The publishing house Individuum has announced it is closing. Its employees had earlier been convicted in a case over selling “LGBT literature”

The publishing house Individuum has announced it is closing. Its employees had earlier been convicted in a case over selling “LGBT literature”

Individuum editor-in-chief Alexei Kiselev published a statement saying that the publishing house is ceasing operations. “The best and clearest endings from the point of view of dramaturgy are, as everyone knows, invented by reality itself, without outside help. And this is how the ending of the story of the Individuum publishing house turned out,” Kiselev wrote.

Individuum had been publishing literature in Russia since 2015. The books that were being worked on in recent months will come out through new publishing houses.

In 2025, employees of the publishing houses Popcorn Books and Individuum were charged with “extremism” over queer literature. The grounds were books whose content, according to investigators, violated Russian law. In August 2026, former director Dmitry Protopopov and two employees, Pavel Ivanov and Artem Vakhlyaev, were sentenced to four years’ probation.

💜Earlier, Verstka reported on how bans in Russia gave rise to an underground literature industry.

A shadow market has formed around banned texts, from secret resale on marketplaces to pirated paper reprints and closed online libraries.

Read about how this industry works, who profits from it, and why readers in Russia still read banned books in Verstka’s article (with a VPN):

Link not working? Read here.

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Verstka

“Interesting little books about pioneers”: how bans in Russia gave rise to an underground literature industry

Fans resell banned books on marketplaces and print pirated copies