Russia’s largest bookstore chain says it has spent millions of rubles pulling banned books from sale. They’re shredded on camera.

Russia’s largest bookstore chain, Chitai-Gorod–Bukvoed, has spent about 100 million rubles in recent years pulling books that violate Russian law from sale and destroying them, the chain’s head, Alexander Brychkin, said in an interview with the Russian business news outlet RBC.

“Mostly it’s the inability to return the goods to the supplier, so we have to write them off as a loss. We can’t just throw these books in the trash. They’re toxic waste. So they have to be disposed of, and that’s also at our expense. On top of that, no one compensates us for the costs of pulling them from the shelf, sending them back to the warehouse, having it all transported somehow, and then processed at the warehouse. All of this adds up to an enormous amount of work and fairly large expenses,” Brychkin said.

Brychkin described how the disposal process works: “The disposal process looks like this: a service provider destroys the books on camera using an industrial shredder.”

Brychkin said a book is pulled from sale after the chain receives notice from the Russian Book Union that “there are suspicions regarding a particular book.” The chain then stops selling it “until clarity is reached.”

“Of course, there can be no complete clarity in this situation. Because even if the Russian Book Union doesn’t find anything in the book, there’s no guarantee that some parallel expert assessment isn’t happening at the same time somewhere within another organization,” Brychkin added.

Brychkin said Russian readers have shown no noticeable interest in books by Lyudmila Ulitskaya and Boris Akunin pulled from sale.

“Some of Boris Akunin’s books are still sitting in the warehouse, and we haven’t disposed of them yet. It’s not possible to return them to the supplier. In a sense, you could think of it as a special restricted storage,” Brychkin said.

In recent years, Russia has regularly pulled books from sale at the demand of authorities or pro-government organizations. For example, in October 2026, Russia’s media regulator, Roskomnadzor, banned the novels Dvesti tretiy den zimy “The 203rd Day of Winter” and Vesna vody “The Spring of Water” by writer Olga Ptitseva. According to media reports, the ban may have stemmed from signs of “promotion of non-traditional sexual relations.”