The secret book club: teenagers dare to read on as Russian forces destroy banned texts

So-called 'extremist' Ukrainian literature tells young readers of Putin's ultimate aim to destroy their country. So much for any talk of peace, write Peter Pomerantsev and Alina Dykhman

- Peter Pomerantsev and Alina Dykhman

It must be one of the most dangerous book clubs in the world. Before they can feel safe enough to talk about poetry and prose, 17-year-old Mariika (not her real name) and her friends have to first ensure all the windows are shut and check there is no one lurking by the flat's doors.

Informants frequently report anyone studying Ukrainian in the occupied territories to the Russian secret police. Ukrainian textbooks have been deemed "extremist" - possession can carry a sentence of five years.

Parents who allow their children to follow the Ukrainian curriculum online can lose parental rights. Teens who speak Ukrainian at school have been known to be taken by thugs to the woods for "questioning".

That is why the book club never meets with more than three people - any extra members would pose further risk of being discovered.

Apart from the danger, there is another challenge: finding the books themselves. In the town where Mariika lives, the occupiers have removed and destroyed the Ukrainian books from several libraries nearly 200,000 works of politics, history and literature lost in one town alone.

So Mariika and her friends have to use online versions careful to scrub their search history afterwards. The authorities like to seize phones and computers to check for "extremist" content.

Among the poems and plays Mariika's book club likes to read are those of Lesya Ukrainka, the 19th-century Ukrainian feminist and advocate of the country's independence under the Russian empire.

In 1888 Ukrainka also formed a book club, in tsarist-era Kyiv, at a time when publishing, performing and teaching in Ukrainian was banned. Ukrainka's works, in turn, explore the 17th-century struggle of Ukraine for independence from Moscow.

In the dramatic poem