Russia’s media watchdog, Roskomnadzor, has demanded the Freedom Letters publishing house remove a queer novel from its website, the company told Novaya Gazeta Europe.
The Roskomnadzor statement, which Novaya Europe has seen, said a link on the Freedom Letters website to the sale of Springfield, a queer novel written by Russian author Sergey Davydov, contained “prohibited information that promotes non-traditional sexual relations and/or preferences, paedophilia, gender reassignment”.
Roskomnadzor’s statement also said that if the publisher refused to delete the link to the sale of the novel, it would block access to the website.
Freedom Letters was founded in April 2023 by Georgy Urushadze, the former director of the Big Book literary award for best prose in the Russian language. The company publishes books that would never get past the unofficial censorship of more mainstream Russian publishers.
Springfield, published in 2023, is about the relationship between two gay men in the city of Togliatti, in Russia’s Samara region. The book was only published in Russia after undergoing censorship, with words such as “queer” and “freedom” redacted. The novel’s first print run sold out on Ozon, a Russian online retailer, within 10 minutes.
Freedom Letters have also published numerous books in Ukrainian, and Dmitry Bykov’s portrait of Volodymyr Zelensky, entitled VZ, which plays off the fact that V and Z are both prominent pro-war symbols in Russia.