Observers say facility was targeted, and its director charged with inciting ethnic hatred, as a result of current cross-border tensions

Employees of the Moscow Library of Ukrainian Literature arrived at work last week to find armed and masked police waiting for them.

The target of the morning raid by riot police wasn’t a dangerous criminal, but what the investigative committee called “anti-Russian” books. Officers confiscated several publications and detained the library’s director Natalya Sharina. She has since been charged with inciting ethnic hatred and faces up to five years in prison.

Employees say the library, which is funded by the city of Moscow, has fallen victim to the antagonistic relations between Ukraine and Russia, and its future is unclear. Ivan Pavlov, a lawyer who specialises in freedom of information cases and is defending Sharina, told the Guardian that her case was political.

On Friday, Moscow’s Tagansky court moved Sharina from pre-trial detention to house arrest. She has been fitted with an electronic bracelet and is not allowed to speak to the press. Pavlov said her health was fragile after an ambulance had to be called four times due to high blood pressure last week.



Moscow’s relations with Kiev soured after mass demonstrations there ousted President Viktor Yanukovych and ushered in a pro-western government in 2014, events that Russian state media described as a nationalist “junta”. Russia-backed rebels soon seized parts of eastern Ukraine, prompting a war that has now settled into an uneasy ceasefire.

The library’s troubles with the law began in 2010, when the interior ministry’s anti-extremism department confiscated about 50 books and a case on inciting ethnic hatred was opened. Since then, books on controversial topics have been held in a closed “special collection” so as not to inflame tensions, deputy director Vitaly Krikunenko said. Russia and Ukraine’s history together has long been interpreted differently in each country, and major points of contention include the famine that killed millions in Ukraine during Soviet collectivisation and the activities of Ukrainian nationalist fighters like Stepan Bandera, who at times collaborated with the Nazis.

The library’s extensive list of monthly events, including classical music recitals, film showings, Ukrainian lessons and a singing club, is not particularly incendiary or politicised, but certain activities touch on issues that have become increasingly fraught amid the country’s turn toward conservative values and away from the west. One of the library’s exhibits was dedicated to Ukrainian writers who were shot in the infamous Sandarmokh forest during the Great Purge of 1937-8 – hardly a popular topic now that Joseph Stalin is frequently praised by Putin and other officials.

Touchy historical topics aside, the Moscow library now seems to have found itself at the centre of what is frequently called an “information war” around the Ukraine conflict. “There’s a changed atmosphere around the library – we felt this yesterday when those [police] came,” Krikunenko said.

In a recent session he pointed to exhibits about poet Sergei Yesenin and Russian authors in Ukraine as evidence that the library was not anti-Russian.

“What do we need to do? Write a sign saying, ‘We’re not Russophobes’? I don’t think we need to explain this, but now our director will have to explain this in court,” he said.

The Ukrainian foreign ministry has called the prosecution of Sharina “unjust” and has said the Russian authorities should “stop the pressure on the library’s work”. The Kremlin has declined to comment on the case.



Salil Tripathi, Chair of PEN International’s Writers in Prison Committee, called Sharina’s arrest an alarming example of a wider crackdown on freedom of expression in Russia. “Whatever the content of the material alleged to have been in the library, the state’s response, to arrest a librarian, clearly seems disproportionate,” he said.

Court materials name the Ukrainian-language book War in the Crowd by Dmytro Korchynsky, which is on the state list of extremist literature banned in Russia, as among those confiscated during last week’s raid. Korchynsky is a Ukrainian author who is a former leader of the ultra-nationalist group UNA-UNSO and now heads an ultra-Orthodox Christian and nationalist party called Brotherhood.

But Krikunenko said the library had disposed of the book after it was placed on the list of extremist literature. He and other employees immediately said the book was not theirs when they witnessed the police bringing it out of the back room that holds the “special collection”.

“It’s some sort of special provocation by some enemies. This shouldn’t happen in a democratic state,” said Natalya Urshanskaya, a frequent visitor who is herself a retired librarian. “I don’t remember anything like this against libraries in Soviet times.”

She said the library had neither a pro-Russian nor pro-Ukrainian bias and was simply “popularising Ukrainian literature in Moscow”.