Businessman Dmitry Silin and lawyer Anastasia Rudenko have launched their new project — the Orwell Library. Unlike a regular library, readers will not have to return books back. Residents of Ivanovo will be able to exchange them among themselves. In the spring, activists distributed more than 700 dystopias to citizens. The activists told 7x7 about this.
Dmitry Silin and Anastasia Rudenko distributed books to residents of Ivanovo in the evening of July 29 and plan to distribute them every weekend. They called their project the "George Orwell Library". Its essence is that people should take books for two weeks, and then pass them on to each other. Using the QR code on the books, Silin and Rudenko will be able to track how citizens exchange them. According to them, more than 90% of the works from the library "should be passed from hand to hand."
Users will be able to exchange books online through the library's website. The range of books includes more than 100 titles in several copies and will be expanded. The activists have collected books by contemporary writers that regular libraries do not have. They plan to distribute them in the streets, but one can come to the library and take them there. Its address is Revolution Street, 8.
According to Silin, the library will cost from 200 to 300 thousand rubles, plus monthly support will be 50 thousand rubles. Software development will require up to 400 thousand rubles.
The police came to the library’s opening. Rudenko told 7x7 that they had not interfered with the event and behaved correctly. According to her, after seeing the police, residents of Ivanovo were even more interested in the action and took the books. 24 users registered in the library on July 29.
Information technology businessman Dmitry Silin and lawyer Anastasia Rudenko started holding book distribution events at the site of three Ivanovo universities after the special operation began. They have given away more than 700 books to 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."