This chapter explores how the liberal-minded elite in Russia around the time of the Decembrist uprising of 1825 developed strategies for evading censorship of translated texts in order to introduce into Russia a civic-minded literature and to construct the poet as an important public figure. The “political” poets of the French Revolution, in particular, André Chénier, Pierre-Jean de Béranger and Antoine-Vincent Arnault, were of special interest to Russian poet-translators because they were deeply involved in the politics of their time, used their poetry as a vehicle for expressing their political thoughts and aspirations, and continued to compose poetry in the face of often violent repression. By analyzing the ways Russian translators treated the works of these French poets, this chapter seeks to engage with a less-researched area of translation censorship, namely productive censorship, or the evasion of censorship through the encoding of oppositional views, in this case, for an interpretive community of highly educated, often bilingual Russians, well-versed in esoterism, who were capable of decoding them.