Russia has placed the popular detective novelist Grigory Chkhartishvili – known under the pen name Boris Akunin – on its register of “extremists and terrorists” for his criticism of Moscow’s war in Ukraine.
Since the Kremlin ordered Russian troops to march on Kyiv on 24 February last year, a crackdown on dissent has hit the arts and books by authors critical of Moscow have disappeared from bookshops in the country.
Chkhartishvili, 67, is known for his historical detective novels and his longstanding criticism of President Vladimir Putin.
Russia’s financial watchdog, Rosfinmonitoring, said on Monday that his name had been listed on the “terrorist and extremists” list while the country’s Investigative Committee announced it had opened a criminal investigation into Akunin for allegedly “justifying terrorism and publicly spreading fake information” on the Russian army.
“Terrorists declared me a terrorist,” Akunin, who lives in London, wrote on Facebook in response.
The terrorist label comes after one of Russia’s main publishing houses, AST, announced last week that it would no longer distribute books by Akunin because of his “public statements”.
Despite falling out with the Kremlin, Akunin remains one of Russia’s most widely read contemporary authors.
He also co-founded a campaign platform called “True Russia”, which gathers Russian cultural figures to help Ukrainian refugees and Russians who fled their country.
“Russia is ruled by a psychologically deranged dictator and worst of all, it obediently follows his paranoia,” Akunin wrote on Facebook the day Putin sent troops to Ukraine in February 2022.
Many Russian cultural figures have fled the country since the Kremlin’s military operation in Ukraine began, with those who stayed facing strict censorship laws.
In an article on his website, Akunin gave his reaction to the charges.
“A seemingly minor event, the banning of books, the declaration of some writer as a terrorist, is actually an important milestone,” he wrote. “Books have not been banned in Russia since Soviet times. Writers have not been accused of terrorism since the Great Terror.”
“This is not a bad dream, this is happening to Russia in reality” said Akunin.
