Photo: Dmitry Tsyganov
Police in Moscow have detained a number of publishing professionals, including a director at Russia’s largest publishing house Eksmo, in connection to a criminal case relating to books allegedly containing “LGBT propaganda”, state news agency TASS reported on Wednesday.
According to Telegram channel VCHK-OGPU, at least three employees are accused of selling books containing “extremist LGBT ideology”, including A Summer in A Pioneer’s Tie, which describes a same-sex relationship between two Soviet teenagers, published by Popcorn Books, a smaller publishing house that has been owned by Eksmo since 2023.
After Russia expanded its “LGBT propaganda” laws, book shops started removing the novel from their shelves, while its authors, a Ukrainian-Russian duo Katerina Silvanova and Yelena Malisova, were forced to leave the country.
A representative of Eksmo said that it had no connection to the propaganda of the non-existent “international LGBT movement”, which Russia deemed “extremist” in November 2023.
Security forces were also interested in books published by Individuum, another publishing house owned by Eksmo, with a number of works seized during the search, VCHK-OGPU wrote. Human rights NGO First Department said the police were interested in works by Russian-language Kazakh writer Mikita Franko, Call Me by Your Name by Italian-American writer André Aciman and other books which had already been removed from sale.
Three of the detainees — Dmitry Protopopov, one of the heads of Popcorn Books and Individuum, as well as sales director Pavel Ivanov and distributor Artyom Vakhlyaev — are expected to appear in court on Wednesday, BBC News Russian reported on Thursday.
Anatoly Norovyatkin, one of Eksmo’s directors, was released on Thursday after being interrogated as a witness, state-affiliated agency Interfax reported. It is so far unclear what happened to the remaining detainees.
Late Wednesday evening, Individuum confirmed the news of the searches and detentions, saying its employees were being interrogated as witnesses. Individuum said that it had always “worked within the law”. Popcorn Books, like Individuum, said that it would not yet make a detailed comment on the searches, detentions and legal proceedings.