the Code of Administrative Offences punishes mass distribution of such materials, and their production or storage for mass distribution. The age marking from 0+ to 18+ under Law No. 436-FZ is a different matter: it is a classification, not a ban.

Why a ban smells like truth

Every prohibition is a gift to conspiracy culture. If a book is hidden, it must contain something; if it is burned, it must be dangerous; if it cannot be found, someone fears it. This logic works flawlessly and is wrong just as flawlessly. Books were banned for heresy, for indecency, for ideology, for incitement to violence, for forgery. The mere fact of a ban says nothing about whether a book is true.

Forgeries show it most clearly. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a proven fabrication: its text was lifted from a French political satire of 1864 that never mentions Jews, and the fraud was exposed by The Times of London in 1921. It is hate propaganda, and entries bearing its title appear on the Ministry of Justice list. The ban did not make it true, just as freedom of the press does not make every page true. The real victims of bans were other books: an astronomical treatise, a novel about one day in Dublin, philosophical works.

What the closed dossier holds

The dossier follows the documents: what exactly the 1966 notification says and what it leaves out; why the Index held Copernicus for two centuries while people read him anyway; what an American judge wrote when he let Ulysses in; how a material travels onto the Ministry of Justice list, from a courtroom to a numbered entry. At the end comes a short test for telling a real secret from a manufactured one. It fits every chapter of this book.