On a Telegram channel tied to the Khabarovsk Council of Fathers, a video circulated featuring a man who introduced himself as Vladislav Kushnirenko, a history teacher at a local school.
“We heard from the store manager that books about LGBT themes are sold only to people over 18,” he said. “They do not sell to minors. Yet in my school I saw these books in sixth grade and eighth grade, clearly under eighteen. That is why they are being sold to children.”
According to a school history teacher, the opinions of children are influenced by destructive forces that move and fund young people from the West, steering them toward LGBT ideas.
Kushnirenko and another participant, Yuri Yagodin, a deputy chairman of the Khabarovsk Duma, were upset that the bookstore did not remove from sale booksellers who appeared to know the contents of the books. Members of the Council of Fathers decided to purchase the entire circulation of LGBT related books at their own expense to destroy it.
The parliamentarian believed that his actions saved at least a few lives.
Shortly after, Telegram news channels released another video. In the footage, Kushnirenko, wearing the same hat and jacket as in the first clip, stated that he was happy to contribute to the liberation of youth.
The teacher announced that he would do his part in countering what he described as the wrong Western values, and then tore the books to pieces on a recycling belt.
“I am glad to do this. This is tears. They are all disgusting and miserable, and this should not happen in Russia. If the West has decided to go crazy, it is the West’s right. We are not the West, we are a separate civilization with a thousand years of history. We have our own values based on Orthodoxy; we are the third Rome, and we do not need this,” Kushnirenko stated during the act.
In the following footage set to a contemporary domestic musical score, viewers see torn books dropping from a conveyor belt into a thick slurry.
In another video released by the Mash Telegram channel, Yagodin and Andrey Nikonov, co-chairman of the Khabarovsk Council of Fathers, tear up books as well.
“Here it is, literature about homosexuality. Here it is, this filthy garbage,” Nikonov remarked.
The first act of many
Another participant, Andrey Nikonov, explained to socialbites.ca that the destruction of the books was only the beginning.
“While ancestral assemblies in other regions did not contact us or offer guidance, no one reached out to us. Our aim was to spur local entrepreneurs before the president signed this law, so people could clear the shelves of these items and stop spreading them,” he said.
Nikonov admitted that he had not read the books he chose to destroy.
“We do not read them. But it was enough for us to hear what they were about,” he asserted. He noted that experts and other specialists were working with activists who claimed that the two-volume work titled Summer in a Pioneer Tie was an overt promotion of gay love.
Nikonov urged readers to revisit classic works instead of books addressing gay themes, suggesting a rereading of Soviet-era literature, and recommending poems by Pushkin and Lermontov.
“Let them read the entire body of work, but not this nonsense. As adults with children and grandchildren, we are against entering the store and seeing this publication labeled youth on the shelf,” he argued.
He also criticized the proximity of the bookstore to a gym where many young students study, describing it as merely ten meters away.
On November 30, the Federation Council approved a package of laws banning gender reassignment and pedophilia, along with LGBT propaganda in Russia. Violators face fines of up to ten million rubles. The ban covers movies, books, advertisements, media broadcasts, and computer games.