That project has nothing to do with Russian censorship. Libgen has always existed as a way to share scientific and other literature for free, basically supporting communism in such a way.

Russia in attempt to make friends with the West at some point approved the laws to prevent piracy and started to respect foreign intellectual property and copyrights, so projects like libgen were outlawed and forced to hide/ change hosting.

But all the books, videos, games etc sharing websites that were born on a territory of the former USSR has nothing to do with censorship, but economic reality that after switching from communism to capitalism citizens became so piss poor, that couldn’t afford to pay for such things, and their communistic mind still thought, that information has to be distributed for free.