The reign of Peter the Great (1682-1725) constitutes a watershed in Russian publishing. Book print had until then almost exclusively been religious; with Peter the need for the translation of secular literature in applied sciences (for naval purposes and cadet schools) meant the introduction of new, state-run printing houses. The presses of the Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg and of Moscow State University, founded in 1724 and 1755, allowed not only for the publication of scholarly texts and translations, but marked the beginning of literary publishing too. However, book production was hampered by the lack of a broader readership – the educated elite could read French and German books in the original – and, if not by censorship, at least by poor state funding.

Catherine II (1763-96) encouraged private printing shops and publishing houses as well as periodicals. The 1770s and 1780s saw an upsurge in the production of books and journals, with N.I. Novikov (1744–1818) becoming the most important entrepreneur in both fields. Books and journals helped the spread of Masonic ideas in Russia. The two daily newspapers edited in the capitals, the Sankt Peterburgskie vedemosti (“St Petersburg gazette”, since 1703) and Moskovskie vedemosti (“Moscow gazette”, since 1756), were complemented by many (often short-lived) private journals, often emulating contemporary British journals like the Spectator or the Tatler. Novikov’s series Drevnjaja rossijskaja vivliofika (“Ancient Russian library”, 1773-75) and the journal Sobesednik ljubitelej rossijskogo slova (“Companion for lovers of the Russian word”, 1783-84), jointly edited by Princess Daškova and Catherine II, catered for an interest in belles-lettres. In the wake of the French Revolution, though, Catherine II imposed tight censorship rules and stifled many publishing enterprises.

In 1804 Alexander I relaxed censorship rules, and during the 1810s and 1820s, as higher education expanded, book production recovered and new journals appeared. Yet translations continued to dominate the book market. With Karamzin’s Vestnik Evropy (“Herald of Europe”, 1802-30), an important new forum for literature and criticism emerged. It foreshadowed an outburst of journal activity in the 1820s and 1830s, initially by leading Decembrists and later by prominent writers like Puškin, but also by avowed conservatives like F.V. Bulgarin (1789–1859), whose Syn otečestva (“Son of the fatherland”, 1825-59) was the only journal allowed to comment on Russian politics during the period.

Under Nicholas I, publishing remained a closely monitored business, which continued to involve significant financial risks for printers and traders. After 1828, censors recruited from among university professors could intercept publications that were questioning Orthodoxy, autocracy, “fundamental institutions” or morality and dignity. Famously, the tsar himself censored Puškin, the towering literary figure of the period. But the second quarter of the 19th century also saw a certain professionalization of printing technologies and publishing venues, laying the grounds for the commercialization of book production and broader circulation of periodicals in the reform period of 1860s and 1870s. The literature of the Romantic period reached its audience in serialized form through journals like Puškin’s Literaturnaja gazeta (“Literary gazette”, 1830-31 and rebooted in 1840-49) and the Biblioteka dlja čtenija (“Library for reading”, 1834-65), which was, with a circulation of 7000 copies, the most popular periodical of the 1830s. It was rivalled in the 1840s by the Otečestvennye zapiski (“Annals of the fatherland”, 1818-84), before V.G. Belinskij was wooed away and joined the Sovremennik (“The contemporary”, 1836-66), founded by Puškin and taken over by N.A. Nekrasov in 1846.

Under the conditions of censorship, tightened again in the last years of Nicholas I’s reign between 1848 and 1855, and with a limited readership scattered across the empire, a specifically Russian institution emerged, the obščestvenno-političeskij i literaturno-hudožestvennij žurnal (“The socio-political and literary journal”). “Thick journals” like the Sovremennik (1836-66) and the renewed Vestnik Evropy (1866-1918) confronted their readers monthly with hundreds of pages of new literary works, with literary criticism that often served as a vehicle for political commentary, with domestic news and with reports from abroad, often translated from the foreign press. It was on the pages of such journals that intellectual debates of the period unfolded, like that between Slavophiles and Westerners. Shaping their readers’ outlook in political and aesthetic matters, the thick journals also helped to establish the Russian literary canon, for example by printing early works of Russian Realism by Turgenev, Tolstoj or Dostoevskij.

The reform era under Alexander II finally saw the emergence of a commercial book market, propitiated by increased mobility, urbanization and the spreading of literacy. The government, fearing the spread of radical ideas from the universities, imposed tight punitive censorship in 1865, which remained in place until 1906. The Ministry of the Interior’s censors suppressed liberal and radical journals like the Sovremennik or the Russkoe slovo (“Russian word”) as early as in 1866. These were replaced by other, often short-lived periodicals, complemented by underground and exile publications, most famously A.I. Herzen’s “Free Russian press” (1854-69). Even so, commercial book printing flourished, and belles-lettres remained, in terms of the number of titles published, the most important genre besides cheap popular broadsheets (ljubki) sold by itinerant merchants in rural areas. As literacy spread, a new generation of publishers, often trained abroad, made profitable use of innovative print technologies and produced cheaper books in large print runs. Commercial production increasingly targeted new layers of readership: school children, women or the urban lower middle classes, who also gained access to literature through a growing network of public libraries. Journalists like M.N. Katkov (1818–1887), under whose editorship Moskovskie vedomosti doubled its print run in the wake of the Polish insurrection of 1863-4, became important contributors to an emerging public opinion. Popular dailies such as Moskovskie vedomosti or Golos (“The voice”, St Petersburg) began to replace the thick journals as the main medium of public discourse.