In May 2025, three employees of the publishing house Popcorn Books, which published books for teenagers (“young adult”), were arrested in Moscow. They were accused of distributing LGBT literature – in particular, for the publication of the novel “Summer in a Pioneer Tie” by Elena Malysova and Katerina Silvanova. The detainees remained under house arrest for approximately one year. Then restraint measures were eased and a ban was imposed on some actions. In June 2026, one of the detainees, former sales director of the publishing house Pavel Ivanov, was tried. He made a deal with the investigation and testified against other defendants in the “book publishers case.” During the discussion, Ivanov mentioned that he “has been fighting this all his life, starting in Soviet times, when he caught deviants as part of the Komsomol detachment.” The court did so in one day and sentenced him to suspended imprisonment. Mediazona journalists attended the trial and He saidWhat was Ivanov talking about there.
Sales director Pavel Ivanov, along with two other employees of the Popcorn Books publishing house – CEO Dmitry Protopopov and Artem Vakhliev, who was responsible for the warehouse and distribution of literature – was accused of involvement in and participation in the activities of an “extremist organization.” The reason for the criminal prosecution was the spread of “gay literature,” to which the security forces included the following books: “What Swallows Are Silent About” by Elena Malesova and Katerina Silvanova, “Rear Window” by Mikita Franco, “The King’s Retinue” by Nora Sakavich, “Call Me by Your Name” by Andrei Aciman and others.
Ivanov was arrested in May 2025, but already in the summer he entered into a pre-trial agreement with the investigation. In June 2026, his testimony was read in court against employees of Eksmo Holding, which included the publishing house Popcorn Books.
Ivanov said that he has been working at Popcorn Books since 2016 under the supervision of the editor-in-chief of the publishing house, Satnik Anastasyan. He described her as a “devoted feminist” who was passionate about books for young people and was looking for “provocative topics to publish.” Among the books published under Anastasyan’s leadership, Ivanov named “The Time of the Wolf. Germany and the Germans: 1945-1955” and “Closed. Life of Homosexuals in the Soviet Union” 2022.
In December 2022, Vladimir Putin signed a law banning “gay propaganda.” According to Ivanov, he had warned even before that that if this initiative was adopted, all Popcorn Books would be illegal. Ivanov claims that after the law was passed, employees continued to work with books on LGBT topics, trying to meet the indicators observed at Eksmo.
Therefore, according to Ivanov’s testimony, at the end of 2022 he spoke with the General Director of Eksmo, Evgeny Kabaev, who was interested in when Popcorn Books would sell the book “What the Swallow is Silent About” in full. “I said that the book is banned for sale,” Ivanov said. Kabaev replied that we need to pay attention to Kazakhstan, where the LGBT community is not banned and where any product can be sold.
Since January 2023, Popcorn Books has been selling books in Kazakhstan. According to Ivanov, from there the books could end up on the market and “end up again on the territory of the Russian Federation.” It is believed that Eksmo management had a scheme to sell books containing LGBT content. “Commercial interest came to the fore. Their goal was to make as much money as possible. They did not have the goal of educating citizens for a long time,” Ivanov said.
He resigned from Popcorn Books in October 2024 because he believed the publishing house’s activities were illegal. Ivanov described his decision to testify as a “conscious act” – and claims he did so voluntarily. “I thought it was my civic duty to give honest testimony against people who, strictly speaking, were and may now be engaged in anti-government activities, violating the Constitution of the Russian Federation. In 2023, I spoke in the Duma about this matter, demanded that the government censor book products, and now I believe that this is necessary,” the former sales director said in court.
Ivanov informed the judge of the investigation procedures as follows:
I have given truthful testimony regarding anonymous persons from Exmo Publishing. During the confrontation, when I was identified by unknown people from Exmo Publishing House, I fully exposed them in the criminal acts they were doing in the publishing house, as all this was in front of my eyes. I witnessed, and in fact, saw how they dragged us into this activity. All the information that I had, that I remembered, that I knew, I provided all of that information to the investigation.
During the discussion, Ivanov maleHe repents and regrets not leaving Exmo earlier. He said: “I regret what I did. This is a great shame for me. I have struggled with this all my life, starting in Soviet times, when I caught deviants as part of the Komsomol detachment.”
He added that he always supported Vladimir Putin, went with the religious procession, and would also like to go to the front if it were not for a heart attack, but “no medical commission will let him pass, and who needs 60-year-old men there.” Ivanov promised to wash away “this black spot” from his biography.
In his final speech, Ivanov said that he was ready to assist in the investigation and arrest of the remaining defendants in the case: “Some of them have not yet been convicted, and they are hiding abroad.”
On June 25, Moscow’s Zamoskvoretsky District Court sentenced Ivanov to a four-year suspended prison sentence. The maximum penalty for one of the charged articles is six years, and eight years for the other. The criminal cases of the other defendants in the case, Dmitry Protopopov and Artem Vakhliev, have not yet been heard in court.