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

In April, law enforcement officials conducted a raid on the century-old bookstore Podpisniye Izdaniya, instructing staff to take down numerous titles related to LGBTQ+ topics and feminism, along with works by dissident and “foreign agent” authors.

The following month, the Kuibyshevsky District Court in St. Petersburg ordered Podpisniye Izdaniya to pay a fine of 800,000 rubles (approximately $10,000) after it was found guilty of disseminating literature deemed to promote what is referred to as “LGBT propaganda.”

As reported by the court’s press service, an evaluation by Herzen University last month determined that 37 titles available at Podpisniye Izdaniya exhibited “psychological and linguistic signs of propaganda,” which supposedly encouraged “non-traditional sexual relationships, gender reassignment, or the refusal to procreate.”

Included among these books was Laing’s “Everybody: A Book About Freedom.”

However, the Kuibyshevsky District Court later decided that the new offense identified on April 10 was outside the statute of limitations and thus concluded the case, according to the court’s press service on Thursday.

It remains uncertain whether the prosecution plans to appeal this ruling.

Russia’s so-called “LGBT propaganda” law was first enacted in 2013 and expanded in late 2022 to prohibit representations of same-sex relationships and “non-traditional lifestyles” across all forms of media, including literature.

Following this expansion in 2022, major bookstore chains began to proactively remove LGBTQ+ literature from their collections as a form of self-censorship.