Photo: New Literary Observer

A Moscow court is to press charges against the publishing house New Literary Observer (NLO) for promoting “LGBT propaganda”, independent news outlet Mediazona reported on Tuesday.

On Friday, BBC News Russian reported that NLO had asked bookstores in Moscow and St. Petersburg to withdraw the book Satanic Feminism by Swedish historian Per Faxneld from sale. NLO clarified that the book was to be removed from bookshelves in line with the demands of the Prosecutor’s Office and the start of an administrative case against them, though no trial date has yet been announced.

In July, a court fined the popular Moscow bookstore Falanster 800,000 rubles (€8,750) and its founder Boris Kupriyanov 100,000 rubles (€1,100) after both were convicted of promoting “LGBT propaganda”.

The charges arose from the store’s sale of titles containing “propaganda for non-traditional relationships and gender reassignment”, based on an analysis by an unnamed expert. These included More Happy Than Not, by American writer Adam Silvera, and the aforementioned Faxneld title.

A nationwide crackdown on books and bookshops began in April, when police seized dozens of books with LGBT and feminist themes from the Podpisnye Izdaniya bookstore in St. Petersburg, while in May, police in Moscow 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”.