I WALK IN ON a minor crisis at Samokat, a children’s publishing house in Moscow. The commercial director, Gleb Kochnev, is telling the editor-in-chief, Irina Balakhonova, that there is a problem in a book they have just published.

The book is called Say Hi to Me, it is a primer on refugees for elementary school children, and it contains a map of Russia and its neighbors. One of the countries on the map is Georgia, which Russia invaded in 2008, biting off two small regions. The regions have since declared independence, which is recognized only by Russia, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and the island microstates of Nauru, Tuvalu, and Vanuatu (though Tuvalu later reneged and Vanuatu seems to have had second thoughts). The map in the book shows the regions as being part of Georgia — the way most of the world sees it. But federal law dictates that any published map must reflect Russia’s official view of the world, which is that these tiny regions are independent. It is not clear what the penalty for violating this provision may be, but it’s clear that it spells trouble.

Kochnev is a large bearded man who towers over the tiny Balakhonova, making it look like he is reading her the riot act. She briefly appears contrite. In fact, though, Balakhonova is the founder of the publishing house and Kochnev’s boss, and she has taken bigger risks than this.

You would think that publishing a book for 6-year-olds wouldn’t entail political risks, even in a country where political risks abound. You would be wrong. Most of the restrictions Russia has placed on speech in the last few years have been framed as intended to protect the innocence and purity of children. A law that went into effect in 2010 is called the law “On Protecting Children from Information Harmful to Their Health and Development.” Publishers and editors generally refer to it simply as the “law for the protection of children from information.”

At first, the law had publishers in a panic. If you believed what it said, Russian children were to be protected from reading in general. Children under the age of 6 could read about violence only if it was not described in detail, the author’s sympathies were clearly with the victim, and good triumphed over evil. There, apparently, went Little Red Riding Hood, Hans Christian Andersen, and the Brothers Grimm. Between the ages of 6 and 12, children were allowed to learn about illness but not death. Violence continued to be off limits. So, obviously, did sex, and indeed any “naturalistic” description of the human body. Little Red Riding Hood, in other words, would still be too much for older kids, to say nothing of adventure novels and just about any contemporary Western books for this age group.

Children between the ages of 12 and 16 were allowed to encounter the mention of violence and drugs as long as they were condemned and not described. Sex could be mentioned but not described, but at least the law did not require it to be condemned. Little Red Riding Hood, with its graphic references would still be too much. Children between the ages of 16 and 18 were allowed to learn a little more about violence, sex, and drugs, as long as none of these were described in detail or encouraged. In other words, Russian citizens under the age of 18 were to be protected from the details of sex and drugs and any information at all about serious illness and violent death, including suicide. A 2013 amendment famously forbade any and all information about “nontraditional sexual relations.”

The good news was, no one rushed to ban Little Red Riding Hood or to rebuild every library and bookstore in the land to put a distance of over 100 yards between the adult and children’s book sections, as the new law required. This law, like any other absurdly restrictive law, could not and would not be enforced as written. The bad news was, it would be enforced in other ways, selective and unpredictable. Impossible and implausible laws serve as signals rather than rules, especially in a society like Russia, which has been conditioned to be supremely sensitive to signals from up top. Soviet-era laws banned so many things — for example, the resale of goods, making too much money, not making any money, spending the night away from one’s official residence — that most people were in breach of the law most of the time. To know how to act, or to create the illusion of knowing, citizens looked for subtle, between-the-lines messages from the top.

As soon as the law was passed, self-styled enforcers swung into action. In Yekaterinburg, a group of parents formed a committee to demand that a number of books be removed from stores and their publishers and authors prosecuted. The books included Israeli author David Grossman’s young adult novel Someone to Run With, in which one of the characters is a teenage heroin addict; American authors Lynda and Area Madaras’ What’s Happening to My Body books, marketed in the U.S. for grades four through nine; and three other books about puberty. The prosecutor’s office acted on the parents’ complaint, but a court eventually threw out the case. By this time, though, the books had been removed from bookstores and, in the case of one of the three publishers affected, pulped.

In the small town of Ulyanovsk (which bears Lenin’s original surname), a probe was launched into a book on families around the world and throughout history, which contained only a brief section on homosexuality. Most recently, the consumer authority and the prosecutor’s office have separately moved to ban a book called Fifty Days Until I Kill Myself, which, with 5 million e-book downloads and over 100,000 paper copies sold, happens to be one of the most popular books in Russia. Written by a teenager for teenagers, the book was an online self-publishing sensation before a major house picked it up late last year. The publishing house, AST, has publicly argued that the book conforms to the law perfectly: It is marketed to teenagers over the age of 16, and it condemns suicide unequivocally (at its end, the protagonist, a teenage girl, renounces her risky lifestyle along with the accompanying dark thoughts).