St. Petersburg Court Dismisses Charges Against Bookstore Over LGBT Propaganda Allegations

A court in St. Petersburg has dismissed a case involving “LGBT propaganda” against a well-known bookstore that had previously been fined for selling works by authors such as Susan Sontag and Olivia Laing.

In April, authorities conducted a search of the century-old store Podpisniye Izdaniya, instructing employees to remove numerous books related to LGBTQ+ topics and feminism, along with titles by dissident and “foreign agent” authors.

The following month, St. Petersburg’s Kuibyshevsky District Court penalized Podpisniye Izdaniya with a fine of 800,000 rubles (approximately $10,000), after determining that it had distributed literature classified as promoting “LGBT propaganda.”

As stated by the court’s press service, an expert review by Herzen University revealed last month that 37 titles sold in the bookstore exhibited “psychological and linguistic indications of propaganda” advocating for “non-traditional sexual relationships, gender reassignment, or refusal to reproduce.”

Included among the contested works was Laing’s “Everybody: A Book About Freedom.”

However, the Kuibyshevsky District Court later decided that the recent violation identified on April 10 was beyond the statute of limitations and consequently closed the case, according to a release from the court’s press service on Thursday.

It is still uncertain if prosecutors plan to challenge this ruling.

The “LGBT propaganda” law in Russia was initially enacted in 2013 and was broadened in late 2022 to prohibit representations of same-sex relationships and “non-traditional lifestyles” across all forms of media, including literature.

Following the 2022 amendments, major bookstore chains began removing LGBTQ+ literature from their inventory in a wave of preemptive self-censorship.