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Russian bookstore raided & faces criminal prosecution for “LGBT propaganda”
July 20 2025, 08:15

A bookstore in St. Petersburg, Russia is being accused for a second time by the government of spreading “LGBT propaganda,” the Russian website Bumaga reports, according to Novaya Gazeta.

The bookstore, Podpisnye Izdaniya (which means “subscription publications” in English), was raided in April, and dozens of LGBTQ+ and feminist books were seized as evidence. The prosecutor’s office said that many of the books had “signs of LGBT ideology.”

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Authorities gave the bookstore a list of titles that they were told to stop displaying or selling, including the book On Women by out writer Susan Sontag, which is a collection of essays and interviews about feminism, sexuality, and fascism.

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“Our books often appear on various insane lists,” said Mikhail Kotomin, the head of the publisher Ad Marginem. “It’s often weird choices such as One Way Street by Walter Benjamin or Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault.”

Foucault was a gay French theorist from the mid-20th century who died early on in the AIDS crisis, who is best known for analyzing the relationship between power and knowledge. Benjamin was a German-Jewish essayist associated with the Frankfurt School who died in France while escaping the Third Reich.

In May, the store was convicted on charges of promoting LGBT propaganda and fined 800,000 rubles (about $10,000).

Yelena Orlova, the store’s manager, was also convicted on a charge of running an “undesirable organization” for selling a copy of the book On the Way to Magadan, a book about imprisonment by Belarusian anarchist author Ihar Alinevich. Orlova was fined 20,000 rubles ($256).

The bookstore was charged with a second count of promoting LGBT propaganda and was supposed to have another hearing last week, but Navoya Gazeta reports that the case was dropped after that hearing due to the statute of limitations of 90 days running out.

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