The educational project “Vsenauka” announced its closure

The educational project “Vsenauka”, which distributed popular scientific literature for free, announced its closure. In two years, almost 13 million books were downloaded from the project website.

In 2022, the conditions for implementing the program became more complicated due to the Russian military invasion of Ukraine. Many foreign copyright holders refused to work with Russia, as a result of which the rights to some of the free books became unavailable in 2022, according to the statement of the creators of Vsenauki, published on the project’s website.

In December, in an interview with journalist Katerina Gordeeva, project creator Georgy Vasiliev said: “I perfectly understand those Western publishers who do not want to deal with an aggressor country, with a country that attacked another country.”

In addition, the authors of a number of books distributed by the project were recognized as foreign agents. Because of this Russian publishing house “began to ask for the termination of the free distribution of some books”.

Another reason for the closure was financial difficulties. In the summer of 2022, Yandex, one of the main sponsors of the project, terminated the sponsorship contract with the program. “Vsenauky simply did not have the money for the extension of electronic rights to books, or for other active activities,” says the statement of the creators of the project.

The operator of “Vsenauki”, the Fund for the support of cultural and educational projects “Russian Globe” made a decision to phase out the program.

In February, the project team was disbanded. The list of books will be gradually reduced, most of them will be available on the vsenauka.ru portal by the end of January 2024.

• The “Vsenauka” project was created in 2019 by a team led by entrepreneur Georgy Vasilyev. He is known as one of the founders of the “Beeline” company, the producer of the musical “Nord-Ost” and the cartoon series “Fiksiki”.