Famously eccentric St. Petersburg lawmaker Vitaly Milonov has offered an uncharacteristic apology for his “rude” statements while in the same radio interview referring to liberals as “dogs” and an LGBT rights activist as “non-human.”
“I am a person who is very emotional,” Milonov, a deputy in the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly who is known for his anti-gay stance, was quoted as saying Thursday by Moscow's Govorit Moskva radio. “I can sometimes say rude things, and that's why I am ashamed.”
“I can let myself go, be loud, shout, say various kinds of things, but later I am in fact so ashamed!” he was cited as saying. “So I apologize to everyone whom I offend.”
The timely apology came in a radio interview during which Milonov described liberals as “dogs” who were worse than medieval crusaders, Gorovit Moskva said in the report.
He also called Yelena Klimova, founder of online support group for LGBT teens Deti-404 (Children-404), a “viper, Christless pagan and a non-human.”
Offering more of his trademark comments, Milonov said he would like to become head of a Russian region that he would name “Spiritual Constantinople,” — a region without alcoholics or LGBT people, Govorit Moskva said Thursday in a separate report.
“We would create a model region: There would be not a single prostitute, not a single drug addict, all alcoholics would be in [treatment facilities] LTPs, we would have 'vice police' units operating, [there would be] not a single gay person,” Govorit Moskva quoted him as saying. “It would be the ideal region.”
An “LTP” is a Soviet-era term for a now-defunct type of establishment, where Soviet courts dispatched alcoholics to recover. The institutions relied on a prison-style regime, forcing addicts to work and using labor as the main form of “treatment.”
The system of LTPs was abolished after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
