Moscow’s Zamoskvoretsky Court has sentenced Artyom Vakhlyaev, head of sales at Eksmo publishing house, to a four-year suspended sentence in a case involving so-called “LGBT extremism,” Mediazona reports. In addition, the court banned Vakhlyaev from publishing books and administering websites during the period of his punishment. He also had 2.9 million rubles ($37,700) confiscated as alleged proceeds from the sale of books containing LGBT content.
The case was heard through a special procedure. Vakhlyaev pleaded guilty and testified against other defendants, apologizing to the court in his final statement for the time spent on the proceedings and asking not to be deprived of the opportunity to “contribute to society.”
Vakhlyaev was detained in May 2025 alongside former Popcorn Books sales director Pavel Ivanov and Popcorn Books and Individuum executive Dmitry Protopopov. The three men were initially placed under house arrest, though the measure was later softened to a ban on certain activities.
The criminal case concerns the sale of books that the investigators deemed to contain LGBT content. These include Summer in a Pioneer Tie, What the Swallow Keeps Silent About, Rear Window, The King’s Game, Call Me by Your Name, and Darius the Great Deserves Better. According to the prosecution, after the non-existent “international LGBT movement” was banned in Russia as “extremist,” staff at the publishing group devised a plan to sell off the remaining stock of LGBT-themed books from the warehouse.
The investigation claims that “red” and “yellow” book lists were drawn up within the publishing house. The “red” list contained books that were deemed most risky due to their “overt LGBT propaganda.” According to the prosecution, these were to be sold only abroad. Books on the “yellow” list, where LGBT themes were less explicit, were planned to remain on sale in Russia. The prosecution called this a “mechanism for circumventing the legal ban.”
The case materials also mention the sale of books via the classifieds platform Avito, the dispatch of a shipment by bus to Azerbaijan, and orders posted by underage female buyers. The investigation used the latter to support its assertion that the accused had been responsible for “involving minors” in the activities of the banned “LGBT movement.”
In testimony read out in court, Vakhlyaev claimed that after the LGBT ban, more than 20,000 books in the warehouse were labeled “unsellable,” and that senior managers at Eksmo-AST then proposed selling them “under the radar.” Vakhlyaev named several executives who he said were involved in the scheme, including Eksmo-AST CEO Yevgeny Kapyov. Kapyov and other Eksmo managers were detained in connection with the case in April 2026 but were released after questioning on a recognizance to appear.
Earlier in the same case, former Popcorn Books sales director Pavel Ivanov received a four-year suspended sentence. He entered into a plea agreement with the investigation and testified against other suspects in the “book publishers’ case.” In court, Ivanov said that during questioning he had “fully exposed” Eksmo employees in criminal activity, as he had witnessed them “dragging” him into the sale of books with LGBT content:
“I gave truthful testimony about unidentified individuals from Eksmo publishing house. During the questioning, when I was presented with these unidentified individuals from Eksmo, I fully exposed them in the criminal activities they were conducting at the publishing house, since all of it happened before my eyes. I was a witness and, in fact, saw how they were drawing us into this activity. All the information I possessed, that I remembered, that I knew — I provided all of it to the investigation.”
He described his decision to cooperate with the investigation as a “civic duty.” He claimed to have always supported Vladimir Putin and to have advocated for censorship of book products, adding that he would have gone to the front with the Russian military if not for a heart attack he had suffered. In the closing arguments, Ivanov stated that he had fought against the LGBT community “since Soviet times,” when, he claimed, he had “caught perverts” as part of a Komsomol detachment.
In August 2023, Eksmo acquired control over the publishing assets connected to the case: a 51% stake in Popcorn Books and 51% in Individuum Print. The legal entity Popcorn Books was later liquidated, and Individuum Print passed fully under Eksmo’s control before also ceasing operations. The Popcorn Books brand itself, however, remained within the Eksmo-AST group until its closure in January 2026.
