Russia’s largest publishing group fires employees who refused to censor queer literature
The Eksmo-AST publishing group has fired employees who refused to work under the censorship rules it introduced in response to Russia’s new laws, and others who objected resigned, the group’s president, Oleg Novikov, said in an interview on the program Vesti. The independent Russian investigative outlet Agentstvo flagged the interview.
Novikov said that after the “book publishers’ case,” the company “drew all the necessary conclusions,” revised its instructions and lines of accountability, and “significantly tightened” its internal regulations.
“Some people couldn’t work [under the new rules]. We have employees who quit on their own. Others we fired ourselves because they weren’t ready — or you could even say didn’t want — to meet the requirements the law imposes today,” Novikov said.
Pavel Ivanov, Popcorn Books’ sales director, and two other employees of the publisher — Dmitry Protopopov, the executive director, and Artyom Vakhlyaev, who oversaw warehousing and book distribution — were accused of recruiting others into the activities of an “extremist organization” and of taking part in those activities themselves. They were detained in May 2025.
The criminal case grew out of the distribution of “LGBT literature,” a category law enforcement officials applied to books including “What the Swallow Won’t Say” by Elena Malisova and Katerina Silvanova, “Windows to the Courtyard” by Mikita Franko, “The King’s Men” by Nora Sakavic, and “Call Me by Your Name” by André Aciman.
In the spring of 2026, several Eksmo executives were detained in the same case, among them the publishing house’s chief executive, Yevgeny Kapyev. They were released after questioning. Sources told Russian media that Protopopov, Vakhlyaev, and Ivanov had testified against the company’s senior managers.
Ivanov and Vakhlyaev have already received four-year suspended sentences in the case.
The company now evaluates books against 10 criteria. “This isn’t just about nontraditional relationships; there are various other bans as well. There was, in particular, a law banning the promotion of drugs,” Novikov explained. The new laws, he said, forced Eksmo-AST employees to vet not only new books but also titles published over the publisher’s 20-year history.
Artificial intelligence is helping employees with the vetting. The group has carried out roughly 20,000 internal assessments and sent 600 books for further expert review.
Eksmo-AST, Russia’s largest publishing group, was formed by the merger of two industry giants — the publishers Eksmo and AST. Estimates of its share of the fiction published in Russia range from 75 to 90 percent. The group includes Corpus, Azbuka-Atticus, the Elena Shubina imprint, and Mann, Ivanov & Ferber, among others.
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