Pages hosting the text on BookPlaneta, Siteknig and Libsafe were blocked. The first two now state the text was removed at the copyright holder's request, while the Libsafe page has been deleted entirely. The outlet Verstka reported the court's decision.
The only image on those pages was the book's cover, which shows two hockey players preparing to face off for the puck. Verstka reports that the court deemed that image propaganda.
"Hot Rivalry" tells the story of a romantic relationship between rival hockey players Ilya Rozanov of Russia and Shane Hollander of Canada. A television series of the same name, released in 2025, was adapted from the book: by January 2026 it had entered the top three most in-demand releases on Russian pirate resources, TV Rain reported.
According to TV Rain, prosecutors said they had found "literature containing propaganda of the extremist ideology 'LGBT.'" No official ban on the book or the series has been announced, the outlet notes: a pirated version of the project can still be found online.
After the Russian Supreme Court declared the nonexistent "international LGBT movement" extremist, queer literature became one of the riskiest categories for Russian publishers and booksellers. In 2025, employees of the publisher Popcorn Books were accused of participating in the activities of an "extremist organization" over the distribution of books with LGBT themes, including the novel "Summer in a Pioneer Tie." They were given suspended sentences.
Russia's book industry has in recent years faced a crisis tied to tightening censorship: publishers pull books from sale, abandon "dangerous" topics or strike fragments of text from editions, Meduza writes.