If laws on “foreign agents” and “undesirable” organizations are applied literally, more than 50% of Russian library collections are at risk of confiscation. “Vedomosti writes about this,” Oleg Novikov, head of the Eksmo-AST publishing group, said at a meeting of the organizing committee for support of literature, book publishing and reading in the Russian Federation.
Novikov noted that books in which individuals or legal entities declared themselves “foreign agents” were involved were at risk of confiscation. We are talking not only about authors, but also about those who, for example, wrote annotations and comments to the work or created the layout of the publication.
He added that similar difficulties exist with books published with the help of organizations now considered “undesirable” in Russia. Among them, according to Novikov, there are institutions with her participation that “in the 1990s and 2000s published a lot of Russian classical and domestic history literature,” as well as leading international scientific centers and universities.
If you follow the laws to the letter, you need to confiscate, among other things, theses and scientific works that cite publications of these organizations, said the head of Eksmo-AST. “This of course creates major problems in developing educational and awareness-raising activities,” he noted.
Novikov proposed starting from the principle of non-retroactivity of the law, and thus removing its scopes from the books of “foreign agents” and “undesirable” organizations published before granting them such status in Russia.
Novikov and the head of the Russian Writers Union (RBU) Sergei Stepashin also proposed that the Ministry of Digital Development issue state accreditation to the Expert Center of the RBU, giving it the status of a “single window” for legal analysis of books. Now claims against books may be based on checks conducted by different organizations in different regions.
“The proposals of industry representatives could solve a large number of issues, but the prospects for their implementation still look doubtful,” Yakovlev & Partners legal group lawyer Evgenia Ryzhkova told Vedomosti.
The Ministry of Culture told Al-Nashra that the department is “studying, taking into account the position of the Ministry of Justice, the issue of the actions of libraries in the event that books published with the help of ‘unwanted’ organizations are discovered.” The Ministry of Digital Development had not responded to the publication request at the time of publishing the news.