Translated material
The ex-employee of Popcorn Books was sentenced to a suspended prison term under Art. 282.2 CC
The first sentence was passed under Art. 282.2 of the Criminal Code for the sale of books that the investigation considered to be LGBT literature. Ex-employee of Invividuum and Popcorn Books Pavel Ivanov, like two other defendants, entered into a pre-trial agreement and was sentenced to a suspended prison sentence.
On June 25, 2026, the Zamoskvoretsky District Court of Moscow sentenced the former sales director of Popcorn Books, Pavel Ivanov. He was found guilty under Part 1.1 and Part 2 of Art. 282.2 of the Criminal Code (involvement in the activities of an extremist organization and participation in it) and was sentenced to four years of suspended imprisonment. This is exactly the period the state prosecutor requested. As an additional punishment, Ivanov was given a four-year ban on carrying out “organizational, administrative and managerial functions in the field of commercial use of book products,” as well as a ban on website administration. In addition, almost 2.7 million rubles were confiscated from him as criminal proceeds.
The case was considered in a special manner in connection with the conclusion of a pre-trial cooperation agreement.
The criminal prosecution of Ivanov, the former sales director of the publishing house Individuum and its division Popcorn Books, which belong to Eksmo, as well as warehouse manager Artem Vakhlyaev and executive director Dmitry Protopov, became known in May 2025; theywere sent under house arrest. Initially, they were charged with involvement in the activities of an extremist organization using their official position (Part 3 of Article 282.2 of the Criminal Code), but later the charge was reclassified. The cases of Vakhlyaev and Protopopov will be considered separately; they also entered into pre-trial agreements.
It was reported that, according to investigators, from November 2023 to September 2024, employees of the publishing house “for selfish reasons published and sold books promoting the activities of the LGBT movement, recognized as an extremist organization in Russia.” According to the Investigative Committee, they involved their subordinates in the sale of books, after reading which, readers would become supporters of the banned “LGBTQ movement.”
Ivanov confirmed in court that he testified against unnamed Eksmo representatives and stated that he resigned from the publishing house in October 2024 because he understood that their activities were illegal. Ivanov’s testimony was also announced in confrontations with Eksmo director Evgeny Kapyev (whom he accused of wanting to make a profit from the sale of books with LGBT themes), Eksmo distribution director Anatoly Norovyatkin (Ivanov stated that he controlled all his work, including the sale of books with LGBT themes for cash), deputy director of editorial office No. 1 for commercial activities of Yulia Sokolovskaya and Svetlana Tseplyaeva, who was mentioned in the press as the financial director of the publishing house (he called them the creators of a scheme for the gray sale of “LGBT books”, including “the creation of a legal cover”).
Investigative actions with the participation of the listed Eksmo leaders took place in April 2026. However, according to available information, they remained in the status of witnesses in the case under Art. 282.2 of the Criminal Code.
From the indictment in the case it follows that the publishing house’s employees compiled a “red list” of books that were already banned, as well as a “yellow list” of those that could raise questions. They planned to sell the first ones only abroad, and books from the second list also in Russia. Ivanov confirmed that in January 2024 he received an order for 50 books from the “red list”, and one of the customers was a minor girl born in 2006. From January to March 2024, another order was received for books from this list from a minor born in 2008. This order was carried out as part of the operational activity “Test purchase”. Another test purchase was carried out when selling books through Avito - a batch of books was sent by bus to Azerbaijan.
The Supreme Court of Russia recognized the “international public movement of LGBT people” as an extremist organization on November 30, 2023; the movement was added to the list of extremist organizations maintained by the Ministry of Justice on March 1, 2024. We believe that the ban on the LGBT movement as an extremist organization is a clearly discriminatory measure, since it deprives part of society of the opportunity to defend their rights and peacefully express their views. We also emphasize that most of the arguments that the Supreme Court of Russia presentedin the text of the decision to ban the organization, in our opinion, were not only not supported by scientific and statistical data, but also had nothing to do with anti-extremist legislation. Those that were at least somehow correlated with it concerned the peaceful manifestation of disagreement with decisions of authorities and peaceful criticism of homophobia, but did not contain any factual information about the commission of offenses by members of the movement. The activity of publishing and selling books that in one way or another cover LGBT relations, in our opinion, cannot indicate involvement in an extremist organization and cannot be considered extremist at all.
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