Vedomosti reports over 50% of Russia’s library holdings could be seized under literal reading of ‘foreign agent’ and ‘undesirable’ laws

More than 50 percent of Russia’s library holdings could be subject to seizure under a literal reading of the country’s laws on “foreign agents” and “undesirable” organizations, the head of the Eksmo-AST publishing group warned at a meeting of the Organizational Committee for the Support of Literature, Book Publishing, and Reading in Russia, the Russian business daily Vedomosti reported.

Oleg Novikov said books are at risk whenever any individual or legal entity involved in their creation has been designated a foreign agent — a category that extends beyond authors to anyone who wrote annotations or commentary or designed a publication’s layout.

The same problem applies, he said, to books published with the assistance of organizations now designated undesirable in Russia. Among them, Novikov said, are foundations that “in the 1990s and 2000s helped publish a significant amount of Russian classical and regional literature,” as well as leading international academic centers and universities.

A strict application of the laws would also require the seizure of dissertations and academic works that cite publications by such organizations. “Which, of course, creates serious problems for the development of educational and outreach activities,” he said.

Novikov proposed applying the legal principle that laws do not have retroactive force, which would effectively exempt books by “foreign agents” and members of “undesirable” organizations published before those designations were assigned in Russia.

Novikov and Sergei Stepashin, president of the Russian Book Union, also proposed that the Digital Development Ministry grant state accreditation to an expert center affiliated with the Book Union, giving it the status of a single point of contact for the legal review of books. Currently, complaints about books can be based on expert assessments conducted by different organizations in different regions.

The industry’s proposals could resolve many outstanding questions, but their prospects for implementation are currently uncertain, Yevgenia Ryzhkova, a lawyer with the legal group Yakovlev and Partners, told Vedomosti.

The Culture Ministry stated it is working with the Justice Ministry on the question of how libraries should handle books published with the assistance of “undesirable” organizations. The Digital Development Ministry had not responded to the outlet’s inquiry by the time of publication.