A Chitay Gorod bookstore. Photo: Yandex
A court in the Siberian city of Chita has fined Russian bookstore chain Chitai-Gorod 800,000 rubles (€8,700) for disseminating “LGBT propaganda”, independent news outlet Mediazona reported on Saturday.
The court ruling, which was made in late December, specifically cited four books sold by the chain — two titles by Swedish writer Fredrik Backman, as well as The Heart’s Invisible Furies by Irish novelist John Boyne and The Left Hand of Darkness by US author Ursula K. Le Guin, according to Russian news outlet Postnews.
According to Mediazona, two individuals who bought the titles reported to the regional office of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) that each of the books contained “signs of propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations”, and handed over both the books and their receipts “for verification”.
According to a forensic linguistic analysis commissioned by the FSB, the books criticised “traditional social hierarchies” and called for the replacement of the “traditional social value system” with “sexual anarchism in which individuals can choose their gender orientation”, and presented Russian ideas of traditional cultural and family values as “conservative, outdated and unnecessary”.
All forms of art have come under increasing pressure and scrutiny in Russia in recent years, as a plethora of censorship laws limiting freedom of expression on topics such as the war in Ukraine and LGBT issues has led to a widespread crackdown, including police raids on bookshops that sell titles effectively blacklisted for promoting “LGBT ideology”.
