Phalanster on fire

Today, the Tverskoy Department of Internal Affairs should decide on the initiation of a criminal case under the article “Distribution of Pornography” in relation to the intellectual literature store “Phalanster”. On November 17, police officers came to the store under the guise of customers who had been looking for the Limonka newspaper for a very long time. Not found. Then they bought Virginie Depant’s book “Fuck Me”, taking with them several more publications “for examination” - including “Paradoxia” by Lydia Lunch and “The Gospel of the Snake” by Pierre Bordage. The books were published by the UltraKultura publishing house (except for the book Lunch, published by the AST publishing house), against which in 2006 a criminal case was instituted in the same way under the article “distribution of pornography”. The publishing house closed this year shortly after the death of the poet Ilya Kormiltsev, who headed it.

Some time after the visit of the “people in civilian clothes,” the director of the Phalanster store, Boris Kupriyanov, was summoned to the local police department, where they took an explanation from him about the seized literature, saying that the books had been examined at the Institute of Cultural Studies and were found to be pornographic. However, Boris Kupriyanov was not given the text of the examination; the investigator read it out loud. Now a criminal case is being initiated against the founders of the store. They face up to two years in prison.

“Phalanster” has been in existence for six years, and during this not so long period of time it has suffered enough: in the summer of 2005, the store burned down after unknown persons threw a grenade and a Molotov cocktail through the window. Then they talked about the political background of what happened and suspected the trace of the recently established Nashi movement. A year later, troubles began related to scandals surrounding the books of the UltraCulture publishing house - which became prohibited by the decision of some court remote from Moscow. Now another attack. “We have been living in a very strange state for two months now,” Boris Kupriyanov told Russian Journal. “Every day we receive about 5-6 calls, and we are asked about specific banned books that we do not have. And it never was. They ask Russian nationalists about the list of banned books, which we never had either... In fact, we are in a situation of terror... We completely unexpectedly, suddenly, and unexpectedly for ourselves, have become either oppositionists or extremists.”