Businessman Dmitry Silin and lawyer Anastasia Rudenko are collecting books at the request of residents of Ivanovo to open a library. Unlike a regular library, readers will not need to return books back. Residents of Ivanovo will be able to exchange them. The activists told 7x7 about this.
Dmitry Silin and Anastasia Rudenko invited the subscribers of Anastasia's channel to fill out a Google form and name the books they would like to read. The activists plan to buy them with their own money and provide them with a QR code, by which they will be able to track how library users pass books on to each other. They want to give books out for a period of two weeks and ask readers to pass them on to other people. The library will be physically located in one of the businessman’s premises. The library will launch on July 16.
"We want to collect books that are not available in city libraries, but make you think and develop critical thinking. I took Orwell's book from our city library, and there was a queue for it," Rudenko said.
The activists hope to engage people in reading: in their opinion, people have started reading less.
"Once at the police station, I offered Orwell's book to an investigator, but she said, ‘I have no time for this.’ It really upset me. And when my daughter found out that we were distributing books, she decided to read Orwell," the lawyer said.
The activists want to create a collection of books that will be passed around without any library cards and with minimal personal data: the reader will only need to enter their name and phone number. This will make sure that the book is not missing and is being read.
"We realized that many people took books from giveaways just like that, and we could not find out what had happened to the books. In our concept, after reading a book, a person can bring it back to the library or give it to a friend, and we will see how they are passed around and who has read them," the businessman explained.
The list from readers already has Brave New World, Day of the Oprichnik, Kys’, The Tales of a Kremlin Digger, Atlas Shrugged, Hadji Murad, and Moscow 2042.
Information technology businessman Dmitry Silin and lawyer Anastasia Rudenko started holding distribution events at the site of three Ivanovo universities after the special operation began. They have given away more than 700 books to the residents of Ivanovo: 1984, Animal Farm by George Orwell, and Hadji Murad by Leo Tolstoy about the Caucasian War. The activists spent about 100 thousand rubles on them.
Early in June, the social activists from Ivanovo decided to draw attention to the restriction of freedom of speech in Russia and started wearing T-shirts with a quote by George Orwell from 1984, "Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four."
