"Books about pioneers": how bans gave rise to Russia's underground queer-literature industry
After selling books with LGBTQ+ characters in Russia became punishable by million-ruble fines and criminal cases, a shadow market grew up around the banned texts — from coded ads on the Avito marketplace to pirate reprints and closed online libraries. The outlet Verstka described how this industry works and who profits from it. Here is the key of it, with context.
In early June 2026, an ad appears on Avito: an anonymous user is selling a "book about the USSR and pioneers" for a little over two thousand rubles. There is no photo of the book itself — only some Young Pioneer memorabilia from a museum, a stock image of a man pressing a finger to his lips, and a picture of a swallow. The puzzle is easy to solve: it refers to Elena Malisova and Katerina Silvanova's novel Summer in a Pioneer Tie and its sequel, What the Swallow Keeps Silent About.
As Verstka found, there are dozens of such ads: "books about pioneers," a "book about two pioneers at a Soviet pioneer camp," filed under "books for parents." Covers are not shown, or are hidden behind another edition; prices are inflated — and the books still sell out. Around the banned texts, an entire shadow market has taken shape: covert resale, pirate paper reprints and closed electronic libraries.
How the books were placed outside the law
The article banning "propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations" has been in force in Russia since 2013, but in December 2022 it was extended from information aimed at minors to any audience, and fines under Article 6.21 of the Code of Administrative Offenses were raised to five million rubles for legal entities. By Verstka's count, since 2022 bookstores and marketplaces have received at least 47 administrative citations for distributing texts with LGBTQ+ themes; the known total of the fines imposed is 36.9 million rubles. Almost half of the citations fell on the online library Mangalib and its manager: between June and September 2025, it received 24 fines totaling more than 25.4 million rubles.
The wording of the rulings gives a sense of the logic of prosecution: courts saw in the books "sexual anarchism," "a denial of the institution of the family," and the endorsement of "incest, same-sex marriage and casual relationships." The fines caught both acknowledged classics and incidental titles: Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, Fredrik Backman's novels, the graphic novel Bes/smertny. In one absurd episode, Wildberries was fined three million rubles over a book by Richard Cohen on conversion therapy — that is, over a homophobic text promoting a "cure" for homosexuality.
For publishers, the risk proved unbearable. A former employee of the youth desk at one of the publishing houses in the EKSMO-AST holding, who worked with queer literature, told Verstka that after the ban the books she had worked on were pulled from sale and destroyed: stores were instructed to remove the print run, and the publisher to stop reprinting and to dispose of what had already been printed. No book, she said, could recoup fines like these.
From fines to criminal cases
In November 2023, the Supreme Court designated the "international LGBT movement" as extremist, and book censorship acquired a criminal dimension. In May 2025, news broke of the first criminal case against book publishers: charges under the article on organizing the activity of an extremist organization were brought against staff of Popcorn Books and Individuum. In June 2026, Moscow's Zamoskvoretsky Court sentenced Popcorn Books' former sales director, Pavel Ivanov, to four years' imprisonment suspended.
Shadow retail: puzzles on Avito
It is against this backdrop that resale has turned into a trade of its own. Platform rules force sellers to encrypt their listings: according to Verstka's sources, ads with the cover or title of a banned book do not pass moderation, so sellers photograph "the whole shelf," painting over the spine in question, and convey the point through hints. Buyers recognize the books by emoji and code phrases — "a set of three books about a VERY STRONG FRIENDSHIP," hearts in the colors of the British flag and a crown (a nod to Casey McQuiston's novel Red, White & Royal Blue).
The range is not limited to Malisova and Silvanova: Nora Sakavic's All for the Game trilogy, Backman's novels and other titles are resold. Demand is high and prices are many times higher than before. At the same time, the outlet's sources note, there is almost no risk for the buyer — unlike for the seller: sellers are asked not to open the book at the pickup point and not to post item numbers in public chats.
Pirate reprints
A separate segment is illegal paper copies. The Telegram channel "Library" offers more than 70 titles priced from 600 to 2,000 rubles; it has 18,000 subscribers. To get around the marketplaces, delivery is disguised: the buyer pays for the book, places an order for a "notebook" on Ozon for 100 rubles — and receives their edition instead of a notebook. The project's owner estimated its profitability to Verstka at 20–25%, on 300–500 orders a month.
The quality of such printing draws complaints — buyers report defects, and the former publishing employee calls the reprints "toilet paper with glue and cardboard" and "a reflection of a very unhealthy situation on the market." Authors are divided. Katerina Silvanova, co-author of Summer in a Pioneer Tie, considers reprints unacceptable: they, she says, "ruin publishers," and the money goes "not to the author but to some random guy." A pirate print run of that one book of theirs reached 25,000 copies, by her account, and someone ran their new novel Symphony of Black Water through machine translation and sold it as a sequel to the duology. Online piracy, Silvanova believes, is morally justified when a book cannot be bought legally — but paid reprints are not.
The American writer Kayla Ancrum, whose novel The Wicker King was published by Popcorn Books, took a different view. She told Verstka that she does not care that strangers in Russia profit from pirate copies, and called piracy "a kind of revolutionary act." The fate of Russia's LGBTQ+ people, she said, matters more than any question of lost earnings: if a young queer person in Russia is reading a pirate copy of her book, she approves.
Online piracy
The bans have also spawned electronic libraries of the "forbidden." One of the largest projects, Nebumaga, framed its mission as a refusal to repeat the plot of Fahrenheit 451. Access is paid (1,500–2,000 rubles), about 1,500 people have taken out a subscription, and the library holds more than 6,000 books. According to the project's creator, Dmitry Rudakov, the team includes translators who restore the passages blacked out in official editions with "the black bars of censorship," while readers abroad send in digitized rare editions. Rudakov makes no secret of the project's pirate nature and says the library is duplicated across different storage: block the channel, and a new one opens. That is what happened — on 29 June 2026 the Nebumaga Telegram channel was blocked, and on 1 July the project returned under the name Polka.
The new "tamizdat"
Alongside the underground, independent Russian-language publishing is developing abroad — a kind of new "tamizdat." Georgy Urushadze, founder of the publisher Freedom Letters, describes the situation inside Russia as a combination of falling incomes, censorship pressure and fear of new bans, whereas abroad there is "no censorship and no fear." Over three years, Freedom Letters has released more than seven hundred print runs (its authors include Vladimir Sorokin, Dmitry Bykov and Alexander Genis) and moves books into Russia "by the most creative means" — including printing part of its runs in Moscow, where "some are sold in time, some are destroyed."
Other émigré publishers have appeared too — Vidim Books, Meduza's publishing house, Ekho Knigi; queer literature is put out by Labris, which prints its books in Kazakhstan and delivers them to Russia. Malisova and Silvanova's novels are now published by the German house Muravey. The fate of Ivan Filippov's satirical novel Mouse is telling: after the Prosecutor General's Office banned it in the summer of 2024, sales rose by roughly 1,200%, by the author's account; the book is resold on Avito and widely downloaded from pirate resources.
"Pirates have become players in the resistance"
Urushadze acknowledges that piracy deprives authors of their rightful royalties, but observes that under present conditions "pirates and speculators" have turned into players in the digital anti-Putin resistance — and them, he says, no authority has ever defeated. The reprint project's owner is confident that demand for "strong stories" will outlast any circumstances. And the creator of Polka, Dmitry Rudakov, says he would be only glad to shut the library down — on the day the legal market can once again offer people any book at a fair price.
This article is based on an investigation by Verstka (the original was written by Ivan Smurov). Some interviewees speak under changed names. It is for reference only and is not a recommendation to buy or distribute editions banned in Russia.
In early June 2026, an ad appears on Avito: an anonymous user is selling a "book about the USSR and pioneers" for a little over two thousand rubles. There is no photo of the book itself — only some Young Pioneer memorabilia from a museum, a stock image of a man pressing a finger to his lips, and a picture of a swallow. The puzzle is easy to solve: it refers to Elena Malisova and Katerina Silvanova's novel Summer in a Pioneer Tie and its sequel, What the Swallow Keeps Silent About.
As Verstka found, there are dozens of such ads: "books about pioneers," a "book about two pioneers at a Soviet pioneer camp," filed under "books for parents." Covers are not shown, or are hidden behind another edition; prices are inflated — and the books still sell out. Around the banned texts, an entire shadow market has taken shape: covert resale, pirate paper reprints and closed electronic libraries.
How the books were placed outside the law
The article banning "propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations" has been in force in Russia since 2013, but in December 2022 it was extended from information aimed at minors to any audience, and fines under Article 6.21 of the Code of Administrative Offenses were raised to five million rubles for legal entities. By Verstka's count, since 2022 bookstores and marketplaces have received at least 47 administrative citations for distributing texts with LGBTQ+ themes; the known total of the fines imposed is 36.9 million rubles. Almost half of the citations fell on the online library Mangalib and its manager: between June and September 2025, it received 24 fines totaling more than 25.4 million rubles.
The wording of the rulings gives a sense of the logic of prosecution: courts saw in the books "sexual anarchism," "a denial of the institution of the family," and the endorsement of "incest, same-sex marriage and casual relationships." The fines caught both acknowledged classics and incidental titles: Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, Fredrik Backman's novels, the graphic novel Bes/smertny. In one absurd episode, Wildberries was fined three million rubles over a book by Richard Cohen on conversion therapy — that is, over a homophobic text promoting a "cure" for homosexuality.
For publishers, the risk proved unbearable. A former employee of the youth desk at one of the publishing houses in the EKSMO-AST holding, who worked with queer literature, told Verstka that after the ban the books she had worked on were pulled from sale and destroyed: stores were instructed to remove the print run, and the publisher to stop reprinting and to dispose of what had already been printed. No book, she said, could recoup fines like these.
From fines to criminal cases
In November 2023, the Supreme Court designated the "international LGBT movement" as extremist, and book censorship acquired a criminal dimension. In May 2025, news broke of the first criminal case against book publishers: charges under the article on organizing the activity of an extremist organization were brought against staff of Popcorn Books and Individuum. In June 2026, Moscow's Zamoskvoretsky Court sentenced Popcorn Books' former sales director, Pavel Ivanov, to four years' imprisonment suspended.
Shadow retail: puzzles on Avito
It is against this backdrop that resale has turned into a trade of its own. Platform rules force sellers to encrypt their listings: according to Verstka's sources, ads with the cover or title of a banned book do not pass moderation, so sellers photograph "the whole shelf," painting over the spine in question, and convey the point through hints. Buyers recognize the books by emoji and code phrases — "a set of three books about a VERY STRONG FRIENDSHIP," hearts in the colors of the British flag and a crown (a nod to Casey McQuiston's novel Red, White & Royal Blue).
The range is not limited to Malisova and Silvanova: Nora Sakavic's All for the Game trilogy, Backman's novels and other titles are resold. Demand is high and prices are many times higher than before. At the same time, the outlet's sources note, there is almost no risk for the buyer — unlike for the seller: sellers are asked not to open the book at the pickup point and not to post item numbers in public chats.
Pirate reprints
A separate segment is illegal paper copies. The Telegram channel "Library" offers more than 70 titles priced from 600 to 2,000 rubles; it has 18,000 subscribers. To get around the marketplaces, delivery is disguised: the buyer pays for the book, places an order for a "notebook" on Ozon for 100 rubles — and receives their edition instead of a notebook. The project's owner estimated its profitability to Verstka at 20–25%, on 300–500 orders a month.
The quality of such printing draws complaints — buyers report defects, and the former publishing employee calls the reprints "toilet paper with glue and cardboard" and "a reflection of a very unhealthy situation on the market." Authors are divided. Katerina Silvanova, co-author of Summer in a Pioneer Tie, considers reprints unacceptable: they, she says, "ruin publishers," and the money goes "not to the author but to some random guy." A pirate print run of that one book of theirs reached 25,000 copies, by her account, and someone ran their new novel Symphony of Black Water through machine translation and sold it as a sequel to the duology. Online piracy, Silvanova believes, is morally justified when a book cannot be bought legally — but paid reprints are not.
The American writer Kayla Ancrum, whose novel The Wicker King was published by Popcorn Books, took a different view. She told Verstka that she does not care that strangers in Russia profit from pirate copies, and called piracy "a kind of revolutionary act." The fate of Russia's LGBTQ+ people, she said, matters more than any question of lost earnings: if a young queer person in Russia is reading a pirate copy of her book, she approves.
Online piracy
The bans have also spawned electronic libraries of the "forbidden." One of the largest projects, Nebumaga, framed its mission as a refusal to repeat the plot of Fahrenheit 451. Access is paid (1,500–2,000 rubles), about 1,500 people have taken out a subscription, and the library holds more than 6,000 books. According to the project's creator, Dmitry Rudakov, the team includes translators who restore the passages blacked out in official editions with "the black bars of censorship," while readers abroad send in digitized rare editions. Rudakov makes no secret of the project's pirate nature and says the library is duplicated across different storage: block the channel, and a new one opens. That is what happened — on 29 June 2026 the Nebumaga Telegram channel was blocked, and on 1 July the project returned under the name Polka.
The new "tamizdat"
Alongside the underground, independent Russian-language publishing is developing abroad — a kind of new "tamizdat." Georgy Urushadze, founder of the publisher Freedom Letters, describes the situation inside Russia as a combination of falling incomes, censorship pressure and fear of new bans, whereas abroad there is "no censorship and no fear." Over three years, Freedom Letters has released more than seven hundred print runs (its authors include Vladimir Sorokin, Dmitry Bykov and Alexander Genis) and moves books into Russia "by the most creative means" — including printing part of its runs in Moscow, where "some are sold in time, some are destroyed."
Other émigré publishers have appeared too — Vidim Books, Meduza's publishing house, Ekho Knigi; queer literature is put out by Labris, which prints its books in Kazakhstan and delivers them to Russia. Malisova and Silvanova's novels are now published by the German house Muravey. The fate of Ivan Filippov's satirical novel Mouse is telling: after the Prosecutor General's Office banned it in the summer of 2024, sales rose by roughly 1,200%, by the author's account; the book is resold on Avito and widely downloaded from pirate resources.
"Pirates have become players in the resistance"
Urushadze acknowledges that piracy deprives authors of their rightful royalties, but observes that under present conditions "pirates and speculators" have turned into players in the digital anti-Putin resistance — and them, he says, no authority has ever defeated. The reprint project's owner is confident that demand for "strong stories" will outlast any circumstances. And the creator of Polka, Dmitry Rudakov, says he would be only glad to shut the library down — on the day the legal market can once again offer people any book at a fair price.
This article is based on an investigation by Verstka (the original was written by Ivan Smurov). Some interviewees speak under changed names. It is for reference only and is not a recommendation to buy or distribute editions banned in Russia.