Former sales director at Popcorn Books enters plea deal in ‘LGBT extremism’ case
A former sales director at Popcorn Books, a now-shuttered publishing house that until recently championed young adult LGBT fiction in Russia, entered a plea deal with prosecutors to receive a four-year suspended sentence for so-called “LGBT extremism” on Thursday, independent news outlet Mediazona has reported.
Pavel Ivanov, who was arrested in May 2025 alongside several of his colleagues at Popcorn Books and Individuum, both of which are owned by Russia’s largest publishing house Eksmo, pleaded guilty to “organising an extremist organisation” and agreed to testify against his co-defendants in exchange for a lighter sentence.
During his trial he told the judge that “unidentified individuals” from Eksmo had drawn him and others into “criminal activity”, publishing books with LGBT themes “in violation of the constitution”. He was testifying voluntarily, he said, as he considered it his “civic duty to testify against people who were and are engaged in anti-government activities”.
According to court documents accessed by Mediazona, the charges against Ivanov and his co-defendants were based on “test purchases” conducted covertly by members of the Russian security services in early 2024, which implicated the publisher in selling books with LGBT themes to girls aged 16-17.
Prosecutors further alleged that employees of Eksmo and Popcorn Books compiled a “red” list of banned books intended for sale outside Russia, including titles such as Call Me By Your Name by Italian-American writer André Aciman, as well as a “yellow” list of books, including the popular British graphic novel series Heartstopper, whose themes might attract the attention of government censors.
Founded in 2018 and shut down in January, Popcorn Books had repeated run-ins with the Russian authorities, the most high-profile of which concerned its decision to publish Pioneer Summer by Ukrainian-Russian duo Kateryna Sylvanova and Yelena Malisova, a novel about a same-sex relationship between two teenagers at a Soviet youth camp.
In April, police investigating “LGBT extremism” raided Eksmo’s office in Moscow and detained three members of the company’s senior management team, including CEO Yevgeny Kapyev.
Publishing industry insiders told Novaya Gazeta Europe at the time that an additional motive for the authorities to pursue the case against Eksmo was that they hoped to gain control of the company’s assets. As the dominant player in the Russian book market, the company would likely interest one of several large state-aligned corporations, a source said.