At Moscow’s Zamoskvoretsky Court, prosecutors asked for a four-year suspended sentence for former Popcorn Books sales director Pavel Ivanov in a case on alleged “LGBT extremism.” According to a Mediazona courtroom correspondent, the prosecution also requested a four-year ban on administering internet resources and the confiscation of more than 2.5 million rubles, which it described as “criminal income.”
Ivanov fully admitted guilt, entered into a cooperation agreement with investigators, and confirmed in court that he had testified against other defendants. He said he took part in interrogations and face-to-face confrontations voluntarily, and that he left Eksmo in October 2024 because he considered the publisher’s activities unlawful.
“During the confrontations, when unidentified representatives of Eksmo were presented, I fully exposed them in their criminal activity,” Ivanov told the court.
According to testimony read out in court, on April 22, 2026, during a confrontation with Eksmo distribution director Anatoly Norovyatkin, Ivanov described him as his de facto superior and said he oversaw, among other things, cash sales of books with “LGBT themes.” In other confrontations, Ivanov accused Svetlana Tseplyaeva, deputy director for commercial affairs at Pervaya Redaktsiya, Yulia Sokolovskaya, Eksmo’s deputy editor-in-chief for literature, and Eksmo director Yevgeny Kapyev of involvement in a gray-market scheme for selling such books.
“The main goal of the Eksmo holding was to make as much money as possible. Educating citizens had long ceased to be its goal,” Ivanov said, according to the confrontation record read in Kapyev’s presence.
In closing arguments, Ivanov said he regretted not leaving Eksmo earlier. In his final statement, he added that he was ready to continue helping the investigation because, he claimed, some of the people involved have not yet been convicted and are abroad.
Ivanov, along with Popcorn Books and Individuum executive Dmitry Protopopov and warehouse and distribution manager Artem Vakhlyaev, was detained in May last year. They were first placed under house arrest and, a year later, moved to a ban on certain activities. Investigators allege that after the “LGBT movement” was banned, the defendants organized a scheme to circumvent the restriction and sell off remaining books, and the case file says some buyers were minors.