Shortly after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, poet and writer Linor Goralik founded the Resistance and Opposition Arts Review (ROAR), a literary almanac featuring antiwar essays, poetry, audio works, and artwork. A few months later, she launched News 26 (Novosti 26), an independent media outlet for teenagers in Russia. Meduza spoke with Goralik about how both projects have managed to operate during the war. The interview was conducted in English by journalist Sarah Chatta and translated into Russian by journalist Ksenia Mironova as part of a Pulitzer Center-supported series on efforts to resist literary censorship in Russia.
The following interview has been lightly edited and abridged for length and clarity.
— Tell me about ROAR.
— ROAR is an almanac that’s published bimonthly online. We try to be a space for voices that speak freely against the Russian regime and against the war in Ukraine. And this is horrible. We shouldn’t exist. We’re a magazine that wants to shut down. We want to stop. When we began, we thought that it would run for two or three issues, and now we’re on issue 22. [ROAR has since released issue 24.] It’s exhausting.
— How is your work different from, say, the Soviet dissident publication A Chronicle of Current Events (“Khronika”)?
— It’s very different from Khronika. And I know this for sure because I once interviewed its founder, Natalya Gorbanevskaya. Khronika’s main focus was informing people about repressions. There are now so many of our colleagues [doing that work]. We, and others, try to do the literary work.
— The Kremlin didn’t start censoring literature in Russia immediately after the full-scale invasion. What made you realize so early on that a project like ROAR was needed?
— I was told that it was a stupid idea. But it was in the air. It was very clear to me that this was going to happen. It was very clear that people who wanted to speak out against the war, those who wanted to write against the war, would not be safe in Russia. It was absolutely obvious that they needed a safe place to speak.
— What’s the submission process like?
— It is very simple. We have an email address. I look at submissions every other day and decide what’s good and what’s not, and that’s it. We have a team, but the decision about whether to publish a piece in the almanac is mine.
— How do you decide?
— Intuitively. My decision is based on two things: what seems to me to be of high literary quality and what seems to me to be an important political message. That’s it.
— Can you tell me more about your team?
— At its peak, ROAR had about 200 people, not including authors. The team includes editors, translators, and proofreaders. Not all 200 people work on every issue, but dozens of people work on each one.
— How many members of your team live in Russia?
— I don’t know, because the team manages itself. I do nothing. I choose the submissions, and I put them in a database. Our editor-in-chief and my very close friend, Maria, takes it from there and edits them. Then she distributes the work among other editors and proofreaders. As soon as a piece is ready, the editors and proofreaders put it in the database, and the layout team starts putting it on the site.
At the same time, the English team starts translating the texts. The head of the English team, Maya, finds translators for each piece. As soon as the translators finish a piece, she passes it to the editors, then to the proofreaders, and then to the layout team. They put it on the site. Then all I do is push the “publish” button.
— Who reads ROAR?
— We have about 2,500 subscribers on our Telegram channel, but we have zero understanding of who’s reading us because of VPNs. So, mainly, we work in the dark.
I wrote an article once about the 2011-2012 protests. I did maybe 25 or 30 interviews, and one of the things people kept repeating was that one of the most important things they did — beyond the protesting itself — was showing that people who protest exist.
That’s why events like the Berlin Bebelplatz festival are extremely important. They help people see that they’re not working in the dark. It boosts morale.
— You mentioned interviewing Soviet dissident Natalya Gorbanevskaya. Did that conversation help you when you were creating ROAR?
— It wasn’t only talking to Natalya, it was the whole history of the Soviet dissident movement. They were publishing almanacs. They were publishing magazines. It was like a basic instinct. The moment you can’t speak freely — do it.
But I didn’t do it for literature. I didn’t do it for authors, and I didn’t do it for the texts. I did it for me, because I had this feeling that I had to do something. Many of us felt extremely helpless. We felt enraged. We felt horrified. And this was an attempt to do something. I did it for myself.
— A few months after launching ROAR, you created a media outlet for teenagers in Russia called News 26. How did you come up with the name?
— I’m a marketing consultant by profession, so I wanted it to be very simple and recognizable. As for the number, I just chose it randomly, but we have two explanations we give when people ask. One is that in 2022, the oldest members of our audience, the 16-year-olds, would be able to vote in 2026. Another is that 12 plus 14 is 26 — and our target audience was 12- to 14-year-olds. But it has nothing to do with reality.
— Do these publications generate any revenue?
— Zero. They don’t make any money at all. All these years, it was volunteer work. Then, last year, we received our first grant for News 26. I wouldn’t tell you how much the News 26 team gets, because it’s very little. But they get something. We received our second grant this year, also small, but very significant for us, and we are very grateful. At least we have some resources now.
— Do you know if people in Russia read News 26?
— They most definitely do. Telegram is [de facto] banned, but they keep reading it and writing to us.
We have about 5,500 subscribers on Telegram, but that means nothing. It could be a readership of 10,000, it could be a readership of 1,000. We see that every post is read by about 2,000 people, and our TikTok videos sometimes reach 50,000 views. But again, today it’s 50,000. Tomorrow it’s 1,000. We never know. And now, with the widespread use of VPNs, we see nothing.
We have an anonymous bot on Telegram, and people write letters to us there. Every day starts with the thought: “Please no letters, please no letters,” because those letters are very scary.
— What makes them so scary?
— They’re letters from children who read News 26. We have a volunteer psychologist who helps us answer the letters and navigate complex issues.
For example, a teenage girl living in a small town near the border with Ukraine wrote that if the war came to her home, she planned to run away and hide because she didn’t think the adults would protect her.
I went to Katya, our volunteer psychologist, and I asked her, “Is this person stable?” And she said, “The scariest thing is that this letter is completely rational. The person analyzed the situation, understood the circumstances, and made a decision. She asked for help.” It was horrifying.
You can’t take too long to respond, because they feel abandoned. So you have hours, maybe days. And I thought maybe we could write two things. First, being alone on the streets is the worst thing for a teenage girl to do during a war. Second, I thought that what this girl needed was some feeling of control over what’s happening in her life. So I suggested some self-defense lessons. And I was dying of fear that she would never reply, but she did. She said that she thought it was a great idea.
— How many letters do you receive?
— Not many. Maybe two a month. Maybe three a month. But I’m afraid of these letters. Sometimes [the teenagers] write just to write: “I hate everything. I hate Putin. I want to donate to Ukraine — how do I do this?” or “I’m gay. I know that I live in hell, and I will live in hell for years. I will never hold my lover’s hand in public, and I’m writing to you just because I have to say it somewhere.”
Parents also write to us to tell us how much [News 26] means because it becomes a part of the conversation in the family. There are also some people who tell us that this is the only news that they can read, because it’s very simple, clear, calm.
So we do this project because we believe it helps some people in some way. For us, that’s enough. We don’t have this ambition to save thousands. We hope to help even five people.
Interview by Sarah Chatta