The owner of the Popcorn Books publishing house, Denis Kotov, said at a personal meeting with State Duma deputy Alexander Khinshtein that he did not accept “LGBT culture” and promised to “change the blue vector” of the publishing house. A post about this was published in Khinshtein's Telegram channel.
Khinshtein specified that he had met the owner of the "infamous" publishing house. According to him, earlier his inclusion in the public council of the Ministry of Culture caused a public outcry, but now Kotov will change his policy.
“I myself was outraged by this, especially since on the eve of the initiation of the first administrative case against the publishing house under our law on the ban on LGBT propaganda. Meanwhile, Kotov explained that he bought the publishing house only last year and intends to radically change its policy. He declared a categorical rejection of LGBT culture: he has already withdrawn the most scandalous publications from sale. As for the “performance” with LGBT books wrapped in the Constitution, then, according to Kotov, it was a “demobilization chord” of management before leaving.”
Khinshtein expressed the hope that Kotov's words would not be at odds with deeds and that the publishing house would change its "blue" vector. However, he added that Popcorn Books would still have to pay the fine.
It was Khinshtein's denunciation in Russia that brought the first case under the article on "LGBT propaganda" against the Russian "independent" book publishing house Popcorn Books. Before that, the shops "Respublika" and "Chitai-gorod" withdrew from sale some books that contained a description of "non-traditional relationships." What exactly is meant by this phrase is still unknown, since this is not spelled out in the law. The LitRes service will now not only withdraw books from sale due to the new law, they decided to contact the authors with a request to rewrite some of the texts so that they can be returned to sale.
