Until a month ago Vladimir Kosarevsky was director of one of the most important public libraries in Moscow and is now sleeping in a hostel in A Coruña, which he has to leave next Tuesday. He has nowhere to go. This 39-year-old librarian fled the Russian capital on January 6 after refusing to destroy books. It’s the order his bosses gave him after they approved a law for Vladimir Putin’s government to ban all cultural works mentioning homosexuality. Kosarevsky received a list of volumes to banish from the shelves and send to the gallows. He disobeyed her. “Destroying books is fascism,” he affirms while sitting in a cafeteria in Coruña. His rebellion triggered threats of dismissal, imprisonment and forced conscription on the Ukrainian front: “I had no choice but to go.” Now he admits his despair because without papers and income no one rents a house to him and so far no public institution has one reached out to help him.
Kosarevsky made an appointment on February 7 to process his asylum application. He did it in Ferrol, the first Spanish city he visited because he knew two compatriots there. At the immigration office, they gave him a date for… two years from now: May 15, 2025. “Vladímir is a refugee and he is also an LGTBI person. His human rights are being violated and the Spanish state should protect him,” defends Sandra López, President of Les Coruña, the Association for Lesbian Visibility, which has mobilized to help this Russian citizen. They have approached the Xunta and the City Council of Coruña, but none of these administrations have done anything. “They look away,” López laments.
Kosarevsky’s nightmare began even before he got his hands on the list of books condemned by the Putin government to be burned because they were written by gay or lesbian authors or contained people of that sexual orientation. When the Russian law was passed in December to make all non-heterosexuals invisible, the librarian posted on his social media that the regulation should be repealed as “discriminatory and harmful”. “That’s when I started having problems at work. State employees are perceived as Putin’s army and we have to obey orders. Anyone who opposes it has to shut up or leave,” he explains.
Everything got worse when the blacklist came along. It contained more than 60 titles by authors such as Haruki Murakami, Michael Cunningham, Danielle Steele, Sara Waters, John Boyne, Stephen Fry, Eduard Limonov, Jean Genet, Banana Yoshimoto, Stephen Chbosky and Robert Jones Jr. The order was to destroy them all. “I saved books as best I could, I tried to hide them so they wouldn’t be destroyed. They hired us to deliver the paper for recycling,” says the librarian. And then he rebelled: He said no, he would not tear these works to pieces. His superiors in the Culture Department of the Moscow City Council, on which the library depends, and also some of his colleagues, threatened him with dismissal, fines, denunciations that would put him in prison and even conscription into the army in Ukraine to fight.
He is “very scared” and realizes that he urgently needs to leave Russia. He applied for a leave of absence from work and a visa to flee to Spain. Permission to enter Spanish territory came into force only on January 17, but he could not stand it any longer: he decided to leave his country on the 6th to wait in Armenia. When he arrived in Ferrol, he temporarily stayed in a hostel. It quickly became clear to him that in his circumstances there would be no possibility of renting an apartment. Desperate, Kosarevsky sent an email to Les Coruña club, explaining his situation.
This NGO from A Coruña, which mobilized together with the Casco Association to help him, arranged for him a place in Padre Rubinos’ hostel in A Coruña, but only for 15 days. The librarian says the staff at this homeless center told him he had to leave on February 28 because they only attend to social emergencies and they don’t consider it theirs. Even in this residence he was not allowed To, adds the President of Les Coruña, an important administrative step for this Russian refugee to move forward. Kosarevsky has asked the NGO Accem for a place in one of their refugee apartments, but the deadline for clarification is three months.
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The abandonment suffered by Kosarevsky was denounced by Les Coruña on February 10 before the plenary session of the Galician Observatory against Discrimination on the Ground of Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity, which includes the Xunta, universities, town halls, trade unions and various NGOs. At that meeting, the representative of the Galician government described his situation as “dramatic”, but so far no administration has contacted him.
Vladimir Kosarevsky, who retaliated in Russia for refusing to remove LGTBI books, and a refugee in Galicia, at the library he runs in Moscow, in an image he provided.
On January 30, Kosarevsky was fired via WhatsApp. He received a message from his bosses telling him that his vacation was cancelled. Looking for a job in Spain. The qualified librarian and postgraduate degree in municipal cultural and educational policy has been working at the Anna Akhmatova Library in Moscow, also known as Central Library number 197, for 14 years, including 7 years as director. The center with a collection of more than 160,000 documents has a 55-year history and in 2018, due to its innovative design using digital technologies and virtual reality, became the first “smart” library in the Russian capital.
The Tripadvisor website still maintains Kosarevsky’s photo to illustrate the information about the Anna Akhmatova Library in Moscow. The Moscow Public Center’s YouTube channel shows the video that its former director recorded just two months ago to verify the results of his activities. He has never hidden his sexual orientation at work and notes that doing so has caused him problems in the past. Between 2013 and 2015, when the law beginning to muzzle homosexuals in his country was already in effect, he worked with the Russian LGBT Sports Federation and organized trips abroad for gay athletes. When they found out, his superiors warned him that “he had to choose between his work and his activism,” he recalls.
His activism prevents him from returning to Russia. As soon as he left his country, he made statements to international media denouncing the Putin government’s repressive policies against the LGTBI community. “At least the prison awaits me there,” he says. He writes a personal diary about the turn his life has taken since the Russian army invaded Ukraine. Kosarevsky has yet to receive international protection in A Coruña, but he has a refuge that never fails: as soon as he can, he flees to the Ágora Library, to the warmth of the bookshelves.
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