Vladimir Kosarevsky was until a month ago the director of one of the main public libraries in Moscow and today he sleeps in a hostel in A Coruña that he must 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 is the order that his bosses gave him after approving the Government of Vladimir Putin a law that prohibits all cultural works that mention homosexuality.
Kosarevsky received a list of volumes that he was to banish from the shelves and send to the gallows.
He disobeyed her.
"Destroying books is fascism," he reaffirms, sitting in a cafeteria in A Coruña.
His rebellion triggered threats of dismissal, jail and forced enlistment on the Ukrainian front: "I had no choice but to leave."
He now confesses himself desperate because,
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 have given 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 that has mobilized to help this Russian citizen.
They have gone to the Xunta and the Coruña City Council, but none of these administrations has taken action.
“They look the other way,” laments López.
Kosarevsky's nightmare began even before he got his hands on the list of books condemned to be burned by the Putin government for being written by gay or lesbian authors or containing characters with this sexual orientation.
When the Russian law was approved in December that seeks to make anyone who is not heterosexual invisible, the librarian published on his social networks that the rule should be repealed as "discriminatory and harmful."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 must obey orders.
Those who oppose must be silent or leave, ”he explains.
Everything got worse when the blacklist arrived.
It included 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 or Robert Jones Jr. The order was to destroy them all.
“I rescued books as best I could, I tried to hide them so they wouldn't be destroyed.
They ordered us to deliver the paper for recycling”, says the librarian.
And it was then that he rebelled: he said no, he wasn't going to tear those works to shreds.
His superiors in the Department of Culture of the Moscow City Council, on which the library depends, and also some of his colleagues, threatened him with dismissal, with fines, with denunciations that would land him in jail and even that he would be enlisted in the Army to fight in Ukraine.
He felt "very afraid" and realized that he had to leave Russia urgently.
She requested a leave of absence from work and a visa to flee to Spain.
The permission to step on Spanish territory did not come into effect until January 17, but he could not take 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.
He soon realized that in his circumstances there would be no way to rent a flat.
Desperate, Kosarevsky sent an email to the Les Coruña association telling them about his situation.
This NGO from A Coruña, which has mobilized to help him together with the Casco association, has obtained a place for him at the Padre Rubinos hostel in A Coruña but only for 15 days.
The librarian says that the staff of this center, which gives shelter to homeless people, has informed him that he must leave it on February 28 because they only deal with cases of social emergencies and theirs they do not consider it to be.
In this residence they have not allowed him to register either, adds the president of Les Coruña, a key administrative step for this Russian refugee to get ahead.
Kosarevsky has asked the NGO Accem for a place in one of its refugee flats, but the deadline to resolve is three months.
The abandonment suffered by Kosarevsky was denounced on February 10 by Les Coruña before the plenary session of the Galician Observatory against Discrimination due to Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity, of which the Xunta, universities, town halls, unions and various NGOs are part. .
In that meeting, the representative of the Galician Government described his situation as "dramatic", but no administration has so far contacted him.
Vladimir Kosarevsky, retaliated in Russia for refusing to remove LGTBI books and a refugee in Galicia, in the library he ran in Moscow, in an image provided by him.
On January 30, Kosarevsky was fired over WhatsApp.
He received a message in which his bosses told him that his leave was cancelled.
He is looking for a job in Spain.
With a degree in Library Science and a postgraduate degree in municipal cultural and educational policies, he has worked at the Anna Akhmatova Library in Moscow, also known as the Central Library number 197, for 14 years, 7 of them as director.
The center, with a collection of more than 160,000 documents, has a 55-year history and in 2018 became the first “smart” library in the Russian capital due to its innovative design with digital technologies and virtual reality.
The Tripadvisor website still maintains the photo of Kosarevsky to illustrate the information about the Anna Akhmatova Library in Moscow.
The YouTube channel of the Moscow public center shows the video that his former director recorded just two months ago reviewing the results of his activity.
He has never hidden his sexual orientation at his workplace and points out that it has caused him some trouble in the past.
Between 2013 and 2015, when the law that began to muzzle homosexuals in his country was already in force, he collaborated 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 or activism," he recalls.
His activism prevents him from returning to Russia.
As soon as he left his country, he made statements to the international media denouncing the repressive policy of the Putin government against the LGTBI community.
"There, at least, jail awaits me," he says.
He is writing a personal diary about the turn his life has taken since the Russian Army invaded Ukraine.
Kosarevsky has not yet obtained international protection in A Coruña, but he has a refuge that never fails: as soon as he can, he escapes to the Ágora library, to the warmth of the shelves full of books.