Self‑abasement as “civic duty”. First conviction in the “LGBT extremism” publishing case, as ex‑Popcorn Books sales director turns on his bosses

Judge Danara Sangadzhieva of the Zamoskvoretsky District Court of Moscow has delivered the first verdict in the “LGBT extremism” case built around Russia’s largest publishing group, Eksmo, handing a four-year suspended sentence to Pavel Ivanov, the former sales director of the queer-fiction imprint Popcorn Books.

She also barred Ivanov for four years from publishing books and from administering websites, and ordered the confiscation of almost 2.7 million rubles, or about $35,700, as “criminal proceeds”, a Mediazona correspondent reported from the courtroom. The sentence matched the punishment requested by the prosecutor in full.

An overly cooperating witness

Ivanov did not contest the case: he admitted guilt, signed a cooperation agreement with investigators, and gave testimony against the other people accused alongside him, describing his decision not as a plea bargain made under pressure, but as a volunteered duty.

His statements sound quite surreal. “During the questioning, when the unidentified individuals from the Eksmo publishing house were brought in, I fully exposed them in the criminal activity they were carrying out at the publishing house, since all of it happened right before my eyes, and I witnessed how they were, in effect, drawing us into this activity. And all the information I had, that I remembered, that I knew—all of it I handed over to the investigation; I acted as an expert,” Ivanov said.

The defendant stressed that he had resigned in October 2024 because he understood that the publishing house’s activities were unlawful. “I believed it was my civic duty to give truthful testimony against people who were, and probably still are, engaged in anti-government activity, in violation of the Constitution of the Russian Federation. Back in 2023 I already raised this in the State Duma; I called for the government to impose censorship on book publishing, and I still consider it necessary. So there was no pressure: this was a deliberate act. I believed these people had to be identified and all the necessary information given to the investigation!” Ivanov said in court.

The testimony read out in court showed Ivanov prepared to give evidence against Eksmo executives up to and including CEO Evgeny Kapyev, who in April 2026 was questioned, together with other Eksmo managers, over the organisation of an “extremist organisation”.

Brought face to face with Eksmo’s longtime distribution director, Anatoly Norovyatkin, on April 22, Ivanov named him as his de facto boss, in control of all his work, including the cash sale of “LGBT-themed” books. He cast Svetlana Tseplyaeva, deputy head of Eksmo’s editorial office for commercial matters, as the architect of a grey-market scheme for selling “LGBT books,” down to its “legal cover,” and levelled the same charge that day against Yulia Sokolovskaya, the publisher’s deputy editor-in-chief for literature.

Facing Kapyev himself, Ivanov accused the CEO of seeking to profit from the “LGBT-themed” titles. By the record read out in Kapyev’s presence, Ivanov said the holding’s overriding aim was to make as much money as possible, and that educating the public had long stopped being a goal. The prosecutor did not read out Kapyev’s reply.

Even more “cooperation”

Ivanov’s statements went well beyond the charges.

He told the court he had passed books to Russian-occupied territories in Ukraine through a film-director friend, and volunteered, unprompted, that Eksmo had not raised aid for participants in the “special military operation,” the Kremlin’s term for its war against Ukraine.

He expressed contrition in personal, ideological terms. “I repent of what I did. For me this is a great shame,” he said, adding that he had fought against this “all my life,” going back to Soviet times, “when as part of a Komsomol squad I caught perverts.” He said he had always supported Vladimir Putin and had taken part in Orthodox religious processions.

During closing arguments Ivanov said he deeply regretted not leaving Eksmo sooner. Were it not for a heart attack, he said, he would have wanted to go to the front, but no medical board would clear him, “and who needs 60-year-old men there.” He pledged to wash this “black stain” from his biography. In his final statement he offered to help investigators detain the remaining defendants, noting that some had not yet been convicted and were “hiding abroad.”

How the case was built

Ivanov was detained in May 2025 alongside Dmitry Protopopov, one of the executives overseeing both Popcorn Books and the non-fiction imprint Individuum, and Artem Vakhlyaev, who was responsible for the companies’ warehouse and book distribution. The three were initially placed under house arrest and, roughly a year later, released under a ban on certain actions.

Popcorn Books, acquired by Eksmo along with Individuum in 2023, specialised in LGBT-themed young adult literature. A novel“Summer in a Pioneer Tie”, a romance between two teenage boys at a Soviet-era youth camp, became a runaway hit and a target for conservative politicians. In September 2022, investigators say, staff held a call with Eksmo about pulling the book from sale, along with other titles.

Prosecutors allege that employees then drew up two lists: a “red” list of books already deemed off-limits, and a “yellow” list of titles that might attract scrutiny. Books on the “red” list, with “overt LGBT propaganda”, were to be sold only abroad, the indictment claims, while “yellow” titles, where the supposed “propaganda” was less explicit, were to keep circulating inside Russia.

The prosecution casts this as the work of an “organised group” inside Eksmo aimed at drawing minors into the “LGBT movement.” To support that, the indictment leans on undercover purchases. In January 2024, it says, Ivanov filled an order for 50 books from the “red” list, one buyer being a girl born in 2006; between January and March 2024, another order came from a minor born in 2008 who is named in the indictment as a participant in a police “test purchase.” The case also describes a consignment of books sent by bus to Azerbaijan and sales arranged through the classifieds platform Avito, where investigators staged a further controlled buy.

All of these books, the indictment states, were shipped from the Eksmo warehouse and then routed through “shadow accounting,” with management said to have tracked sales of the banned titles in real time and received regular reports.

The wider crackdown

The prosecution unfolds inside two overlapping campaigns in Russia: against books and against LGBT representation.

The criminal case rests on Russia’s 2023 designation of a non-existent “international LGBT social movement” as an “extremist organisation”, a ruling so vaguely defined that it has handed authorities sweeping right to prosecute almost any LGBTQ+ association. The same period saw raids on independent bookstores: Moscow’s respected Falanster store, where works by Michel Foucault, Hannah Arendt and Susan Sontag were seized, and St. Petersburg’s Podpisnye Izdaniya, hit with an “LGBT propaganda” protocol over books by Olivia Laing and Sontag.

On the day of the May 2025 detentions, Eksmo instructed booksellers to withdraw some 50 titles from sale and either destroy them locally or return remaining stock, among them“Summer in a Pioneer Tie” and its sequel, as well as Rustam Alexander’s“Closeted: The Life of Homosexuals in the USSR”, and works by Aidan Chambers and Andrew Sean Greer.

Ivanov’s suspended sentence is the first to be handed down. The other defendants (and potentially Eksmo’s senior management) remain under investigation.