The day after the director of Novosibirsk’s opera house was fired over a controversial production of Tannhäuser, a top Kremlin official “proposed that theatrical productions be subject to ‘inspections’ before they are presented to the public. Though [he] did not use the word ‘censorship’ (which is explicitly prohibited by the Russian constitution), this would represent a return to the Soviet system of preliminary censorship, in which no work of literature, theatre, or film could appear without the approval of government censors.”