Russian Publisher Individuum Closes Following "LGBT Extremism" Prosecution
On Monday, September 28, 2026, the Russian non-fiction publishing house Individuum announced it was shutting down operations. The announcement was made on the publisher’s official Telegram channel by its editor-in-chief, Alexei Kiselev. According to him, forthcoming books prepared in recent months will “definitely be published,” but through other publishing houses.
In his farewell statement, Kiselev described the closure using words by avant-garde poet Aleksandr Vvedensky as “sudden, but not unexpected,” without providing specific reasons for the decision. Founded in 2015, Individuum specialized in socio-political literature, investigative non-fiction, memoirs, and popular science. In 2023, control over Individuum and its affiliated young-adult imprint Popcorn Books passed to Russia’s largest publishing group, Eksmo, and in December 2024 the legal entity was formally merged into the parent holding.
The publisher’s closure comes after sustained pressure on Russia’s book industry and criminal proceedings against staff. The primary catalyst for scrutiny from authorities and conservative activists was Popcorn Books, which published Elena Malisova and Katerina Silvanova’s bestselling novel Summer in a Pioneer Cravat, depicting a romance between a teenage pioneer and a camp counselor in Soviet times. Following the late-2022 expansion of Russia’s ban on “LGBT propaganda” and the Supreme Court’s November 2023 ruling designating the “international LGBT movement” as extremist, queer literature was withdrawn from circulation, and Popcorn Books ceased operations in January 2026.
In May 2025, Russian law enforcement opened a criminal case charging employees with organizing the activities of an extremist organization (Article 282.2 of the Russian Criminal Code) over the continued distribution of LGBT-themed books. As Uránia previously reported , in August 2026 the Zamoskvoretsky District Court of Moscow sentenced three defendants—former Individuum executive director Dmitry Protopopov, former Popcorn Books sales director Pavel Ivanov, and warehouse manager Artyom Vakhlyaev—to four-year suspended prison terms after they pleaded guilty and cooperated with investigators.
