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We begin in St. Petersburg which for centuries was known as Russia’s most open and European city but now has become the epicenter of Russian homophobia, with deadly consequences. We tell the story of a gay Russian journalist who was murdered in his apartment by a young suspect who proudly calls himself “the cleaner.” We talk to a politician whose homophobic laws and rhetoric have unleashed this kind of violence and to a vigilante who has targeted dozens of gay and lesbian teachers.

Putin’s anti-gay policies are finding surprising support in our own backyard. Our next segment takes us to a conference in Tbilisi, Georgia, organized by the World Congress on Families, which is based in Illinois. We meet one of Putin’s closest allies, who is developing connections with anti-gay activists in the U.S. and around the world.

Putin and his government have been selling their anti-gay message to the Russian people using the state-run media. We hear the propaganda that Russians are consuming on a daily basis on the evening news.

The episode will be broadcast on public radio stations across the United States. The full episode is available on The Center for Investigative Reporting’s website or as a download from iTunes.

Reveal is a weekly radio program produced by the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX. For more, check out their website.

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The June 12, 2016, march in Kiev passed peacefully, but the security arrangements that it entailed came as a reminder that from the United States to Ukraine, from Iraq to Bangladesh and Russia, LGBTQ people are a target. Islamic fundamentalists, Christian Orthodox activists or far-right nationalist groups and other radical movements are choosing homosexuality as a top enemy symbolizing what they see as a “decadent” West.

This trend has put gay rights not only on the frontline in the battle for human rights; civic expression of the LGBTQ community’s existence has become engulfed in geopolitics.

In Ukraine, this has deeply entangled LGBTQ lives in a complex war with Russia. Powerful, Kremlin-funded propaganda is tapping into the existing homophobia in Ukraine’s socially conservative society to cast sexual minorities as a Western creation. Russian-backed rebels in eastern Ukraine often cite homosexuality (or “homofascism”) as one of the primary reasons they took up arms against the government in Kiev.

Ultra-nationalist, far-right groups in western Ukraine have also embraced violent homophobia, causing a spike in vicious attacks on gay men. Since the 2013 Maidan protests that ousted former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, the issue of LGBTQ rights has become a litmus test for creating a more tolerant and democratic society. Post-Maidan Ukraine committed to freedoms including the freedom to assemble, but marches since the protests have either been banned or marred with violence.

The Sunday Equality March in Kiev was a test of whether Ukraine, supported by the European Union and the United States, can trump the tradition of intolerance that the Kremlin, and far-right groups, have been trying to promote.

The march ended as the most peaceful LGBTQ event held in the post-Soviet space (with the exception of Baltic states that committed to Westernizing early and joined the EU in 2004). Nearly two thousand people took part according to organizers, including five members of the Ukrainian parliament, three members of the European parliament and four European ambassadors.

But it took a massive effort to keep them safe. Six thousand police officers encircled a giant perimeter, cordoning off the far-right activists searching for holes in their defenses.

After marchers walked the five hundred and fifty yards shouting “human rights above all else” they were put on buses and into empty metro cars to disperse them throughout the city and shield them from attacks.

“We took an oath to protect every person and citizen of our country. We, of course, didn’t take that oath to protect people selectively and will ensure safety,” said Khatia Dekanoidze, chief of the Ukrainian national police force on Thursday before the march.

In Ukraine, vocal police support to protect gay people signals a change from the past. “Last year at the planning meeting for the march with the police and Western diplomats one of the police looked at me and said ‘you want blood I can see it,’” said Zoryan Kis, an activist responsible for security at the march. The Sunday Equality March in Kiev was a test of whether Ukraine can trump intolerance imported by the Kremlin and promoted by Ukrainian far-right groups.

Unlike in past years, Western government scrutiny, as well as training and equipping Ukraine’s new police helped communicate to local authorities that protecting LGBTQ rights is an important factor in judging the country’s European ambitions. Europeans and American embassies sent security experts to evaluate police preparations and monitor the march and special Envoy for the Human Rights of LGBTI Persons Randy Berry visited from Washington to meet with officials.

Establishment political support for the march was visible in Kiev. The city’s metro has been full of posters of prominent Ukrainians voicing their support. Even Kiev mayor Vitali Klitschko, who in 2014 derided Kyiv Pride as an unwanted carnival, officially supported it after a receiving an open letter from Jamala, the 2016 Eurovision song contest winner from Ukraine.

“I feel like they finally gave me a voice,” said Ira, a 26-year-old lesbian who marched for the first time.

But daily life for LGBTQ Ukrainians remains vulnerable to violence and discrimination. For many, the euphoria of having managed to organize their first peaceful march was overshadowed by the shocking news from Orlando, a reminder that governments cannot always protect their citizens and that even in the most LGBTQ-friendly countries homophobia can still flourish and kill.

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Maksym was stabbed multiple times, in Odessa in December. He managed to escape his apartment, but his attacker chased after him and finished the job in the entrance to Maksym’s building.

Alexander is from Kharkiv and was beaten last year by a group of about 10 unknown assailants, including two women, in a courtyard near his work. Sergei was attacked recently by a group of young men as he was sitting on a bench in the evening with his boyfriend in a park in his hometown of Vinnytsia.

All these incidents had one thing in common: their victims were gay men.

Since Ukraine’s February 2014 Maidan revolution, the number of attacks on the LGBTQ community has exploded. According to the Our World gay rights center, which publishes an annual report on anti-gay violence, there were around a dozen hate crimes per year just before the revolution. Then in 2014, these jumped to 27. And the next year, they jumped again, to 60. These include individual beatings, murders, assaults on LBGTQ organizations or offices and violent attempts to break up gay-pride festivals.

These are just the incidents reported to Our World and other gay rights organizations — the actual numbers are believed to be significantly higher. Most victims choose to stay silent. And even fewer report attacks to the authorities. They are afraid of hassle or possibly police violence, sexual or physical, or are scared of being outed within their communities. The attackers prey on this fear: Many of the incidents are robberies or cases of blackmail, where the perpetrators target gay men, knowing they won’t go to the authorities.

Sergei, who was attacked in the park in Vinnytsia, didn’t file a report. He said he intended to, but changed his mind. His attackers, he said, were from the Right Sector far right organization, and, when he went to the police station, he saw what he believed were right-wing activists manning the registration desk.

The immediate cause for the jump could be a combination of factors. Violent crime overall has skyrocketed, since the revolution. The gay and lesbian community has also raised its visibility and become more assertive in pushing for their rights, which some activists say could create a backlash. And in return, far right groups like Right Sector and the Azov Battalion, self-assured and enjoying a measure of public approval for their battlefield exploits, have stepped up their violently anti-gay agenda.

At the same time, though, the environment for gays in Ukraine has unquestionably improved: significant legislation protecting sexual minorities has been passed, and more is in the pipeline. This year’s Kiev gay pride march will receive unprecedented support from city authorities.

What no one seems to be able to answer at the moment is whether these assaults and murders are ultimately a sign that anti-gay forces are on the retreat, and that they are lashing out because they somehow sense Ukrainian society, post-Maidan, is becoming a more tolerant country? Or is this an indication of a growing acceptance of violence against gays both at the grass roots, and in certain circles of the establishment?

The answers to these questions are crucial not just to the LGBTQ community, but also to the country as a whole. In addition to replacing a corrupt government, the Euromaidan revolution was trumpeted as Ukraine’s embrace of “European values” and “rule of law”. However, even as the revolution was unfolding, it was apparent that many of the protestors interpreted these ideals in vastly different ways – and for some, basic civil rights such as freedom of assembly only applied to groups that they approved of.

Now the country’s future is in the balance. Ukraine could still easily go the way of Russia and other former Soviet states, where gays are marginalized – or in worst case scenarios, seen as carriers of a foreign contagion (the dreaded “Gayropa”) and denied full protection of the law. Or Ukraine could live up to the European and democratic principles that many said they supported, and defend the rights of minorities, including those of sexual minorities.

The murder of Oleg in Kharkiv illustrates, brutally, the rising violence against the LGBTQ community, and the formidable legal obstacles that prevent the perpetrators from being fully brought to justice. (Individuals’ first names are only being provided, either because they requested anonymity, or the investigations in which they are involved are ongoing. Most names have been changed.) The case also underlines what experts say is a systemic indifference to anti-LGBT violence.

The basics of the case: Oleg was found in his apartment with 28 stab wounds, and his iPhone missing. A few days later, a 17-year-old, Ivan, was detained on suspicion of committing the crime and in possession of the iPhone. Ivan and Oleg had made each other’s acquaintance online, chatted for a few weeks and then agreed to meet in person. Ivan confessed to killing Oleg, which resulted he said when the two men started to fight, and Ivan stabbed him in what he says was self-defense. In December, last year, a court found Ivan guilty of murder. The case is currently being appealed.

But questions remain. Obviously, the first thing to ask is why it’s necessary to stab someone more than two dozen times in “self-defense”? Or for that matter, why he went to the meeting with something close to a hunting knife in the first place? Or when they started to fight, why didn’t Ivan just leave?

Moreover, the two men first agreed to meet near Oleg’s building, but for some reason ended up going back to his apartment. Oleg’s friends say this was odd, since he was an intensely private person, who was loath to invite people into his home. Ukraine could still go the way of Russia where gays are marginalized – or in worst case scenarios, seen as carriers of a foreign contagion and denied full protection of the law.

Then there was the issue of the “third man”: Ivan went to meet Oleg with a friend, who, Ivan said, then waited outside while Ivan went into Oleg’s first-floor apartment. The friend, Ivan said, stood near the building, but didn’t come in, even when he and Oleg started to fight, which was probably audible from the street. Police questioned the friend, but his name completely dropped soon thereafter from the investigation.

This was noteworthy since, at around five-foot-two and 110 pounds, Ivan was considerably smaller than Oleg and it’s not clear how he overpowered his victim. On the other hand, the friend was taller and heavier than both of them, and, significantly, practiced martial arts.

Oleg’s closest relative was his aunt, as both his parents had passed away. She felt the police showed a lack of interest in investigating what actually happened – for instance, officials first characterized the motive as a robbery, although Oleg’s money, laptop computer, iPad and other valuable objects were untouched. So she engaged a lawyer, Roman Likhachev.

Likhachev says there were other equally important discrepancies. For one, Oleg was found with a belt around his neck and signs that he had been strangled, which was then played down during the investigation. He also says that most of the stab wounds targeted critical areas – showing the attacker had knowledge of fighting and human physiognomy that Ivan most likely did not possess. Likhachev says Ivan was “intellectually limited” and “practically cannot write.” All text messages were made from Ivan’s friend’s telephone.

Ivan was convicted for premeditated murder which carries a sentence of 7-15 years. The judge, however, gave him close to the minimum — eight years. In his verdict, he cited Ivan’s outspoken hatred of gays, and the number of times he stabbed Oleg as “mitigating circumstances.” No further explanation was given.

“It’s difficult for me to understand the logic behind this,” said Likhachev. “But I have the impression that the court intended to show that if you kill someone of a non-traditional sexual orientation, the verdict will be sufficiently easy.”

Ukraine’s criminal and administrative codes lack any statute for homophobic hate crimes. Without this, police and courts lack the legal basis to fully investigate and prosecute instances, which may have targeted someone because they belonged to a sexual minority.

Furthermore, even if there were such a statute, it’s not given that law enforcement bodies would use it. The criminal code does have a paragraph defining crimes based on hate towards race, religion or ethnic group. But this is applied sparingly. Many assaults on the LGBTQ community are characterized as “hooliganism” – such as an arson attack on a gay-themed film in at the Zhovten cinema in Kiev last year.

Ukrainian police nevertheless have begun to investigate some cases as LGBTQ hate crimes. Last year, according to official records, there was one, and eight listed as “possible.” There are indications that the extreme far right and homophobes occupy top positions within Ukrainian law enforcement.

“We have a paradoxical situation: The court did not assign homophobic motivation to the crime, but it found a lot of “extenuating circumstances,” said Alexander Zinchenkov of the Our World gay rights organization in reference to the cinema incident. “Our law enforcement bodies are not only unable to qualify crimes as homophobic – they also don’t want to,” he continued. “And society and the government turn a blind eye to this – although no one is protected from hate crimes. Today it’s gays, tomorrow refugees, and further down the road, who knows.”

In March, 2016, LGBTQ activists gathered in a hotel in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv for a gay-pride festival. Their location was unannounced, but 200-300 far-right extremists found them anyway and congregated outside the building. Police arrived eventually and formed a cordon to escort the LGBTQ activists into buses. The extremists threw rocks and shouted, “Kill, kill, kill!” but the buses managed to get away. A few dozen extremists also took a group photograph, identifying them as members of the neo-Nazi “Misanthropic Division,” and showing raised-hand Nazi salutes.

In addition to mass actions like the one in Lviv and brutal assault on a gay pride march in Kiev, last year, ultra-nationalists may also be linked to individual attacks and murders. Their modus operandi is to meet gay people through social media with the intention of setting up a face-to-face rendezvous. Once they get together, the extremists can humiliate, beat, torture or even kill their victims. Often the encounter is filmed, in order to blackmail or further demean them.

These methods seem to have originated among Russian homophobic organizations – indeed they are standard operating procedure among groups targeting gays, and especially homosexual men, and the template has migrated as far as North America. In Ukraine, activists from a Russian group called “Occupy Pedophilia” are known to have trained local extremists.

In Ukraine, the two most active homophobic groups are “Fashionable Verdict” and “Nazhdak”. Information about them is difficult to obtain, since they communicate primarily in chat rooms closed to the general public. However, at least one of the people interviewed for this article – Alexander, who was attacked by a group in Kharkiv – believes he was targeted by “Fashionable Verdict.”

A big question mark also hangs over parts of the law enforcement establishment about their commitment to combatting anti-gay crime. In Lviv, the police’s performance was far from reassuring, though in the end they protected the LGBTQ activists They were slow to come at the hotel, and, reportedly, only after strong prodding from officials in Kiev. Once they arrived, they appeared unwilling to disperse the threatening crowd. And afterwards, not one arrest was made.

More disturbing are indications that the extreme far right and homophobes occupy top positions within Ukrainian law enforcement. Vadym Troyan was previously the head of the Kiev regional police and, in March, he was named deputy head of the country’s newly constituted national police force. Until 2014, though, he was listed as an “active member” of the neo-Nazi “Patriot of Ukraine” organization, which calls for a “white crusade” against “Semitic-led sub-humans” and is violently homophobic.

Troyan was additionally a leader in the Azov volunteer military battalion, which now has been incorporated as a regiment in Ukraine’s national guard. Azov – which has Patriot of Ukraine members in key positions and officially employs three modified Nazi symbols – has reportedly worked closely with the Kiev regional police.

The former head of the police’s narcotics division, Ilya Kiva, tweeted a verse from the Old Testament, which said gays should be executed. Kiva also at one point spoke of working with Azov, who he said was “fighting for the purity of the Ukrainian nation.”

Despite the preponderance of the anti-gay violence, there are nonetheless reasons to be optimistic. Ultra nationalists may have strong links to parts of the government, but they’re still very much on the electoral fringe, having failed to enter parliament in the last elections.

The old police force is being replaced —not fired en masse, but phased out gradually, so the two forces exist everywhere side-by-side. The old interior ministry police, or “militsia,” is believed to be a bastion of un-reformed homophobes – but as the presence of Troyan and the ex-narco head, Kiva, indicate, the new one raises concerns, too. The new police force – full of fresh-faced, photogenic new recruits who make their rounds in environmentally-friendly Toyota Prius cars – will receive “tolerance training.” Top officials have also that they will create two separate departments for human rights and hate crimes, though they have yet to begin to staff them.

LGBTQ activists say that, post-revolution, the attitude of the government has tangibly changed. “Now officials are taking steps, and even if this is all very unclear, at least it is happening. Slowly but it’s happening,” said Alexandra Zaharova of the Gay Alliance organization. “Now they’re freely talking about LGBT rights,” she said. “Two years ago they wouldn’t even give a peep about that.”

Some big battles have already taken place. Already deputies have added a paragraph to the country’s labor code that outlaws discrimination based on sexual orientation. This was done in order for Ukraine to qualify for visa-free travel to the European Union. But, nevertheless, the law had to overcome considerable resistance. One of the bill’s supporters, Hryhoria Nemyria, chairman of parliament’s human rights committee, says it needs “to be closely monitored.”

Nemyria says the next order of business is to draft and present a “human rights action plan,” which, among other things, will remove loopholes and contradictions in the various legal codes so that homophobic hate crimes can be adequately investigated and prosecuted.

But he warns against being “overly optimistic.” Ukraine, he says, is still extracting itself from a post-Soviet legacy, where homosexuality was both taboo and criminalized. “We learned a painful lesson in of raising expectation that then bred frustration,” he said. “What’s important is a sense of direction, to avoid a classic ‘one step forward and two steps back,’” he added. “When you have something change positively and then, either through implementation or lack of consistency in the legislation, you basically have more of the same.”

On a recent Friday night at the Jam Club, where the murdered Oleg worked as a disc-jockey, there were few patrons – but then again, it was just 11 p.m. and still early in the evening. Nevertheless, once past the unmarked door, and the two security men who doubled as ticket sellers, the music was pounding.

Oleg’s murder, of course, hadn’t been forgotten, especially since the circumstances of his acquaintance with Ivan were somewhat typical. In Kharkiv, outside the Jam Club, opportunities to get to know other gay people are very limited, and many people are dependent on the internet. “This is something that could have happened to anyone – if you meet someone, you can never know who they are completely,” Sasha, one of the clients, said.

But the hows and whys of his murder, more than one year later, remained shrouded in mystery.

Sasha said that he himself didn’t feel particularly at risk – he had a boyfriend. But he was careful: Not many people know he is gay. He didn’t tell his co-workers, for instance. “It’s better that way – no unnecessary questions,” he said. Tanya, Jam’s administrator, remembered Oleg as a thoughtful but private co-worker, who went straight home after work. Someone who knew everyone’s favorite song, which he would play if they were in a down mood. But the hows and whys of his murder, more than one year later, remained shrouded in mystery.

Tanya went to the morgue with Oleg’s aunt, to help identify his body. “He was carved up like an animal,” she said.

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That attack on May 1, 2006, was when an alliance between a politically insurgent Russian Orthodox Church Christian and violent homophobia got its start, a partnership between icons and clubs that would continue to resonate in Russian politics a decade later.

In the years since that first attack, an eruption of a pro-Church hooligans and militant babushkas wielding iron crosses has metastasized into an organized movement promoted by the highest reaches of the Russian Orthodox Church, sanctioned by the state, and supported by growing ranks of Russian Christian laity.

In the months following the nightclub attack, a neo-Nazi group known as RONS (the Russian abbreviation for Russian National Union) rose to prominence through a series of attacks on gay parades. An Orthodox presence was increasingly visible in these attacks, and in a 2007 street assault two Orthodox priests were captured by cameras literally ordering far right activists to inflict bodily violence against the well-known journalist Roman Super, reportedly because one of the priests disapproved of his earring. Foreign activists were also beaten, including the British musician Richard Fairbrass.

“Normally the driving force in far-right street riots are Neo-Nazis— they simply have much bigger experience in fighting than the Orthodox activists” said Alexander Verkhovsky,a prominent human-rights activist and head of The SOVA Center for Information and Analysis. “But RONS combined the two: it was a union of old-school Nazis who fanatically embraced Orthodox fundamentalism.”

A year after the Moscow gay club attack, the Orthodox Church was itself sponsoring organizations specifically aimed at attacking gay expression. One group called Georgievtsy! removed homosexuals from Ilyinsky Square —the hot spot for Moscow’s gay community. Positive coverage of the Georgievtsy! in the official press indicated the authorities’ support for the organization.

In the early 1990s Kremlin banned many neo-nazi and nationalist movements, but by 2006 in Vladimir Putin’s resurgent Russia many of the groups returned to the political scene. RONS was not the only one. In fact, like a scene from a Mad Max movie, the gay pride parade brought out a cornucopia of raging Orthodox and nationalist groups including the Black Hundred, the National-Socialist Union, Union of Orthodox. the Union of Orthodox Banner-Bearers, Kuryanovich Crew, and Slavic Union among others.

As the number of Orthodox activists grew, things got tougher for Russia’s gay community. The promise of freedom brought by the dissolution of the Soviet Union was gradually replaced by militant piety. That piety became the norm by the time four Russian girls rocked the world by singing an anti-Putin song in Moscow’s main cathedral in 2012. Pussy Riot infuriated many Russians, including a professional boxer Vladimir Nosov and businessman Andrey Kormukhin to set up a group called Sorok Sorokov (“Forty by Forty”). What set Sorok Sorokov apart from dozens of Orthodox organizations mushrooming throughout Russia, was army-like discipline and the athleticism of its members.

On June 11, 2013, when Russia’s controversial anti-gay propaganda law was passed, Kormukhin and his fellow skinheads, including his two teenage sons, were in the forefront of the attack on LGBTQ activists in front of the Duma. They were not wearing their red-white fascist-like uniforms, but are easily recognized in photos.

Less than a year later, Kormukhin organized an impressive demonstration where 4,000 young men marched around Moscow’s Christ the Saviour Cathedral in a symbolic assurance to the Russian nation, and to the Patriarch Kirill in particular, that the power of the Church was unshakeable. The Church, it turned out, took notice.

At the time, the Russian Church faced resistance over its plan to build 200 churches around Moscow. Much of the money for construction was to come from a charity fund called the Moscow Temple Construction Support Fund. Its board of directors includes many government officials and some of the most powerful men in Russia: Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin, Patriarch Kirill, the head of Russia’s Sberbank German Gref, the head of Gazprom Alexey Miller and Vladimir Potanin, who top’s Forbes Richest Men in Russia list. This fuelled speculations of massive corruption involving state and church officials, but what really enraged Moscovites was the fact that many of these churches were to be built in public parks. The far right’s response was to launch a campaign that claimed that LGBT activists were involved in the anti-temple riots.

On June 18, 2015, dozens of young pro-church activists, wearing red t-shirts with white circles, moved into Torfyanka as the construction of the temple began. But pro-park activists proved to be trickier targets than the other frequent political targets in Russia such as gays, pro-Western liberal politicians, journalists, independently-minded business owners, and human rights defenders. After a tense, nine-month standoff that culminated in a massive street fight between the two sides, Moscow authorities announced they were stopping construction of the church. The church activists lost, but they also learned their lesson.

“Do not openly beat up regular people,” said Verkhovsky of the SOVA center. “Unlike beating up gays, it would cause reputational risks for the Church.”

The far right’s response was to launch a campaign that claimed that LGBT activists were involved in the anti-temple riots. “Templephobe” became the antonym of “homophobe”. The activists distributed leaflets that read “Not happy with the temple? Welcome to the gay parade!” They simply stuck a gay label on their new targets.

The pro-temple movement gained muscle and fists, and increasingly public approval of the Church. In September 2015, members of Sorok Sorokov and another Orthodox group called Bojya Volya (God’s Will) smashed to dust hundreds of thousands dollars worth of sculptures at an exhibition of a famous Russian sculptor Vadim Sidur. The attackers were arrested but released with no charges after five days. Soon afterwards the Church spokesman Rev Vsevolod Chaplin declared that Sidur’s exhibition was “deeply immoral” and contained “propaganda of homosexuality.”

And the Church seems especially supportive of Sorok Sorokov. In February, 2016 the Patriarch personally congratulated the founder, Kormukhin on his forty-fifth birthday and gave him a valuable icon as a present.While Sorok Sorokov seems to have lost the Torfyanka fight, Sorok Sorokov claims to have “protected” fourteen other temple construction sites in the last two years by managing to associate a pro-park opposition to new churches with homosexuality and gay rights groups. The growing number of Sorok Sorokov’s followers (Kormukhin,the co-founder, claims 10,000 members) tend to win popular sympathy: fueled by anti-gay and anti-liberal propaganda, many Russians increasingly view new churches as a spiritual shield from Western depravity.

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The convention, timed to coincide with the day of a violent 2013 mob attack on an anti-homophobia rally in Tbilisi, will be hosted by Levan Vasadze, a dagger-sporting homophobic knight dressed in Georgian national attire. Vasadze participated and is alleged to have helped organize the 2013 attack that relegated Georgia’s nascent LGBTQ-rights movement to the periphery of national discourse.

Former President Bush, who will be given a nod at the convention with a “Family and Democracy Award,” was the first sitting US president to visit Georgia in 2005, when he described Georgia as a “beacon of liberty” in the region. While the country boasts many unprecedented freedoms in the region, the country severely suppresses its LGBTQ community.

To counter the symbolism of the May 17 anniversary of the mob attack on LGBTQ supporters as a day for celebrating gender and sexual diversity, Georgia’s Orthodox Church pronounced that date as the Day of Family. The Illinois-based World Family Congress subsequently announced its tenth annual conference would also coincide with the anniversary.

Anyone looking to more fully understand what brings the World Family Congress from the American Midwest to the Caucasus must get properly acquainted with Vasadze, the group’s choice for its convention’s emcee.

Emory University-educated Vasadze, given a knighthood by the remnants of Georgia’s royal family, has long focused on the procreative organs of fellow Georgians. Mixing a sexualized, scatological vocabulary with a quasi-scientific, moralizing lexicon has led Georgian critics to variably characterize him as a menace or a laughingstock. He is a frequent target in comedy shows and on social media.

He once declared that the pro-choice position on abortion made the “vagina, which should be paradise on earth for human beings…the most dangerous place to be.” Looped on the video sharing site Coub is Vasadze’s explanation of the classical roots of liberals: “Liber was a Plebian false god of the Aventine Triad of the Roman pantheon of false gods and he was distinct for his licentiousness and dipsomania.”

Liberals, like the vagina, portend death, according to Vasadze. “Tolerance is a term of Franco-Gallic medical school and means human organism’s ability to tolerate poison,” Vasadze pointed out in another TV interview. “It is the dead body that has perfect tolerance. It is very interesting where they [the liberals] want to take the national organism, don’t you think?”

When the World Congress of Families announced Georgia as the site for its next convention, Vasadze was present to accept the honor. “Up until now most people in Georgia believed that every Westerner who comes to Tbilisi works for George Soros,” he said, pausing for laughs. “And we would like to show them otherwise.”

Vasadze’s role in bringing the World Congress of Families to Tbilisi will help to lend an international flair to his crusade against liberalism. But Georgia is an odd venue for this US-led religious right retreat. Georgia’s Orthodox Church is harshly critical of Christian denominations in Europe and in the US; nonetheless, the veteran leader of the Georgian Church, Patriarch Ilia II, will address the gathering, which includes Mormons among its donors.

The convention’s anti-choice, anti-LGBTQ agenda seems to provide a degree of ecumenical and political unity among American, Georgian and Russian attendees. And in fact, the World Congress of Families has close ties with Russia. The coalition was conceived, in its own words, “on a cold winter night of the 1995” in Moscow, in the apartment of Anatoliy Antonov, a sociology professor. Anatoliy and his American guest, Iowa-born historian Alan Carlson, and a handful of concerned Russians came up with the idea to launch a global conference to protect heterosexual, procreative marriage.

Carlson, president of the Howard Center for Family, Religion and Society, went on to midwife the birth of the World Congress of Families. Picking up partners around the world, the organization developed into a driving force “behind the US Religious Right’s global export of homophobia and sexism,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, an Alabama-based civil rights group. With a $200 million annual budget, the World Congress of Famlies is now a partnership network backed by a slew of US religious groups, such as the Alliance Defending Freedom and the Knights of Columbus.

The coalition has had a particular impact in Russia, where it forged a Bible Belt-to-Kremlin collaboration around its anti-choice and anti-gay agenda. “The Kremlin used to be a no-no for conservatives, we are going to redeem that building,” said World Congress of Families Vice President Larry Jacobs in 2013, when its convention was held in Moscow. The group has held a number of events and lectures across Russia, and has endorsed Russia’s controversial 2013 law that restricts public discussion and displays of homosexuality.

American civil rights groups say that the World Congress of Families exports hate to Russia, a country already difficult for LGBTQ people. “WCF backers include Russian officials, who were sanctioned by the US government following Russia’s annexation of Crimea,” said the Human Rights Campaign, a Washington-based LGBTQ rights advocacy group.

The World Congress of Families counters that Putin sets an example for the US to follow. “How sad and ironic it is that the Russian president...is the one defending laws and morality consistent with the freedom in the US Constitution while our socialist American president has launched an all-out assault against religious freedom and the moral and religious people of American,” said Jacobs, the group’s vice president, while expressing support for the jailing of Pussy Riot, Russia’s feminist punk rock protest group.

As it descends upon Georgia, the World Congress of Families, wittingly or not, might be helping a Russian foreign policy agenda in the region. Fanning the flames of homophobia has long been Moscow’s soft-power way to urge its former Soviet satellites, including Georgia, to distance themselves from the West. Before Georgia signed an Association Agreement with the EU in 2014, the Russian propaganda machine was put into gear, describing the landmark treaty as essentially Georgia’s gay marriage with Europe. Brussels had to issue public assurances that the treaty, meant for political and economic harmonization, does not contain any fine print requiring Georgia to allow same-sex marriages.

In reality, same-sex marriage is a non-issue in Georgia, where LGBTQ people cannot gather safely in public much less demand marriage rights. Nevertheless, some of the country’s own politicians run on an anti-gay marriage platform, pandering to widespread conservative attitudes and the position of the much-revered Georgian Church. A pending parliamentary vote seeks to amend the Georgian constitution to state that lawful marriage is limited to opposite-sex partners.

“Would you want such marriage in your family, men in bridal veils, hairy, bearded men?” asked Tamaz Mechiauri, of the Georgian Dream Party, when asked to explain the reasoning for the bill.

A longtime Georgian LGBTQ rights activist, Irakli Vacharadze believes that the agenda behind the bill banning gay marriage is to expose pro-gay political rivals to an anti-LGBTQ electorate. “Controlling your butt” is going to be one of the campaign themes in the highly contested election this fall, said Vacharadze.

Vacharadze thinks none of this augurs well for Georgia’s pro-Western, liberal-minded political factions. Coordinated or not, the agendas of the Kremlin, Georgia’s hardline politicians, the Church and the Vasadze crowd overlap, and this could have implications for Georgia’s lurching attempts to create a modern, liberal democracy. Against this backdrop the World Congress on Families will conduct its annual conference in the very time and place where three years ago a crowd led by priests brutally crushed a modest call for tolerance and acceptance.

The nation’s small but vibrant LGBTQ rights community is bracing for the impact, but denied a public space for debate their options to respond are limited.

The post A “family” gathering commemorates an anti-gay riot appeared first on Coda Story.

Part 1: Terror in Central Asia

The story of one man caught up in Kyrgyzstan’s homophobic violence. [Warning: Graphic Content]

Part 2: Permission to Exterminate

Activists have gone underground after a wave of attacks.

We knock again, hard. But still there is no sound of anyone coming to the door. A journalist colleague and I had been invited for dinner at the home of Nika, a gay man who recently set up a small LGBTQ support group in Bishkek, the Kyrgyzstan capital. Only after we phone him do we finally hear muffled sounds from inside of first one, then two heavy metal doors being unlocked. “This is how we live now,” said Nika, taking in my glance at his security arrangements.

Two years ago, the Kyrgyz parliament followed the lead of its powerful near-neighbor Russia and introduced a series of amendments outlawing the promotion of same-sex relationships. Popularly known as the ‘anti-gay propaganda law,’ it has unleashed a campaign of violence and intimidation against the LGBTQ community, with a near 300 percent increase in reported attacks since the legislation was announced. Some people have been savagely assaulted, including one gay man we interviewed who was beaten unconscious and gang-raped this year. Several sources told us of lesbians being subjected to so-called ‘corrective rapes’, and many attacks go unreported. LGBTQ activists have gone underground after the Bishkek office of one advocacy group was firebombed.

The names of all the LGBTQ individuals have either been changed or not published, at their request, because of concerns for their safety.

“I get phone calls and text messages saying things like: ‘we’re gonna cut out your tongue and shove it up your ass’ and ‘you are ruining this country,” said Nika. “The new law encouraged everyone to go after us, without fear of being punished.” The police are often accused of being at the forefront, with many LGBTQ individuals detailing instances of officers threatening to expose their sexual identity unless they pay bribes.

Nika showed us into his living room where his other guests are already seated around a coffee table, while others help bring dishes from his kitchen next door. It is a friends’ get-together just like anywhere else—except they say this is now the only safe way they can meet because of the spate of homophobic attacks. “If I could afford it, I would leave tomorrow,” said Slava, one of his guests.

It was never easy being lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender in Kyrgyzstan’s patriarchal, Muslim-majority society. Nonetheless, in a region where the Soviet past hangs heavily and ossified dictatorship is the norm, the smallest of the Central Asian ‘Stans’ was seen as a relative beacon of tolerance and democracy. And while there were occasional attacks in the past, the LGBTQ community was mostly left to itself. Until recently there were even several gay clubs in Bishkek. But over the past few years, internal and external forces have “dragged the LGBT community into a battle for Kyrgyz identity,” said Medet Tiulegenov, chair of international and comparative politics at the American University in Bishkek.

Poor and landlocked, Kyrgyzstan has been a geopolitical and economic supplicant ever since it became independent after the collapse of the Soviet Union, always vulnerable to bigger powers. While the US needed the Manas airbase outside Bishkek after 2001 to ferry troops in and out of Afghanistan, the Kyrgyz government tilted westwards. But the Kremlin proved the greater force, unhappy at an American presence in its backyard, and successfully pressed Bishkek to close the base. And since winning power in 2011, President Almazbek Atambayev has cemented this shift away from the West towards Russia. “We cannot have a separate future,” he declared when President Vladimir Putin visited Kyrgyzstan in 2012.

He has been an assiduous courtier, extending Russia’s lease on its own military base outside Bishkek, before enthusiastically copying anti-Western crowd-pleasers in the Kremlin’s legal arsenal. First came a virtual clone of Moscow’s offensive on NGOs, with legislation demanding all groups receiving external funding declare themselves as ‘foreign agents’, targeted at human rights groups, including those advocating for the LGBTQ community. And then, in March 2014, MPs from the ruling coalition announced the ‘anti-gay propaganda’ measures, with even harsher penalties on paper than the Russian version. They were necessary to “protect the rights of the majority rather than of the minority,” said one of the co-sponsors, Talantbek Uzakbaev, a member of the pro-Russian ‘Dignity’ party. “We cannot tolerate gay propaganda.”

These moves had enthusiastic support from powerful nationalist and religious constituencies at home—both Muslim and Orthodox Christian. Self-styled nationalist groups like Kyrk-Choro (Kyrgyz Knights) have been at the forefront of assaults on both the LGBTQ community and sex workers—with its leader claiming he has official backing. (Raids on brothels and prostitutes quickly subsided though, because unlike the LGBTQ community, analysts say, they have establishment defenders.) In effect, being anti-Western and homophobic have become two ends of the same bone in a Kyrgyz version of dog-whistle politics. “Being anti-LGBT has been very profitable for the nationalists,” said Tiulgenov.

But less so for Kyrgyzstan, as Moscow has given little in return for President Atambayev’s fealty. Hammered by low oil prices and Western sanctions over Ukraine, Russia has instead cancelled several major investments, including plans for a $2.5 billion hydro-power scheme, just as crucial remittance income from Kyrgyz migrants working in Russia has also collapsed. And while it’s been a symbolic boost for President Vladimir Putin to have Kyrgyzstan join the Moscow-led Eurasian Economic Union; for Bishkek it’s been an expensive let-down so far, as new customs fees have hit its lucrative transit trade with China.

In the meantime, homophobic violence has risen. It’s impossible to get definite figures but staff at one Bishkek LGBTQ activist group—who asked me not to publish its name—said they’ve been helping the victims of 5 or 6 attacks a month in the past year, nearly three times the rate of two years ago. But, says Amir, one of the group’s activists, “these are only the ones we know about.”

The television in the corner competed with the dinner chat as Nika’s guests tucked into a delicious selection of meat and vegetarian dishes. There are nine men and women, from a mix of ethnic Kyrgyz, ethnic Russian and other backgrounds. The conversation though is all in Russian, one of Kyrgyzstan’s two official languages—one of many ways Moscow can be sure of maintaining its influence here, even if it is running low on cash.

Stalin has paid the price for his cartographic crimes in Kyrgyzstan, but Bishkek is still dotted with Lenin statues and streets named after other communist celebrities who were removed from other parts of the former Soviet bloc years ago. So the Kyrgyz government’s manifestations of loyalty were almost like a free handout for the Kremlin, observers say—it already has the mainstream of Kyrgyz public opinion in the bag. “If there was a world war tomorrow, I would be with Russia,” was how one Kyrgyz businessman put it, as we talked about relations with Moscow.

For the LGBTQ community, this only serves to amplify their troubles. Russian TV channels, with their explicit anti-Western, homophobic bias, have a solid audience. “It makes me feel guilty about being gay when I hear some Russian programs,” said Nika. Local media outlets tied to the government and nationalist groups take a similar line, helping stoke an atmosphere of permissive victimization. “‘Look there’s the faggot’ another student shouted out when he saw me in my university café,” said Ilya, one of Nika’s dinner guests. There is no point going to the college authorities, he said, “because that will just bring me more trouble.” And Ilya said he was recently ejected from his gym. “The manager said other clients had complained about me being there. He didn’t say it was because I’m gay, but it was clear that’s what he meant.”

And it’s political suicide to come to the LGBTQ community’s defense, say analysts. LGBTQ advocacy groups would also be hit if the parallel ‘foreign agents’ law is passed—as most receive Western funding—but the rest of the NGO community have conspicuously avoided coming to their defense.

Yet more than two years since the Kyrgyz parliament first introduced the ‘anti-gay propaganda’ measures amid a flurry of pro-Russian rhetoric, it has stalled on actually making it law. MPs gave the bill large majorities on its initial two readings, but no date has been set for the necessary third reading, and it would still need the president’s signature afterwards. There’s similar uncertainty over the ‘foreign agents’ bill targeting NGOs, which was first introduced in 2013. And no one knows if or when parliament will debate them again.

Even so, the police have reportedly been using the anti-gay propaganda legislation to justify going after LGBTQ individuals and then extorting bribes. “They say they are enforcing the law,” said Pasha, a gay man who was forced to hand over 4000 Kyrgyz Som (about $60—a large sum in a country with an average wage of less than $300 per month). Some Kyrgyz journalists have reportedly resorted to self-censoring stories on homophobic attacks, or anything to do with the LGBTQ community, in case they are accused of publishing ‘pro-gay’ propaganda. “The liberal sector in society is coming under increasing stress,” said Medet Tiulgenov of the American University.

I made repeated requests to talk to Kyrgyz MPs and other officials about their Russian-inspired legislative plans, and the associated rise in homophobic attacks. All said they were too busy, or never returned my calls. Perhaps that is a sign of what one diplomatic source calls “buyer’s remorse”, particularly over the anti-gay propaganda measures. “The president has said privately he doesn’t think it’s a good law now,” said the source, “but politically it’s hard to roll it back.”

Viktor had been receiving threatening text messages for several months, messages like: “Why are you spoiling our country” and “Leave, you freak, or we’ll cut your head off.” He moved to another part of Bishkek, hoping he would be safe.

But one evening this January, walking home from work, he was ambushed and beaten to the ground. “I didn’t hear anything because I had my headphones on,” he said. “‘Why are you still here’, they were shouting. ‘We warned you we would find you.’” They kicked him unconscious, and when Viktor came round he found he had been driven to a wooded area, and his attackers were tearing off his clothes. Then they took turns to rape him. “One held my head down so I couldn’t see their faces,” he told me, pausing and sobbing several times as he tells the story.

“From the moment the bill was first discussed, Kyrgyz society took it as permission for extermination,” said Viktor. “Some don’t even understand what it says, but they take it as a call to hunt.” Yet after past experiences of harassment, he never even considered going to the police. “They would just say ‘we don’t take cases from gays and faggots.’”

Several sources told me of cases of lesbians being subjected to ‘corrective rape’, after their sexual orientation was uncovered. “Sometimes it’s the brothers who do it,” said one LGBTQ activist. Some lesbians are forced into marriage; many are reported to have fled Kyrgyzstan for good. Through intermediaries, three victims of corrective rape said they were too scared to talk to us, and activists believe many more such attacks are never reported.

But some are trying to take a stand. On May 17, 2015, activists from a Bishkek group called Labrys and several other LGBTQ advocacy organizations were gathering at a Bishkek restaurant for the ‘International Day against Homophobia and Transphobia’ when it was attacked by a nationalist mob. They stormed the restaurant, chanting abuse as they went, and one woman was injured in the ensuing scuffles. Though it was frightening, compared to other recent anti-LGBTQ violence, it was a relatively minor incident. But this time activists called the police.

With so many eyewitnesses, Evgenia Krapivina, their lawyer, believes the police had no choice but to open a case, and two suspected members of Kyrk-Choro have been charged with hooliganism and property damage. To no one’s surprise, there’s been little progress since, and they hold out little hope of winning, but one of the Labrys activist who was there sees it as part of a much bigger battle. “The LGBT community is not the only target,” he says. “Some of the nationalists who attack us say everyone should speak Kyrgyz, and that there’s no place for Russians here. And tomorrow someone else will be the target.”

The post A violent struggle over national identity appeared first on Coda Story.

Six years ago, Karina Krasavina, a DJ originally from Volgograd, founded the L-Word party, a women-only event in central Moscow. She hoped to create a space in which like-minded women could meet, fall in love and feel free. But in the eyes of the Russian law, her job is seen as provocative.

“What I am doing involves certain risks. I can’t agree with recent legislative developments, I think they are wrong” she explained on a break from her DJ set in the club’s dressing room. “But I absolutely support Vladimir Putin when it comes to parades in Moscow. I am personally against gay parades and I don’t want to propagandize.”

A regular L-Word attendee, Yulia Astakhova, complained that she doesn’t feel free in Moscow due to the recent homophobic legislation and society’s enduring prejudice that regards homosexuality as “unnatural.” But when asked about her attitude to Putin and the existing regime, she smiles: “I support Putin. I like my president and I am proud of him. He is strong, he is a leader. He knows what he wants and he takes control.”

Russian politics is never linear. Both Krasavina and Astakhova reflect an identification as LGBTQ and support for Putin’s presidency that is not so unusual, with support for Putin often a proxy for patriotism. This political juxtaposition also reflects the internal divisions within Russia’s LGBT movement as a whole.

At a recent L-Word party, many women were hesitant to talk about politics and activism, nervous about causing more unwanted attention and trouble. Their fear highlights a growing unease with activism in Russia which has deeply affected marginalized and oppositional political groups.

Indeed, some members of Russia’s LGBTQ community view Pride events, parades and gay activism as a potential trigger which could ultimately bring about a dangerous backlash. Often, those that organize marches and parades are viewed with suspicion, seen as naive, reckless and seeking to self-promote while endangering others.

The movement has been hurt by the increasing number of LGBTQ activists fleeing the country. According to statistics from 2015, by the end of the fiscal year, 1,454 Russian nationals filed new asylum applications, up 50 percent from the previous year and more than double that filed in 2012. Immigration Equality reports that their caseloads have jumped from 50 to 60 requests for assistance from Russian LGBTQ people in 2012 to 180 requests in 2014, according to Al Jazeera. Not only has this drained the Russian LGBT community of resources and leadership, state-media reports of fake asylum cases have cast a shadow over activists’ credibility. “I support Putin,” said a frequent L-Word attendee. “I like my president and I am proud of him. He is strong, he is a leader. He knows what he wants and he takes control.”

In Russia, there is also a lack of cohesion between gay rights and the mainstay liberal, opposition movement. Either such figures—politicians, activists and journalists alike—are prone to homophobic prejudice themselves, or avoid touching LGBTQ issues for fear of being prosecuted under the propaganda law.

Fear and lack of a united front have considerably weakened and divided the LGBTQ movement in Russia, limiting its development and opportunities for open discussion.

Such divisions are not unique to Russia. The American gay rights movement also experienced self-criticism and internal divisions over the tactics and goals of the campaign to legalize same-sex marriage. Some LGBTQ activists argued that the campaign diverted attention away from more pressing issues—such as combatting AIDS and transgender rights—and some factions questioned the cultural value of marriage within the LGBTQ community.

So too, civil rights campaigns on behalf of different marginalized groups have a history of cooperation as well as friction. In the US, gay rights organizations have sometimes sparked pushback from some African-American civil rights leaders who argued a gay rights political agenda had unfairly coopted the national conversation on equal rights. And the American suffrage movement bitterly split after the Civil War over passage of the 15th Amendment to the US Constitution, which granted voting rights to all men, including black men, but not women of any race.

The post Young, Russian, Gay, and Pro-Putin appeared first on Coda Story.

We approach the solid metal door of what looks like an office building, and Andrei rings the buzzer as a security camera eyes us from above. The metal panel swings open and a wave of thumping music gushes out into the night as if trying desperately to escape. We slip inside, restoring silence to the unsuspecting street.

In recent years, Samara has been dubbed Russia’s most homophobic city. In 2012, there were seven gay clubs here. Today, the discreet venue Andrei has led me to is all that is left.

Security is tight —our bags are meticulously searched and I am asked to leave my camera at the door. Thugs and vigilante groups have attacked gay clubs even in more cosmopolitan cities like Moscow and St Petersburg. In Samara, they’re not taking any chances.

Despite his ardent love of clubbing, Andrei doesn’t come here often. It’s not hard to see why: compared to the vibrant gay nightlife of Moscow, it is a wholly forgettable experience.

The club itself is well-kept and clean, but there is an inescapable air of decline. Despite it being the last gay club in a city of over 1 million people, it is half-empty on a Saturday night. A saccharine mix of Russian and Western pop music echoes around the cavernous room while couples sit in the shadows of the faux leather booths which line the dancefloor.

“It’s just the same people every time,” Andrei later laments. “No one new.” Sure enough, he knows half the people in the club. He introduces me to Obra Delis, a stocky but muscular guy, clad head-to-toe in black: black jeans paired with a black v-neck t-shirt. The tufts of ginger hair which sprout out from underneath his black beanie cap are the only flashes of color. You’d never guess that he was a transvestite.

“Just sometimes, I’d like to go out dressed-up here, but there’s no way I could do that”, he tells me as we stand under the red strip lighting of the nightclub cloakroom. From the next door room, an apt anthem pulses - Gloria Gaynor’s ‘I Will Survive’.

Situated on the banks of the river Volga, around six hundred miles to the southeast of Moscow, Samara was famed for its intolerance even before the Kremlin adopted its current socially conservative stance. Sexual minorities have been attacked here for years, prompting many to flee to Moscow and St. Petersburg.

When a 22-year-old gay man was brutally beaten to death here in 2009, his attacker was sentenced to just five-and-a-half years imprisonment, the most lenient possible under Russian law. Two years later an assembly of local Cossacks – with the blessing of the Russian Orthodox Church – called for gay people to be banned from working in education or state-owned media.

The introduction of a national law banning ‘gay propaganda’ in 2013 has made things even worse. The law itself is limited in scope, and to date only four people have so far been prosecuted under it across all of Russia. But the crescendo in homophobic rhetoric as it passed through parliament was accompanied by an increase in violence against LGBT people, according to Human Rights Watch. A small but toxic segment of Russian society began to feel that the law was on their side and a culture of vigilantism flourished. Oksana doesn’t blame people who have decided to leave Samara. “Everyone has to save themselves in whatever way they can. But if we leave, who would people call?”

It is in conservative heartlands like Samara that the LGBT community is most at risk from this kind of atmosphere. The activists standing up for them here are overworked, and dangerously exposed.

Oksana Berezovskaya is the first person to call if you’re gay and find yourself at the police station in the middle of the night in Samara. Utilitarian in both her speech and her appearance, Oskana wears a neatly pressed button-down shirt, a mobile phone in one breast pocket, an e-cigarette in the other. As the legal services coordinator of Avers, Samara’s LGBT rights organization, her phone almost never stops ringing.

Born and raised in Samara, Oksana has long been open about her sexuality with her friends and family, but she didn’t become an LGBT activist until the ‘gay propaganda’ law was passed in 2013. “That law set us back, now we are like the slaves in Ancient Rome” she says, taking a heavy draw from her e-cigarette. “Second-class citizens.”

Oksana doesn’t blame the gay and lesbian people who have decided to leave Samara. “Everyone has to save themselves in whatever way they can” she says, without bitterness. “But if we leave, who would people call?”

I meet her at a Volga center, a community hub recently opened by Avers, the LGBT rights group. Located in a deliberately non-descript building in a residential part of the city, the center doesn’t look like much, but it is one of a dwindling number of safe spaces left for Samara’s LGBT community.

Avers have been forced to carry out most of their work in discreet, indoor settings such as this since 2014.

In April of that year the group held a small picket in the city center to mark an international day of solidarity with LGBT youth. Despite the fact that the demonstration was legal, the police arrived. They sent the participants home – but not before noting down their passport details.

“A month later, they began to hunt us” says Oksana, gravely. “From the beginning we didn’t break any rules so they couldn’t just take us in for questioning. But the authorities still wanted to punish us.”

Over the following month one by one those who had been present at the protest had some kind of unexpected run-in with the local authorities. The police summoned the co-founder of Avers, Sasha Kornieva to account for a supposed irregularity with her car. According to the protestors, the police showed up for no reason at the house of another activist’s mother. One young man present at the rally was called up for military service shortly after.

“The conscription office, who sent him that summons, broke the law. Because they knew full well that he has an exemption on health grounds,” said Oksana. “It was an agreement between the police and the conscription office to frighten the guy.”

As well as being a safe venue for activism, the Volga center provides a much needed social space. On Saturday nights, they show films. A white bedsheet taped to the wall serves as a projector, and a table in the middle of the room overflows with bowls of sweets and popcorn. Young visitors curl up and chat throughout the screening.

The center also runs counseling sessions, support groups for LGBT families as well as legal workshops. One Sunday afternoon I sit in one of these, watching as respected criminal lawyer Tamara Sarkisiyan leads a seminar on legal rights.

She begins by talking about what people should do if they become victims of a violent assault.

Sitting next to me is a transgender woman who is listening attentively. I see her flinch from the corner of my eye every time Tamara describes some of the attacks her gay clients have faced.

About forty-five minutes into the session, there comes a poignant reminder of its importance. There’s a loud bang on the door of the centre and the noise of someone fumbling with the locked door. Everybody jumps anxiously as Sasha, the co-founder of Avers, goes to investigate. She opens the door to a woman who she quickly spirits away into the next room.

This is Alexia, a transgender woman who was violently attacked by an armed gang just one week earlier.

Alexia and some transgender friends had built a summer house on an island in the Volga river only accessible by boat. It was a rare refuge where they could be themselves, but then suddenly a group of five men wielding guns descended on it.

One of the women was beaten so violently that she was placed in an intensive care unit with severe head injuries. Alexia has a fresh scar across the bridge of her nose from where it was broken, and jaundiced bruises have pooled beneath her eyes.

The workshop pauses for a break and Sasha brings me next door to talk to Alexia, who is standing with her arm wrapped across her chest. Her eyes dart around the room anxiously in response to even the slightest sound. She rarely makes eye contact. Sasha comforts and coaxes her like a concerned parent.

Alexia explains that she went straight to the police station to report the attack, only to find herself detained for 9 hours before she was allowed to go to the hospital.

“The police don’t believe we are normal people”, she says, swaying from one foot to the other, nervously. I notice that her shoulder-length blonde hair is held back by a rainbow bandana. She seems to be more defiant than her fearful body language suggests. Before we part she quotes me a lyric describing how she feels. I’m not sure where it comes from, but it echoes the spirit of Gloria Gaynor in the nightclub. “It’s like that song,” says the bruised woman. “The more they beat us down, the higher we will soar.”

The post Clubbing and surviving in Samara appeared first on Coda Story.

The public display of public affection by Zoryan and his boyfriend Timur was not entirely spontaneous. In Russia, two male actors had decided to see what would happen if they walked around Moscow holding hands, documenting the abuse they received and uploading it to YouTube. Zoryan decided to do the same thing in Kiev — he wanted to see how much Ukraine had changed since the Maidan revolution and how different it was from Russia. The experiment had gone well until the very end.

Zoryan was not the only person asking how much has actually changed for the LGBT community since Ukraine officially embraced Western values following the ouster of President Viktor Yanukovych in 2014. Gone are the days when Kiev tried to court Putin’s favor and cash by copying Russia’s anti-gay laws, but the freedoms of speech and assembly called for by the Maidan protests are still unevenly applied in post-revolutionary Ukraine when it comes to the LGBT community.

Even in the Maidan itself the role of the LGBT community was difficult. The protests brought together people from different economic, regional, ethnic and religious groups. At any given time you could see flags belonging to the EU, Ukraine, the Crimean Tatars and even Israel. But the one banner you would not find was a rainbow flag.

The Maidan protests could have been an opportunity for Ukraine’s LGBT community to gain mainstream acceptance, as they proved to be for other groups. But because pro-Kremlin media were attempting to portray the pro-EU protests as a tantrum by LGBT people yearning to join ‘Gayropa’, activists like Zoryan decided not give them further ammunition by flying rainbow flags.

Today, he is still not sure if that was the right call. The Maidan protests have become a founding narrative for the new Ukrainian state. Images of the protestors killed, known as the “heavenly hundred,” are displayed in squares and schools across the country. The LGBT community are completely left out of the narrative.

“What we hear from our opponents is ‘you were not there at the Maidan first”,” says Zoryan. The LGBT community is also criticized for not doing more to mobilize support for the new government in rebel eastern Ukraine, in spite of the fact that being out and LGBT in Ukraine is dangerous at the best of times. Underlying these accusations is an implicit question about whether the LGBT community is really Ukrainian.

“We were on Maidan and we are in the ATO (Eastern Ukraine)” says 27-year old Maria. “But you don’t exactly go around asking people if they are LGBT in those places.” Maria is gay, though not an LGBT activist. She participated in every Maidan protest from the first to the very last. She brought petrol for Molotov cocktails and threw them at riot police during the iconic clashes on Kiev’s Hrushevsky Street. Her girlfriend was also there, working as a frontline medic. After the protests ended, Maria went to fight in the east, and says she was not the only person from the LGBT community who did.

The Maidan protests started when Yanukovych sought to cancel an Association Agreement with the EU. Maria and Zoryan were in the square for the same reasons as other Ukrainians — because they wanted the improvements in democracy and human rights that association with Europe would bring. But the agreement had particular importance for the LGBT community. “For me Ukraine not signing the Association Agreement also meant that it would become part of the so-called Russian world. One of the values of the so-called Russian world is state sponsored homophobia,” says Zoryan. Pro-Kremlin media were attempting to portray the pro-EU protests as a tantrum by LGBT people yearning to join ‘Gayropa.’

The new government went on to sign the agreement, and there has since been some progress in LGBT rights. Ukraine passed an amendment to the labor code making it illegal to fire someone based on their sexuality. Ukraine hosted its second ever LGBT march after the revolution, which was attacked by far right activists but successfully protected by the police.

But these decisions were driven by the EU and other Western countries. Western support has been essential for most reforms in post-revolutionary Ukraine, but the difference between anti-corruption measures and improvements in LGBT rights is that the former have strong local support. The labor code amendment was a prerequisite for visa free travel in the EU, and last summer’s march might not have taken taken place if the West had not put pressure on reluctant police forces to protect it.

Last week in the western city of Lviv the same excuses were used again. Local authorities said they could not protect an equality festival organized by the LGBT organisation Insight. The hotel where the event was to take place was surrounded by far-right activists in masks shouting “kill, kill, kill.” The organizers had to call off the event and leave the city.

“The situation can lean either way,” says Zoryan. When he asked the police to investigate the people who attacked him and his boyfriend in July, offering them a video recording of the incident, the complaint was dismissed for lack of evidence. It was only after going to court seven months later that he finally succeeded in having an investigation opened.

Zoryan is good at getting the authorities to take action. When they were reluctant to give protection to an LGBT march he was trying to organize last June he started bringing Western diplomats to liaison meetings with the police. Suddenly, they became much more helpful, but it isn’t a solution that always works - as events in Lviv have shown.

In spite of the disappointments of the past two years, Zoryan still has hope in Ukrainian society’s capacity for change. He cites one memory from the Maidan that fuels this hope.

At one point in the protests, after LGBT activists had decided not to demonstrate under their own banners, fake LGBT protestors infiltrated the square waving rainbow flags. Zoryan was in the Maidan watching as they approached.

A member of the Maidan self-defence forces yelled as the group came closer: “Everyone keep calm! I know the Ukrainian gays are not part of the protest and this is pro-Russian bullshit.”

“I think it was the first time he put “Ukrainian” and “gay” in one sentence,” Zoryan says. “It was a sign to me that Ukrainian identity can embrace also gay Ukrainians,” he says.

The post Forgotten revolutionaries appeared first on Coda Story.

Soon Benioff joined together with 70 other top executives of technology companies—including Airbnb’s Brian Chesky, Netflix’s Reed Hastings, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, and Cisco’s Gary Moore—to sign a statement opposing the legalization of LGBT discrimination. And Apple’s openly-gay CEO, Tim Cook, published an opinion column in the Washington Post to let people know “around the world” that “regardless of what the law might allow in Indiana…we will never tolerate discrimination.” Cook concluded: “Opposing discrimination takes courage. With the lives and dignity of so many people at stake, its time for all of us to be courageous.” Days later, Salesforce.com’s top executive in Indiana stood by the side of the legislature’s recalcitrant Republican leaders as they announced a new law clarifying that the state’s “religious freedom” act didn’t condone discrimination based on gender.

The quick, decisive victory in Indiana resonated worldwide, and the news inspired the hopes of Russian activists that America’s progressive techno-moguls would finally speak up against Vladimir Putin’s anti-gay laws. But the Silicon Valley leaders still haven’t summoned nearly enough courage for that much tougher fight.

An American sales executive traveling today to Moscow—where the state sanctions persecution and condones violence against LGBTQ people—could nonetheless patronize many of the same brands that serve him in San Francisco or Seattle or New York City, including the companies that forcefully opposed the Indiana law: He could stay at an Airbnb apartment rental in Moscow, which has emerged as one of the service’s top markets worldwide. (Airbnb has a Moscow office with several employees and owns a small Russian design firm.) The traveler could get chauffeured around town by Uber drivers, drink lattes from Starbucks, stream video on Netflix, and buy an iPhone or iPad or MacBook at a retail shop or order one directly from Apple’s Russian-language online store. (Apple has sold more than 1 million iPhones a year in Russia). He could search for sales leads and contacts and gauge customers’ attitudes in Russia using Salesforce.com’s ”social listening software.” If he was conducting business with the Russian government, he would surely encounter bureaucrats using PCs that ran on Microsoft Windows operating system and were networked by routers made by Cisco, which is under investigation by the U.S. Justice Department and Securities and Exchange Commission for allegedly masterminding a massive scheme of kickbacks and bribes to secure contracts with Russia’s government, military, and intelligence operations.

America’s progressive companies have remained conspicuously silent about Putin’s anti-gay laws while they’ve continued to pursue Russia’s marketplace. As influential as the Silicon Valley titans might seem in their home country, where local officials crave the investment and employment opportunities they can bring, they’re facing a precarious situation in Russia, where Putin has become increasingly antagonistic towards them over the past several years. His regime has cracked down on Internet companies in its efforts to suppress free speech and political opposition. Last year it began requiring that foreign companies operating in Russia keep their data on servers on Russia soil, where the government can access it. In response Google shuttered its research and development operation in Moscow, moving an estimated 50 to 100 engineers overseas. Microsoft relocated its Skype development team from Moscow to Prague, and Adobe pulled all its employees.

Google, which rivals Russia’s homegrown Yandex in the Internet search business there, appears to have flaunted Russia’s data server law or at least delayed taking action so far. (Google, as well as Facebook and Twitter, were granted vague extensions). But Uber and EBay are reportedly following the new regulations, and the Russian business daily Kommersant has reported that even Apple is complying, too. If this is true —Apple hasn’t commented publicly on the matter— then Putin’s regime could gain access to Russians’ personal troves of photographs and videos and text messages and find what they’ve been reading and listening to and watching. Such a capitulation would represent a perilous strike against the privacy of all of Apple’s Russian customers, and it would be especially dangerous for LGBTQ people there.

Only a few years ago Russia was courting America’s top technology companies rather than fighting them. In 2010 President Dmitry Medvedev visited the corporate headquarters of Apple and Google in Northern California. On his mission he talked up his plans for Russia’s ambitious effort to create its own version of Silicon Valley: the Skolkovo technology park development on the outskirts of Moscow. Medvedev succeeded in enticing leading American venture capital firms to commit to invest in this nascent technology “hub,” which was planned for 100,000 workers.

But the Silicon Valley-Moscow alliance began splintering in early 2014, when the Human Rights Campaign, a prominent American gay-rights advocacy organization, called on the official sponsors of the Winter Olympics in Sochi to protest Putin’s anti-gay laws. Sponsors such as McDonald’s and Coca-Cola refrained from explicitly addressing the issue, but the activists’ agitation helped to elicit gestures of support from a couple of major technology companies: AT&T, a longtime sponsor of the U.S. Olympic Committee (though not of the Sochi winter games), issued a statement on its blog, and Google recast its homepage logo with illustrations of Olympic athletes superimposed on the colors of the rainbow flag.

But the real fissure came soon after the Olympics, when Russian forces annexed Crimea—and America’s technology companies complied with the U.S. government’s sanctions against the invader. Russia’s current “Internet czar,” German Klimenko, who is pushing for a steep hike in taxes on American technology companies, recently told Bloomberg BusinessWeek that this compliance marked a “point of no return” for Russia’s relationship with Silicon Valley firms. Putin’s antagonism to Silicon Valley has been costly to Russia’s economic aspirations. American venture capital investors have been pulling their funding, and tech startups have been fleeing the country.

In April 2014, Putin appeared on Russian television and claimed that the Internet had begun as a “CIA project” and remained a tool for the American intelligence agency. Months later, in October, when Apple’s Tim Cook came out as the first openly-gay chief executive officer of a Fortune 500 company, the news provoked a backlash from the Russian establishment. Vitaly Milonov, a member of parliament who helped instigate the nation’s anti-gay laws, called on Russia to bar Tim Cook from ever entering the country: “What could he bring us? The Ebola virus, AIDS, gonorrhea? They all have unseemly ties over there. Ban him for life.” And a monument to the late Steve Jobs, which enshrined the entrepreneur’s image on 6-foot-high replica of an iPhone, was dismantled and removed from a college in St. Petersburg, where it had been erected by a consortium of Russian companies.

Apple and Cook himself never commented publicly about this harassment, and soon after the company pushed ahead and aired its first-ever commercials on Russian television. Since then Apple hasn’t responded to any of the ongoing Russian attacks against its gay-friendliness. The company ignored Russian government member Alexander Staravoitov’s accusation that it was spreading “gay propaganda” by offering U2’s album “Songs of Innocence” as a free download for customers who upgraded their operating systems. And Apple remained silent when the Russian media reported last September that the Russian police were investigating it for promulgating “gay” emoji depicting same-sex people holding hands and kissing.

Putin’s antagonism to Silicon Valley has been costly to Russia’s economic aspirations. American venture capital investors have been pulling their funding, and tech startups have been fleeing the country. And the Skolkovo tech hub outside Moscow has peaked at only around 25,000 workers, a fraction of Medvedev’s grand aspirations.

Because of Putin’s hostility to foreign technology companies, he may be losing one of the most promising opportunities to diversify Russian industry beyond its heavy reliance on natural resources. The economy has suffered greatly from the sharp declines in oil prices, but Putin’s regime hasn’t relented.

Silicon Valley companies are less likely to take the risk of agitating for gay rights in Russia when they no longer have employees on the ground there. Salesforce.com provided a statement to Coda Story that partially explains the seeming inconsistency between its activism at home and its absence on LGBT rights in Russia. “Last year we took a public stance in Indiana because our employees there brought the issue to our leadership,” said the statement. But while the company sells software for tapping the Russian market, it doesn’t actually maintain an office with employees in Russia who could demand action from headquarters in San Francisco. (Apple, Airbnb, and Starbucks, which do have employees in Russia, didn’t respond to requests for interviews).

Even though the Silicon Valley companies have been closing local offices and bringing home their engineers from Russia, they’re still competing relentlessly for market share in an emerging economy that already has 84 million Internet users. Unless they’re willing to risk losing access to Russia’s large and promising marketplace, the Silicon Valley moguls will ultimately have to play by Putin’s rules. And that means it’s unlikely that their crusade for gay rights will extend to Moscow or St. Petersburg. If anything, their acquiescence to Russia’s insistence on storing all data within Russia will do even more to imperil the persecuted LBGTQ population.

The post The absent activists appeared first on Coda Story.

The 48 year-old was one of Russia’s best-known TV interviewers. He was a star anchor at the most-viewed channel, NTV, for almost two decades. In 2012 he joined Dozhd (Rain) TV, one of Russia’s few remaining independent news outlets.

Last November, Lobkov was having a drink with a friend, when a producer from one of the channel’s programs called, asking him to participate in the evening talk show Hard Day’s Night.

The show was exploring how doctors should break the news about a positive HIV status to their patients, the producer said. The on-air discussion would close off an entire day of broadcast devoted to HIV in honor of World AIDS Day.

The unprecedented coverage reflected a dawning awareness that Russia was in the throes of an HIV crisis. In October, Prime Minister Medvedev acknowledged for the first time Russia is facing an HIV epidemic. The number of people infected with HIV in Russia was predicted to reach one million by the end of the year.

The producer told Lobkov that Vadim Pokrovsky, the head of the Federal Aids Center, would be appearing on the show. Lobkov agreed to participate, but for the first time in his career, he had no idea how he would handle the appearance. Unknown to the producer and to most people in Lobkov’s life, the topic was an intensely personal one for him. 12 years ago he had been diagnosed with HIV, and Pokrovsky had been the first doctor to treat him.

Lobkov had never wanted to take a public position on his personal life. “A public coming out for a gay makes sense if there is a concrete personal, legal issue, concerning family or property,” he explained to me when we met for coffee a few weeks after the show was broadcast. A surprisingly low-key personality, he seemed uncomfortable talking about the topic even in a Moscow cafe.

On that November night, Lobkov and his friend got through half a liter of vodka as he wrestled with what he described as “a hardcore choice.”

In the end, a sense of responsibility to other HIV positive people prevailed, as well as a reluctance to be dishonest. “I realized I could not just sit on the show and pretend I did not have any personal experience, did not know my doctor,” he said.

The next day, Lobkov came to Dozhd prepared to carry out his decision. He avoided any discussion about the broadcast before filming started so that “nobody would talk me out of it”.

Coming out as HIV positive in Russia today is comparable to what it was like in the U.S. in the late 1990s. It is widely perceived as a self-inflicted death sentence for drug addicts and prostitutes. Lobkov’s mother, a retired pensioner in St. Petersburg, feared that red crosses or the slogan “AIDS lives here” would appear on her door if her son’s status was made public.

The prejudice is largely fed by ignorance, a consequence of inadequate funding for public awareness campaigns and a lack of compulsory school sex education programs that discuss the disease.

In the absence of widely understood facts, conspiracy theories have shaped the discourse on AIDS. As recently as 2010 primetime Channel One TV anchor Alexander Gordon claimed that the disease was invented by Western doctors to extract money from patients. Groups denying the existence of the disease, sometimes calling themselves “HIV dissidents,” have a strong presence in online chat rooms and parent forums. A government-funded research institute published a paper in late 2015 arguing that Western organizations bent on weakening Russia from the inside posed as HIV programs.

This was environment Lobkov faced when he walked into the studio on December 1, prepared to become the first public figure to ever admit to having the disease on Russian television.

The discussion began, and cameras zoomed in on Lobkov when he talked. Without changing his professional tone, Lobkov turned to Pokrovsky. “Vadim Valentinovich is not just a guest at our program, but my first doctor,” he said. “You were the one who I came to with my trouble in 2003.”

His voice became increasingly emotional as he told the story of his diagnosis. The doctor that broke the news to him, before he came to Pokrovsky for treatment, had not been tactful. In that first consultation, he noticed that the cover page of his medical record was struck through with a red marker. There were three red letters in the corner of the page: “HIV.” All the doctor would say was that he would no longer be admitted at the clinic, and would have to use a specialized facility for HIV positive patients. “‘All the best. Goodbye’. That’s what I was told at the clinic,” Lobkov recalled angrily.

The clinic that treated him like this, he said, was run by the president’s office. Lobkov forcefully stressed the connection with Vladimir Putin’s administration each time he referenced the poor care or discrimination he faced.

Disclosing a patient’s HIV positive status, Pokrovsky jumped in, is an art form; a key moment. If mishandled, the appointment may be the last time a HIV positive person even sees their doctor. Less than a quarter of registered HIV positive people are on medication. There are many reasons for this, but reluctance to seek treatment because of the stigma attached to the disease undoubtedly plays a role.

Even those who do return to the clinic may not find the right drugs available. While medication is paid for by the Russian government, people in smaller towns face unexpected drug shortages because of the sprawling bureaucracy of the ordering system.

After the cameras stopped rolling, colleagues came forward to hug Lobkov. None of the attacks feared by Lobkov’s mother materialized. Support poured in, sometimes from unexpected quarters. “I think that Lobkov, a famous public person, committed a heroic social act,” pro-Putin political analyst Sergei Markov told me.

Lobkov is clearly uncomfortable with the overwhelming response to his disclosure. “More popularity, public attention was the last thing I was seeking,” he said.

His decision to speak out represents a small but significant blow against the forces of prejudice and ignorance. Anton Krasovsky, a journalist and campaigner trying to get Russian authorities to increase the budget for federal AIDS centers said that Lobkov’s brave TV performance “touched” many state officials, making a legislative breakthrough in 2016 more likely. “Pavel’s coming out helps tens of thousands of people living with HIV overcome their own fear”, he said.

Dozhd draws a small, dedicated liberal audience, however. On December 1, 2015, most Russians were watching state TV programs which presented the disease to a soundtrack of frightening music. Infection rates continue to climb. According to Vadim Pokrovsky, they are set to double in the next two to four years. Two million Russians will be HIV positive.

The post The primetime bombshell appeared first on Coda Story.

“Which law are you using to arrest me?” Davydov asked two policemen reaching to take him by his arms. “It’s a children establishment here,” grunted the one on the left. Davydov was ushered into a police van.

In Russia’s Administrative Code, a law known as Article 6.21 had been recently passed that banned the “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations among minors.” Davydov became the first person to be charged with breaking the new law, which was his plan —to be detained and to use the incident to challenge the law.

But the 36-year-old Davydov died of kidney failure two months later, before his case was heard by a court. The law was consequently upheld when three other activists, Nikolai Alekseev, Dmitry Isakov and Yaroslav Evtushenko appealed its legality to the Constitutional Court of Russia. Since it ruled that banning “gay propaganda to minors” was a lawful move, it has had “a huge cooling effect” on activists, according to Dmitry Bartenev, a St. Petersburg lawyer who has defended many LGBTQ activists.

This is the story of what happened after Davydov, in four prominent cases.

Children’s deadly sins

On March 4, 2013, Lena Klimova published an article titled “Children-404” in the Rosbalt news service seeking to show the absence of evidence-based policies concerning at-risk LGBTQ adolescents in Russia. The article morphed into a cause, and soon a massive online community across social networks emerged, where teenagers could share their stories and connect with other people who could offer support and understanding. “Children-404” became Klimova’s long-term project, more activist than journalistic.

“Children 404” made Lena Klimova one of the chief targets of Roskomnadzor, a government oversight agency that regulates the Russian Internet. According to Meduza, an independent online publication, the agency blocks an average of 60 pages a day.

Paid experts, such as academics and defense lawyers, testified against Klimova in court. The opinions included the views of Lidia Matveeva, a psychologist teaching at Moscow State University who cited sources including the Big Soviet Encyclopedia published between 1969-1978, passages from the New Testament, and an essay by a right-wing, American theorist named Joe Carter, co-author of the book “How to Argue like Jesus.”

Alexander Ermoshkin, 41, a gay activist and former school teacher, university professor and researcher from Khabarovsk and currently an asylum seeker in the US, was attacked on the street, forced to abandon his job, and portrayed as a US intelligence asset on Russian TV. “Finally, the sensation of constant persecution forced me to leave,” he said.

Ermoshkin was never actually targeted for direct prosecution. Rather, the state set its sights on Alexander Suturin, the editor-in-chief of a local newspaper called Molodoy Dalnevostochnik that had published stories on Ermoshkin. A 2013 article titled “History with Geyography” described how Ermoshkin was ousted from teaching for having developed “fame from being an LGBT organizer.”

On January 31, 2014, Suturin was found guilty of spreading gay propaganda and ordered to pay a 50,000 rubles fine. His lawyer appealed, but a higher court confirmed the verdict.

Suturin decided not to appeal for a second time. Ermoshkin, the subject of the article, was assaulted before fleeing Russia. According to Ermoshkin, other activists received a warning from the FSB, the KGB successor organization: “We have let Ermoshkin leave, but we will make sure to round you all up.”

For internal use

On February 24, 2014, Vitaly Milonov, a Saint Petersburg MP notorious for his deep hostility to gays, held a public hearing to debate the merits of the city’s proposed anti-gay propaganda law. It was a one-sided conversation.

Dmitry Isaev, sexologist, psychiatrist and psychotherapist who was at the time heading the Department of Clinical Psychology at Saint Petersburg State Pediatric Medical Academy, was invited to speak. Invoking his research, he argued that propaganda can be ideological or social in purpose but it has nothing to do with the nature of homosexuality or with medicine in general. “Of course, the discussion was heated enough”, said Isaev. “The problem is that the supporters of the law did not provide any arguments. And when experts’ opinions were quoted, the other side just shouted back.” St. Petersburg passed an anti-gay propaganda law five days later.

On August 9, 2012, Madonna performed in St. Petersburg. She said from the stage: “Now I’m here to say that the gay community and gay people, here and all around the world, have the same rights. The same rights to be treated with dignity, with respect, with tolerance, with love. Are you with me? If you’re with me, I want to see your pink wristbands! Are you with me? Are you motherfuckin’ with me?” Afterwards she asked people wearing pink wristbands, distributed at the entrance, to raise their hands in solidarity.

Leaders of an obscure organization called the Union of Russian Citizens demanded 333 million rubles from Madonna for publicly defending LGBTQ people and mocking Christian symbols. “Boys and girls will practice debauchery more, and it will lead to the loss of the country’s defense capacity, among other things”, one of the plaintiffs was quoted by RAPSI, Russia’s legal news service.

The judge, however, treated the plaintiffs’ arguments with a great deal of skepticism. According to a Rossiyskaya Gazeta reporter, when a woman stood up to complain that her underage brother saw Madonna’s show on social media, he replied that it should had been his parents’ responsibility to stop him from watching it. The judge advised anti-gay activists to fight liquor companies instead.

Milonov later tried to have Madonna fined for breaching her Russian visa conditions, but Madonna announced she is not planning to return. “I won’t appear in Moscow or Saint Petersburg anymore, because I don’t want to perform in places where being homosexual is tantamount to a crime,” she said in 2015.

The failure to turn Madonna into a convicted criminal in Russia might have been considered a random encounter with an open-minded judge, but there is another indication that the anti-gay propaganda law was intended only for “internal use” in Russia. Two lawyers in separate cases in 2015 unsuccessfully attempted to sue Apple for making emoji depicting same-sex families available in the iPhone 6.

Legal palate of the rainbow flag

The persecution of LGBT activists in Russia did not start the day the first regional anti-gay propaganda law was passed. The state has been effectively using a number of other measures: laws on the protection of children from harmful information, meetings, rallies and demonstrations; and most recently, with a foreign agents law. Activists are often charged with civil disobedience or hooliganism. Sergey Alexeenko, a Murmansk activist and a former director of Maximum, the LGBT rights group that ceased to exist in 2015, had been targeted for prosecution under many of these laws.

On July 21, 2013, four Dutch citizens were arrested at the site of the Youth Human Rights Camp held by Maximum outside of Murmansk. Police had tried to use the anti-gay propaganda law against the group, but since there were no minors present they fined the Dutch nationals for filming in Russia while on tourist visas.

In 2015 Maximum was fined 300,000 rubles for not declaring themselves foreign agents. Then the organization’s director Sergei Alexeenko was personally fined 25,000 for “an unsanctioned protest” as he released balloons into the sky on May 17, the annual Rainbow Flashmob day.

Maximum founders decided that it was time to close the organization down. “Why we did not contest the court decision?” Alexeenko reflects. “Now people are starting to get prison terms for protests. With my sexual orientation, I don’t want to end up a Russian prison. We decided to concentrate on advocacy for now, because in the totalitarian state activism is dangerous and in a brainwashed society it’s counterproductive.” On January 21, 2016, Alexeenko was further fined 100,000 rubles for subsequently breaking the gay propaganda law yet again.

The post Legal circuses appeared first on Coda Story.

That, at least, was how the scriptwriters of Netflix’s “House of Cards” portrayed the impact of anti-gay legislation in Russia.

The 2012 law, which is ostensibly aimed at protecting children from “gay propaganda”, became a cause célèbre in the US and Europe. Coupled with the jailing of members of the punk band Pussy Riot, it left little space for anything else in the Western media’s coverage of Russia.

Russian President Vladimir Putin meanwhile initiated a crackdown on organized political dissent, quietly but effectively suppressing the protest movement that had flared up in December 2011.

The Union of Solidarity with Political Prisoners lists 59 people currently in prison or under house arrest, and 297 who have been subject to politically motivated prosecution under criminal law since 2008. The list of prisoners includes nationalists, left-wingers, liberals, Islamists, pro-Ukrainian activists, environmentalists, bloggers and many others, but no one has yet been prosecuted specifically for LGBT activism.

Russia’s LGBT activists have undoubtedly suffered under Putin. But rather than helping them, media hype in the West might have helped the Kremlin to obscure the broader picture of political repression.

Nikolay Kavkazsky is that rare breed — an LGBT activist who has seen the inside of a Russian prison. He spent 12 months in a remand cell with three other inmates in 2012, and was declared by Amnesty International to be a prisoner of conscience. Yet there have been no profiles of him in the Western media, because it was not Kavkazsky’s sexuality that incurred the wrath of the state.

Kavkazsky took part in the Bolotnaya movement — a series of massive protests in Moscow that began in December 2011, prompted by Putin’s decision to run for president for the third time. The demonstrations came to a head on May 6, 2012, the day before Putin was due to be inaugurated.

The May 6 march was heading for Bolotnaya Square, which sits on a river island opposite the Kremlin. Reflecting the fact the anti-Putin opposition encompassed a broad spectrum of forces, the protesters divided themselves into columns, each representing a specific political flank. There were left-wingers waving red flags, nationalists clad in black uniforms, anarchists wearing balaclavas and the considerably more numerous liberals, sporting white ribbons, which became synonymous with the protest.

Kavkazsky joined a small column that went under rainbow flags at the rearguard of the march. It was comprised of LGBT activists, feminists and supporters of Pussy Riot, who had been arrested two months earlier. Russia’s small LGBT movement was divided at the time. Its most prominent leader, Nikolay Alekseyev, chose not to participate in Bolotnaya movement. But other, mostly left-wing LGBT activists, such as Kavkazsky, were enthusiastic.

Shortly before they started moving, the march abruptly stopped. They were stuck for a good hour. Kavkazsky eventually went to investigate. When he made it to Bolotnaya Square, he saw riot police brutally dispersing the crowd and detaining people in the dozens. “They started beating people up,” he recalls. “I could not watch it idly, so I approached the police and asked them to stop their illegal actions.” A riot policeman responded by hitting him with a baton. Kavkazsky claims that at this point he raised his leg to protect himself, an episode that was captured on police camera and later used to charge him with attacking the police.

The suppression of the May 6 demonstration was extensively reported on by the Western media, but they were less good at covering what happened next. For Kavkazky, life continued as normal until July 25, when he went shopping and got arrested by agents from the Interior Ministry’s Centre E Directorate (the E stands for “extremism”).

According to Kavkazsky, the man who arrested him was agent Aleksey Okopny, a legendary personality known to virtually every full-time opposition activist in Moscow for his thuggish, heavy-handed style. “He didn’t threaten me directly, but he told me how he had beaten up and tortured people,” Kavkazsky says. “Guess he hinted that I was facing the same if I didn’t cooperate.” The list of prisoners includes nationalists, left-wingers, liberals, Islamists, pro-Ukrainian activists, environmentalists, bloggers and many others, but no one has yet been prosecuted specifically for LGBT activism.

Many of the May 6 protesters were arrested around the same time. The selection of the prisoners seemed quite random. There were activists of all shades as well as those who had never attended a protest before in their life. Charges were almost entirely based on police video and contradictory testimonies by riot policemen, who often appeared to see the defendants for the first time in their lives.

Kavkazky says the agent who arrested him threatened to have him put in to a so-called rooster cell, where the victims of prison rape are cloistered “since I was a gay activist.”

But this never came to pass, and the interrogators he subsequently dealt with didn’t seem to have had a problem with his LGBT activism, which he discussed with them.

“They sometimes argued with me, sometimes agreed. They were respectful and didn’t threaten me in any way,” he recalls. Almost as surprisingly, his fellow prisoners didn’t give him any problems for his LGBT activism.

34 people were prosecuted in the Bolotnaya Square case, of which 21 spent between one and three years in prison.

Kavkazky has since been released on amnesty, but seven Bolotnaya prisoners are still serving sentences or awaiting trial. The investigation is far from over — the last arrest in the case took place last December. One of the Bolotnaya prisoners, left-winger Leonid Razvozzhayev, was kidnapped in Ukraine and brought over to Russia, where he claims he was tortured.

The gay propaganda laws, by contrast, have sent no one to prison. While the “House of Cards” scriptwriters were busily spinning hunger-strike scenarios, the most any individual faced from the law was a fine of 5,000 roubles (around $67). For legal entities, such as TV stations or cinemas, it is one million roubles ($13,300).

According to Andrey Obolensky of Rainbow Association, which monitors anti-LGBT discrimination, only a handful of activists have even been fined so far, though the laws have been used to shut some organizations down as well as to fire several school teachers involved in LGBT activism.

Sporting long hair and a flamboyant, multicolored scarf, Obolensky appears to be celebrating rather than concealing his identity. But even he must be cautious. He doesn’t like people to know where his office is.

Obolensky says that rather than unleashing a wave of repression from the authorities, the adoption of the anti-gay law altered the atmosphere in society, prompting more homophobic rhetoric, discrimination and violent attacks on pro-LGBT protesters by thugs from organizations linked to the Kremlin and the Russian Orthodox Church.

“Hatred is being incited and the attitude of society has changed to worse,” he said.

Real though these concerns are, they have had a disproportionate influence on Western media coverage. Over a thousand stories were published on the New York Times website including the words “Russia” and “gay” between 2011 and the time of writing, while items featuring the word “Bolotnaya” number just 67. The ratio is 945 against six on CNN’s website. Certain issues, Putin has learned, can bump the suppression of dissent off the news agenda no matter how marginal their actual impact.

It’s doubtful that those who first started playing the LGBT card realized the extent of its usefulness. The first anti-gay initiatives emerged in September 2011, when Putin decided to run for president for the third time. His popularity was at a record low. He was expected to engage the socially conservative part of the electorate at the expense of the liberals, who didn’t want him back.

A law banning gay propaganda was adopted in the northern Arkhangelsk region four days after Putin announced he was running. On November 16, the city of St. Petersburg adopted a similar law, which caused an angry reaction in the Western media. But it took another few tumultuous months before the Kremlin made the LGBT issue a cornerstone of its domestic political strategy.

In November 2011, Putin’s long-time ally Vladimir Yakunin, who headed Russian Railways at the time, took an ancient Christian Orthodox relic known as the Virgin’s Belt and kept in a Greek monastery on Mt Athos, on a tour of Russia. As it reached Moscow, around a million people braved the bitter cold weather, queuing for up to eight hours only to spend a few seconds marvelling at it inside the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour.

The parliamentary election took place just a few days later, on December 4. Monitors representing anti-Putin groups uncovered gross violations, including ballot stuffing and people being bussed from one polling station to another in order to vote multiple times. The outcry on social networks sparked a series of rallies, most of which took place in Bolotnaya Square (where Kavkazky would find himself in the midst of a crackdown six months later).

Unprecedented though they were, these rallies were drawing no more than 100,000 people — a far cry from the conservative crowd that lined up to see the religious relic just across the river. It was immediately evident which ideological paradigm served as a better tool of mobilization. A war of values was born. Real though these concerns are, they have had a disproportionate influence on Western media coverage. Over a thousand stories were published on the New York Times website including the words ‘Russia’ and ‘gay’ between 2011 and the time of writing, while items featuring the word ‘Bolotnaya’ number just 67.

Putin set the narrative for his propaganda machine by hinting that all of the people in Bolotnaya Square were gay activists. During a live broadcast on December 15, he mentioned the white ribbons which became the movement’s insignia: “I thought it was some kind of an anti-HIV campaign, that they were contraceptives.”

Pussy Riot crystallized Putin’s strategy. The previously obscure all-female collective shot to fame in January 2012 by directly insulting the president in a song called “Putin Wet Himself,” which suggested that the protests made him panic. The government chose to ignore it.

But in February, Pussy Riot stormed the cathedral the Greek relic had been displayed in and sang a song called “God’s mother, get rid of Putin.” The authorities decided to arrest them. The stunt created reams of outstandingly rich material for the Kremlin’s public relations war.

Images of one of their earlier protest actions, in which they imitated sex inside a museum, were splashed across the pro Kremlin tabloid media. Words like “sacrilege” and “blasphemy” interspersed with juicy images filled TV broadcasts and newspapers. A poll conducted by the independent research organization Levada Centre at the end of the same month showed that 46% of Russians approved of them being jailed for anything between two and seven years, as envisaged by the Russian criminal code.

It was at that time that a federal law banning gay propaganda was introduced in Russia’s State Duma, prompting an uproar in the West that rendered the standoff between Putin and democratic opposition insignificant by comparison. The wording of the draft and the very notion of gay propaganda seemed so vague that many at the time wondered how the law would even be enforced after adoption.

Kirill Petrov, a Russian political expert who works at Minchenko Consulting, a group that advises many pro-Kremlin clients, describes such laws as “heat flares” — the infrared devices that warplanes fire to avoid being shot by missiles. “It’s a routine practice,” he says. “A law comes up, which on the face of it makes no sense and can’t really be implemented, but it helps to cover up something more significant, such as an unpopular economic measure or a political protest.”

Not all of the pro-Kremlin MPs saw the point of the law. “We are discussing issues that provoke mass interest because they have to do with physiology. I don’t think they should be our priority,” MP Vladimir Ovsyannikov said during the debates.

The mass interest only grew. It took almost a year for the Duma to pass the anti-gay legislation (infinitely more than other repressive laws), with every new step in the discussion creating furore in both Russian and Western media. Public figures from Madonna to Elton John joined in the chorus condemning Russia’s treatment of gays. Media coverage of the issue reached its peak in the run up to Putin’s showcase 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi. Such was the fervor of the atmosphere that some Western gay athletes feared for their safety, much to the bemusement of Russians.

Political protests carried on throughout this time, but seemed to be losing momentum. People were intimidated by a whole host of new laws clamping down on political dissent. The trials of the Bolotnaya prisoners played out unglamourously.

Maria Baronova, once an unofficial spokesperson for the protest movement who narrowly avoided imprisonment in the Bolotnaya case, says the fuss over the gay propaganda law was largely spurred by domestic agendas in the US and Europe. “Putin fitted neatly into the image of the bad foreign guy who hates the gays,” she says. Baronova is pro-LGBT and was actively involved in defending Pussy Riot.

The relationship between Putin and gay rights advocates in the West is a piece of political theater worthy of “House of Cards”.

Left out of the script are the real political prisoners, people like Ildar Dadin. Last December, Dadin was sentenced under the new draconian law on public assemblies to three years in prison for a series of one-man protests against the war in Ukraine and suppression of the opposition. He also happens to be an LGBT activist, but this is irrelevant to his imprisonment. Will Madonna and Elton John speak out for him?

The post Politics and Repression appeared first on Coda Story.

“My biological gender is female, but I don’t feel like a girl. That’s why I am writing to you...”

“My mother has hinted that she would put me out of the house, if my sexual orientation was wrong”

On Russia’s biggest social network, VKontakte, these pleas for help from teenagers are now illegal.

On January 13, Children 404, the Russian online support forum for LGBT adolescents, had its legal case rejected at the Altay Regional Court in Southern Siberia, finding it and the group’s founder, Elena Klimova, guilty of spreading the “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations among minors.”

The judgement is the latest blow to what experts warn is a dangerously threadbare support network for LGBT teens in Russia.

Elena Klimova is only 27, but she is already inured to legal battles. Slim, with cropped hair and dark-rimmed glasses, she has become one of the most prominent faces of LGBT activism in Russia.

In 2013, Klimova authored several articles on the passing of a controversial and vaguely-phrased law which banned “propaganda” of homosexuality and pedophila to minors. The response to her pieces was overwhelming — her mailbox filled up with messages from teenagers complaining that they had no one to turn to.

“I received a letter from a girl who was bullied at school and beaten at home. She wrote a few good-bye letters and started planning her suicide, but then when she read one of my articles she changed her mind,” Klimova said.

Inspired by the response, she set up an online forum with the slogan, “Being Gay is Normal”. She called it Children 404, after the “Not Found 404” web-error that shows up when a website does not exist. The forum, she says, was meant to provide a safe place for children to share their stories, talk about their problems and address pervasive issues of aggression from peers and parents. As thousands of letters began to pour in, many wrote not only of discrimination, but also teenage heartbreaks.

The website quickly became known as the only safe public space in Russia where LGBTQ teenagers could talk about their problems, discuss coming out to friends and parents, and seek professional help for dealing with confusion, harassment and bullying. In 2015, as the number of 404 users passed 50,000, Klimova brought volunteer psychologists onboard and self-published a book of stories from the forum.

The popularity of Children 404 drew attention from both the media and the government. By January 2014, Klimova faced four different legal procedures in three different Russian cities. She was ordered to pay fines, but in the Altai Krai region of southern Russia, she was ordered to shutdown Children 404 on Vkontakte.

In the streets, Klimova was followed and shouted at. Online, she received messages from people who promised to find and kill her. Among the most prominent online threats, she says, many came from members of the youth branch of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s United Russia political party. “The popularity of Children 404 drew attention from the media and the government. By January 2014, Klimova faced four different legal procedures in three different Russian cities.”

Valerii Sozaev, one of the first teachers to lose a job because of their sexuality, describes the situation for LGBT teens in Russia as “catastrophic.”

“The whole homophobic context, all those anti-gay reports on television, statements from parliamentarians, make the situation more difficult and dangerous,” Sozaev said. “Now vengeance against gay teens by other students and even professors at schools can end with violence.” Without Children 404, he added, teenagers have no other resource.

The principal at Sozaev’s St. Petersburg school, where he taught social sciences, asked him to quit after local politicians and Russian Orthodox priests launched a campaign to ban LGBT activists from holding public sector jobs. Since the passing of the law, he says, 39 teachers in St. Petersburg have been individually targeted and fired — some of them identified not through their activism, but by their posts on social networks.

Throughout his teaching career, Sozaev became a confidante for dozens of his students, who came to him for advice on coming out. He would often speak to parents too, helping them to accept their children. According to a 2011 Columbia University research study, suicides are ten times higher among gay teenagers than heterosexual adolescents worldwide.

If the latest ruling is enforced and Klimova has to close down the VKontakte social network, where Children 404 have over 75,000 subscribers, her outreach will be limited to networks with little traction inside Russia, like Facebook, where Children 404 has less than 8,000 members.

The post Russia’s invisible children appeared first on Coda Story.

Gay clubs and bars were sprouting up like mushrooms in large and small cities. Some brave men and women emerged as outspoken leaders of this newly visible minority. One of them, a provocative young man named Roman Kalinin, made headlines by announcing his intention of running for president. (He intended it as a joke; the Russian press took it seriously.)

Sex between men was still a crime in 1991, but it hadn’t been in the early years of the Soviet Union. After the revolution, the new regime abolished the Tsarist legal code, which criminalized homosexuality. But in 1934, Stalin introduced new anti-sodomy legislation. Many gay men were swept up in the purges of the late 1930s. Homosexuality disappeared from public discussion. That didn’t mean, of course, that gay and lesbian life disappeared — it survived underground, like everything did, in friendship circles that had weathered the decades of Soviet repression.

By 1993, when Russia finally repealed the sodomy law — the much-hated Article 121 — the situation finally seemed to have reached an irreversible turning point. It felt like people had generally recovered from the shock of learning that homosexuals existed, and even lived next door. Besides, in the turbulence of the Boris Yeltsin years, people had so much to worry about — and in particular scraping together a living — to spend much time thinking about anything else.

That’s all changed, of course, now that Russia has banned the dissemination of material supporting “non-traditional” relationships. Even before I arrived, American friends warned me to be careful, to avoid drawing attention to myself. They worried I could be detained by police or beaten up by the homophobic street thugs known as remontniki, or “fixers.” I was slightly nervous myself, but I also knew that Russian life always revealed more nuance and color than the grim impressions haunting Western imaginations. (I did shave off my facial scruff, as I always do when heading for Russia, to reduce the chances of being perceived as a Chechen, Dagestani, or anyone else from the Muslim areas of the southern Caucasus.)

The anti-propaganda regime has had serious repercussions. Teachers who have not proven sufficiently tough on non-traditional families have been forced to resign their positions. Courts have ruled against media organizations for running positive portrayals of homosexuality. In the provinces, local authorities can act with even more autonomy and make life miserable for people. And there is no real protection from those who beat up gays and lesbians, blackmail them, or out them to family members and employers.

And yet, as always in Russia, the reality is more complex. Contrary to some of the fears evoked by my American friends, authorities are not bursting into people’s homes and arresting them for homosexuality. Men and women still hang out in bars and nightclubs, without much fear of harassment. The fact that the law is a civil offense with limited applications provides some measure of protection, although of course Russian authorities manage to apply laws in an arbitrary way to people they dislike.

Sasha Kondov, a sociologist from St. Petersburg, told me, “In Russia, as always, there is the law, and there are people, and we live in parallel countries.”

I understood what he meant. But I wouldn’t have in 1991, when I arrived with the expectation that gay life in Russian would look much like it does in the U.S. — just many decades behind. It wasn’t like that, of course. I discovered that, beneath the grim public exterior, people had created parallel lives rich in friendships, love and sex, as people always had. They faced more extreme circumstances and dangers than I did in my life, of course, but they seemed to accept them as immutable realities, like Siberian snowstorms, and managed to survive more or less intact, at least most of the time.

In the early 1990s, waves of Westerners of all varieties swept across Russia and the many former Soviet republics. They rushed over to teach these backward peoples how to thrive in the modern world: How to build democracy and have elections! How to protect private property! How to sell advertising! Banking reform! Education reform! Let’s do investigative journalism! Moscow, Tashkent and Yerevan were full of foreign experts, preaching so-called best practices.

American gays and lesbians were no different, and no less patronizing in their approach. Some took it upon themselves to enlighten and educate their Russian counterparts on… what, exactly? I wasn’t quite sure. Things just didn’t translate. Take the concept of “coming out” — so axiomatic to the U.S. gay experience. Russians understood what it meant, of course. But it made much less sense to them. People who had grown up in the Soviet era had honed their skills at shielding their inner lives from public scrutiny. Why would they feel a need or desire to suddenly reverse course?

And why, my friends wanted to know, did Americans insist that an unwillingness to come out meant that people suffered from “internalized homophobia”? From their perspective, it made no sense. The people I met did not express shame about their sexual orientation; they simply saw no reason why it was anyone else’s business. As one friend said, “David, what am I supposed to do when I go to the bakery? Say, ‘Hi, I’m a lesbian, I’d like to buy bread?’” This notion, of course, caused much merriment among my friends. How naïve and stupid Americans sometimes were, they told me, and I couldn’t say that I disagreed with them. “It felt like people had generally recovered from the shock of learning that homosexuals existed, and even lived next door.”

Privacy, I came to learn, was sacrosanct in Russia, and not just because of the watchful eye of the authorities. Many people I met, male and female, lived in tiny apartments with their mothers, or other family members. (Fathers were often dead, in alcoholic stupors, or somewhere unknown.) People living in close quarters, I learned, found ways to construct mental zones of privacy given the lack of spatial ones. Other family members respected these zones and refrained from asking intrusive questions.

So when I came out to a relative, I did not earn the congratulations which I had expected from my friends. My dad’s first cousin, Sopha, lived in a grubby suburb an hour-and-a-half from Moscow. I used to visit her at least monthly; sometimes I’d stay over. Her mother, Figusia, was my grandfather Joseph’s sister. Figusia had stayed behind in the village, in what is now Ukraine, with the rest of the family when Joseph fled to New York after the Russian Revolution, during the violence and chaos of the civil war. Sopha was an accountant; her husband had been a longtime party member.

Over time, as Sopha and I grew to know one another, I dropped hints — about not being married, about knowing people who had died of AIDS, about my newspaper work covering the gay and lesbian movement in the U.S. So by the time I told her, she had already figured it out. She said of course it made no difference to her. She said it was something that was never talked about, although of course she knew there were “these kinds of people.” She recognized how difficult life must have been for them — to grow up knowing they were so different and to face such challenges finding their place in the world. She did gently suggest that I not tell my elderly great-aunt Zhenya, “because she has a weak heart.”

I felt proud of myself in coming out to Sopha — a small victory, I thought, against the forces of darkness and ignorance. My friends hooted when I told them what I’d done. For an American cousin to show up in a Moscow suburb was already “exotica,” one friend said, “like having a giraffe in the house.”

Despite this abuse, I pressed on and explained that Sopha not only accepted it well but even sympathized with the situation faced by gays and lesbians. “A very big thanks, David,” said my friend. “By your charm, you conquer the world, and have now converted to our view the lovely wife of a Party functionary…”

In 1994, I spent a weekend in a sort of gay-lesbian encounter group led by three well-meaning, but clueless, Americans activists. They spoke no Russian and had little apparent understanding of the country, yet this was their third visit for the purpose of “community building.” In any event, whatever community they were building seemed of little interest to the Muscovites. The event started off well enough, with 50 or more people turning up on a Friday evening. Only half came the next day, and that dwindled to a dozen or so by Sunday.

Few people, it seemed, took to the trust games and open confession sessions and relentless promotion of positivity and disclosure that marked these kinds of gatherings in the U.S. As a temporary Russian, I agreed with the locals: Why would anyone want to sit around and reveal intimate details to people they didn’t know? It might make sense at Big Sur or the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival but not in some cheesy basement in Moscow three years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Without hot tubs on a cliff, the process of building trust took years and decades to build, not minutes. “I felt proud of myself in coming out to Sopha — a small victory, I thought, against the forces of darkness and ignorance.”

In an interview, one of the Americans, a young self-styled “lesbigay” activist named Alma, said she’d recently learned about the Young Pioneers, the Komsomol, and all the other Soviet forms of institutional ideological coercion. She’d found this information to be extremely useful in her work. “There’s been a lot of dysfunctional group behavior that causes people to have a lot of shit and pain around groups and leadership,” she told me and my friend Laurie Essig, a sociologist also living in Moscow at the time.

The fact that Russians suffered from “dysfunctional group behavior” and experienced “a lot of shit and pain around leadership” appeared to be news to Alma. This surprised Laurie and me; we glanced at each other. Had Alma heard of Stalin?

I told my friends about this group encounter session. “Well, Americans think they can save us, they think they are the Messiah, or Superman,” said one. “And as for the American gays and lesbians, they think they are the Supergays and Superlesbianki!”

These experiences considerably tempered my own inclination to frame my Russian experiences through an American lens. Rather, I tried to check my American assumptions at the border and view local realities through their Russian, post-Soviet lens.

Times are different now, of course. In 1991, the word of choice for gay was goluboi, meaning “light blue.” Why light blue? No one knew. For women, it was rosavaya, meaning “rose” (the color). Again, the etymology was vague. The words gay and lesbian also popped up frequently in Russian sentences. When I returned in December, younger people laughed or looked quizzical if, out of habit, I used the word goluboi. Even “gay and lesbian” sounded fusty and archaic. These days, it seems, only LGBT, and sometimes LGBTQ, would do.

The change shouldn’t have surprised me, of course, but it did. Many of the people I met this time weren’t even born when I first arrived, and grew up under realities far different from those I investigated in the 1990s. The world I wrote about — the immediate post-Soviet years — is long past, eclipsed by far more recent traumas. And my friends themselves had moved on. They still don’t enter bakeries and demand bread as homosexuals and lesbians. They still won’t discuss their sexuality with their mothers or other relatives or colleagues at work. But they no longer view themselves as a secluded and self-contained underground. They are part of a larger historical and global phenomenon, a connection discovered and strengthened through the remarkable online universe that did not exist when I landed there 25 years ago.

And I’ve also changed. In 1991, I was part of that messianic wave of Americans arriving to do good. But doing good as I saw it didn’t always conform to doing good as they saw it, and many of the Western-funded efforts at doing good flailed about for purpose and direction — beyond the goal of paying excellent salaries to Western contractors and consultants. My best doing good turned out to be observing and then writing about what I observed — which sometimes involved my embarrassment at the misguided approaches promoted by well-funded American do-gooders.

Americans love to feel they can solve problems in other countries by building banking systems, democracy and LGBTQ communities. They can’t. Americans can provide financial support to LGBTQ refugees, they can create political noise in national and international venues, they can demonstrate outside Russian consulates. But inside Russia, it’s a different story. No one there needs my advice. They don’t need me telling them how “out” or “in” they should be. They don’t need me telling them how to feel about what Putin does. They have to live there. I don’t. So I go to observe, hug friends, and offer support. I don’t go to save them, because I know I can’t.

The post In and out in ‘90s Russia appeared first on Coda Story.

But like everyone else in the city, I knew that there was a park called Komaygi in front of the mayor’s office where cross-dressers and transgender people — many of them sex workers — gathered at night. I wanted to find out who these people were. Once in a while, their stories would catch the attention of the media, but only when some fervent defender of public morality physically attacked a cross-dresser, or a politician issued a call to cleanse the park of so-called immoral people. Otherwise, we knew nothing about them.

The first night I arrived in the park, I was immediately surrounded by people. They asked me why I was there and what I wanted. I told them that I simply wanted to photograph. Many wanted to know how much would I pay them. I said that I didn’t pay the people I photographed. One of them, Lorena, said that she didn’t mind.

We met at an apartment. It belonged to Layma and Lorena, and four other people lived there too. At first I was terrified. I didn’t know what sort of people I was dealing with. All I knew was that they were sex workers, who received several clients a day there.

I was not free from prejudice myself. When I first met them, the encounter made me feel dirty. We just talked about their work – the clients, how it worked. Going back to my family home afterwards, I found myself wanting to shower.

But months went by and I carried on, going deeper and deeper into their world. I was with them not just at the park and in their homes, but in nightclubs and parties and strip bars. As I got to know them better, I began to feel cleansed of that dirty feeling.

Lorena and I became particularly close. I was taken aback by her femininity. She was so skilled at applying make-up, much more skilled than I am. She did it slowly, sometimes for several hours at a time. At first, it seemed to me that carefree Lorena was happy in her life. At night she would open up like a flower. But the better I got to know her, the more I noticed her sudden drops in mood.

Lorena grew up in an orphanage. She loved to act in children’s plays, pretending to be sly or ruthless, funny or sad. She took part in all the performances. In third grade at the orphanage, she was raped.

She made it through high school and passed the entry exams for the Theater Institute in Yerevan, but during her second year, she dropped out of drama school. She could not afford the tuition fees, and she felt she was different from everyone else. She was 20 years old when a friend introduced her to the park, where someone approached her and told her that she would make “a beautiful trans person.”

There were many visitors at Lorena and Layma’s apartment. One day I met Kara. She was the newcomer to the group and the youngest, with beautiful eyes.

When I was photographing Kara, Lorena came in the room; she seemed jealous that I was showing interest in the newcomer, but only for a moment — then the jealousy passed. Lorena sat down and began to watch me work with the camera. We took a break and Kara sat down on her knees and put her head on Lorena’s lap — I snapped a photo. It’s my favorite picture. What is this other than warmth between different generations? In this world they only have each other; can they only get warmth from, and console each other?

For the first six months of this project, Lorena’s flatmate Layma didn’t want to be photographed. Then one day she asked me to come and take her picture, opening up to me in a way that I never expected.

As I got closer to this community, I wondered more and more about how would I display their photographs. I knew Armenian society was not ready for them. I knew it because friends had turned away from me even while I was undertaking the project, warning me not to destroy my reputation.

When I felt the project was ready, I started approaching galleries, but not a single one would exhibit it, even ones who had previously shown my works. In the end, I rented an apartment and held a one-day exhibition. It was by invitation only, and even then I didn’t feel it was safe to invite Lorena, Layma, Kara.

I did find another way of displaying the photographs, however. In December 2013, with the help of a small grant from the Open Society Foundations, I self-published a book of photographs, The Stamp of Loneliness.

Only one bookstore in Yerevan agreed to carry the book. Despite this limited distribution, a local politician denounced it on Armenian public television as Western propaganda. A storm of hate messages followed on Facebook. On social networks I was called a foreign agent, one who spread “gay propaganda.” I received messages saying that I should be burned alive together with the people I photographed. I was called a traitor.

Perhaps the worst aspect of these threats and accusations was that so many came from artists and people that I used to respect, and this filled me with doubt. I’d never wanted to be an activist. There was a moment when I thought I shouldn’t have done the project, a moment of fear for my reputation as a photographer. I felt afraid, and anxious about the effect it would have on my family. I sunk into a deep depression. I closed my Facebook account, refused interviews and stopped talking about the subject altogether.

But in the end, I took comfort in the fact that a negative discussion is better than no discussion at all. And I believe the project made me a better photographer — more tolerant, and more compassionate. I realized that I could work anywhere, with anyone.

The book also brought another tangible result. Layma and Lorena moved to Europe, and used the book during their visa interviews. I still talk to Lorena often. I think she is happier. She got residency, and is looking for a job. However, nothing has changed for Kara and the others who stayed behind.

The post Armenia’s ostracized minority appeared first on Coda Story.

Those parliamentarians who had backgrounds in law issued a joint statement condemning the bill for lack of clarity and failure to define what it was trying to ban: “public demonstrations of distorted sexual preferences in public places.” But in an interview in the dissident Meduza website, the author of the bill, Ivan Nikitchuk offered to clarify: the bill would stop homosexuals “from displaying their demonic desires, which the West would force on us.”

I did not cover the bill’s passage, but the news took me back to what feels like a distant and unreal past: Moscow in 2012.

The year before, the opposition had organized mass protests in Moscow and St. Petersburg. The Russian middle class, or parts of it, still dreamed of democracy. People came out into the streets demanding fair elections and respect for their rights and freedom. They also wanted the resignations of the corrupt cabinet.

But this newly-mobilized Russian middle class soon understood that the government was not going to make concessions. The protesters grew quickly disheartened by their own inability to influence the regime. The government had outsmarted them by enlisting loyalists in the provinces and members of the working class against the urban intellectuals and launching a full blown attack on those tiny pockets of freedom that still existed in Russia.

And one of the most memorable outcomes in that battle between protesters and the government came a year later in a bill against the “propaganda of homosexuality,” which was passed unanimously by the State Duma and signed into law by Russian President Vladimir Putin in June 2013.

I am not a member of the LGBT community but I took the 2013 propaganda law personally. Such discrimination seemed so humiliating for a normal society that I could not stand aside.

It was obvious that there was nothing we could do to force the government to change its mind, but at least I had a chance to show where I stood. How? I chose satire. It seemed to be the best way. I simply could not find any rational explanation for the insanity of the Russian deputies. I felt uncomfortable giving this legislation any sort of serious assessment. My newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, is very author-led. Reporters often choose subjects themselves and are allowed to find creative ways of covering them. The most important criteria is that the final product is engaging and interesting, and a creative approach like satire is consistent with this mandate. Russian lawmakers are reaching new levels of absurdity, but these days making fun of them could land me in jail for three years.

So together with my colleague, videographer Diana Khachatrian, we decided to stage a little carnival inside the halls of the State Duma. I got dressed into something best described as a cross between George Michael and a drag queen. Equipped with a microphone and a camera, we headed to parliament to troll Russian politicians.

The amazing thing was that none of them saw the irony. We caught them in the corridors, in their offices and in the foyer of the main Duma hall. They seemed sluggish, almost half-alive, but as soon as the camera was on they would liven up, turning from empty dolls into wind-up robots. Each of them would fill their lungs, and seemingly in one breath deliver a speech about how homosexuality could rot our society.

Duma member Tatyana Moskalkova was especially honest. Apart from banning homosexuality, she also expressed her support for bans on Zionism and Americanism. I asked another lawmaker, Tamara Pleteneva, whether we should bring back the Stalinist practice of exterminating everything “foreign”? She used the question to come to Stalin’s rescue. “Don’t you touch Stalin now,” she said, as if protecting something sacred.

Most of the MPs failed to explain to us why representatives of sexual minorities must be officially considered second class citizens, or for that matter what the letters LGBT stood for. They didn’t know. And they didn’t seem to care — it felt like they voted because they had to.

But it was not the only law passed that year. One after another, legislators in the Duma adopted a series of laws that made it virtually impossible for any Russian to be an active citizen: there was the legislation that banned adoption of Russian orphans by foreigners; amendments that made it a criminal offense to participate in any sort of unsanctioned protest; a ban on foreign-funded, non-governmental organizations and new barriers for Russia’s already constrained mass media. The speed of introduction of these legislative changes was dizzying. Many were shocked by the absurdity of the new rules and most of us did not know how to react. We had just been in the streets demanding freedom and instead we got a giant spit into our faces.

The anti-gay “propaganda” law, which Duma deputies labeled a law “for the Purpose of Protecting Children from Information Advocating for a Denial of Traditional Family Values,” effectively banned promotion of culture and the rights of the LGBT community, and signalled the end of a more open, more hopeful liberal moment.

It had been only several years prior to this that Russians had been seriously discussing legalizing same sex unions, giving them a status of official partnership similar to many countries in Europe.

But by 2012 Russia had fallen backwards. You can’t underestimate the power of Russian propaganda. It is the regime’s super weapon, which affects minds with extraordinary speed. Two years was enough to reprogram the public mood, to coax, massage, and finally weaponize public attitudes firmly against homosexuality. It was two years of constant, aggressive propaganda against homosexuality. This propaganda was smoothly layered on top of a subterranean Soviet-Orthodox foundation, according to which homosexuality has always been a Western vice.

Right now, looking back at the year 2012 is to remember a more lax time. It now feels like a historical rupture, when I could take a camera and go to the Duma to make fun of Russian politicians. Back then, getting kicked out of the Duma was the worst case scenario. I wouldn’t try satire today. Russian lawmakers are reaching new levels of absurdity, but these days making fun of them could land me in jail for three years. In Russia, we no longer joke with the government.

The post No room for humor appeared first on Coda Story.

The group’s leader Dmitry Enteo — a pudgy, bearded man who goes around in jeans and a T-shirt — was taken in for questioning, but quickly released. He received similar treatment after being arrested while at a protest the previous year. Russian state authorities are clearly not in the business of imprisoning Orthodox activists.

In fact, Vladimir Putin is closely allied to Orthodox hardliners. The most famous indicator of this has been the state’s treatment of the punk group Pussy Riot, who were put on trial after they screamed and smashed their guitars in Moscow’s Christ the Savior cathedral in 2012, and whipped through the streets by Cossacks when they protested anti-LGBT discrimination in the run up to the Winter Olympics in 2014.

The discourse of Orthodox activists and the conservative Orthodox priesthood mostly echoes the official line of the Kremlin, a convergence starting at the top with Patriarch Kirill, who recently blessed the Kremlin’s bombing campaign in Syria as a necessary “holy war.”

The Church was an important component of Tsarist autocracy and never strayed far from the Kremlin line when it was severely suppressed during Soviet times, and since then its growing role in society predates Putin. But Putin’s political entwinement with the Church has become more knotted, and has become was a much more visible alliance than anything seen in the 90s or 2000s.

The Church is flexing its new-found muscle. A youth music festival was recently canceled by the government when the church objected, and a major staging of a Wagner opera in Novosibirsk called off because it offended Orthodox tastes.

For Putin, the alliance with the Church offers the chance to advance an idea of Russianness that is defined by what it is not: not European, not soft, not Muslim nor any other religious minority, not multicultural and not newly invented but ancient and traditional, and very much not gay. Orthodoxy gilds this stance with a kind of Old Muscovy aesthetic and veneer of doctrinal coherence.

There are potential fractures within this alliance. Competing claims to ultimate social authority can eventually butt against each other. The Kremlin looks to the Church for legitimacy, but what happens if the state and the church find their interests diverging? Objection to homosexuality from within the Church can seem visceral, unyielding, even existential. While the Kremlin has made even publicly proclaiming oneself gay a crime, it mostly allows (discreet) gay life to go on unchallenged. What happens if the Church decides this is entirely too tolerant?

Russian foreign policy priorities too are not always perfectly aligned with the Orthodox interests. The Orthodox religion represents various national churches though the Russian church is its largest denomination. In a 2013 editorial on Syria in the New York Times, Putin inveighed against nations considering themselves “exceptional” solemnly declaring that God had created them all equal. The following year he invaded Ukraine, causing major tensions between the Ukrainian Orthodox church and its sister organization in Russia.

National exceptionalism, as we see here, was bad until it was good. The Orthodox Church may find itself the victim of the same sudden shifts of logic.

The post The Kremlin and the Cross appeared first on Coda Story.

The Russian doctrine of information war is not concerned with ideology. It is a way for the state to confuse, dismay, delay and divide. Ideas are of interest in so far as they serve a tactical purpose.

The Kremlin’s post-2012 conservative stance, which has created an environment whereby TV hosts call on citizens to “burn the hearts of gay men,” is a case in point.

Russian President Vladimir Putin was probably telling the truth when he told a TV interviewer he had no problem with homosexuals. His administration is said to contain several, and some key members of the media elite are themselves discreetly gay. Being openly gay in macho Russia has never been particularly pleasant (think of attitudes to “fags” and “benders” in the UK and US in the 1970s), but gay-bashing was never a top topic and was based more on boorishness and ignorance rather than any religious position. As anyone who has ever lived in Russia knows, social culture there is hedonistic and, if anything, somewhat libertine; rates for abortion, divorce and children born out of wedlock are high. Church attendance is low. The US Bible belt it certainly isn’t.

To understand why marginalizing gay people work for Putin it’s worth going back to the beginning of the campaign. In 2011-2012, Putin faced a mounting wave of protests focusing on bad governance and corruption among the elites. He desperately needed to change the agenda and refocus national anger elsewhere. The opposition rock group Pussy Riot’s controversial “punk prayer” in Moscow’s central cathedral came as a Godsend to the Kremlin, allowing it to shift the national conversation away from corruption to its own definition of values. On TV, Jerry Springer-like shows ranted about witches, God, Satan and anal sex. Europe, which had been used by Putin’s opposition as a cypher for the rule of law and transparency, was now labeled “Gayropa.” Putin has managed to transform the struggle in Ukraine from a battle against corrupt kleptocracies into a clash of civilizations.

Domestically the ploy only half worked. Though the Kremlin managed to change the agenda, Putin’s ratings kept on falling (it would take military victory in Crimea to boost them). Internationally, however, it has been far more successful. Unlike in Russia there really are powerful, ideologically driven anti-LGBT movements in the US and Europe, and these groups now see Putin as an ally and help undermine the Western coalition against the Kremlin’s belligerent foreign policy. The idea that Russia is a genuine defender of conservative moral values, and that these values have some sort of geopolitical expression, helps bolster Putin’s status and feeds into the idea Russia has some sort of inherent zone of influence, that countries such as Ukraine are part of its “civilizational block,” and are destined to be in the Kremlin’s orbit. Putin has managed to transform the struggle in Ukraine from a battle against corrupt kleptocracies into a clash of civilizations.

In practice, of course, Russia is economically intertwined with the West. Russian TV is an odd hybrid: “Gayropa” rants by Kremlin hosts such as Dmitry Kyselev are followed by ads for Western brands and Russian franchises of Western TV formats, and these all represent potential pressure points for LGBT rights campaigners.

As this hybridity suggests, the increased frequency with which anti-gay messages crop up in Russian media is not due to an inherent culture, values, or ideology. When Western liberal intellectuals such as Bernard-Henri Lévy describe the war in Ukraine as a fight between “conservative” Russia and “liberal Europe,” they would do well to remember that they are in fact walking right into the Kremlin’s narrative trap.

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There are also ways of dealing with the aftermath of the violence. One common technique is to blame the victim’s party, such as the liberals who the government claimed were responsible for gunning down dissident Boris Nemtsov inside the Kremlin’s walls in February 2015.

Proportionally, attacks against members of Russia’s LGBT community are significantly lower than against opposition supporters, but they emanate from the same Kremlin-sanctioned political weather system. When zealous defenders of so-called Russian values attack gay people in the streets, they are secure in the knowledge that they are unlikely to face prosecution.

Some of the actions flourishing under this system are documented in License to Harm, a 2014 Human Rights Watch report, which describes a long list of abuses committed on the street, or in the subway, or in offices. A vigilante network calling themselves Occupy Pedophilia is shown to pour urine over its victims, in some cases forcing them to drink it. Occupy Pedophilia’s founder, Maxim Martsinkevich, likes to be called “Tesak,” which means cleaver or hatchet in Russian. Common Occupy Pedophilia tactics include striking victims with dildos or forcing victims to pose with dildos, then stripping them naked, painting or drawing slurs on them, and then wrapping up the attack by spraying victims with construction foam in their groin.

The St. Petersburg-based Russian LGBT Network conducted an anonymous survey in 2014 which found that fully half of gay and lesbian respondents had been harassed and 15 percent physically attacked — a number is suspected to have gone up significantly in the last year as the intensity of anti-LGBT rhetoric from prominent people in government, the Russian Orthodox Church, and the media has increased.

The Kremlin’s political violence franchising isn’t limited by Russia’s borders. After protesters toppled the Russian-backed president of Ukraine in 2013, the Night Wolves — a Moscow biker gang allied with the Kremlin — turned up in Ukraine, galvanizing violent reprisals against activists who were protesting Russia’s annexation of the Crimea region of eastern Ukraine. Zealous defenders of so-called Russian values attack LGBT people in the streets, secure in the knowledge that they are unlikely to face prosecution.

An even more sinister franchise partner is warlord Ramzan Kadyrov, whom Russian President Vladimir Putin has cultivated as his in-house thug to maintain control over Chechnya. With an estimated 15,000 men in his security force, Kadyrov is alleged to have played a role in many deaths not only in Chechnya but in Moscow, where his men reportedly have special security clearances.

State-sanctioned political violence can be a means of authoritarian control. But the Kremlin’s policy of spinning off the dirty work to vigilante organizations, outlaw clubs, powerful henchmen and semi-private militias can also be seen as a loss of control. In its report on Russia’s “Uncontrolled Violence”, The Economist compared contemporary Russia to 1970s Latin America or Italy — a place where the state is just another criminal enterprise among many.

This ambiguity may suit Putin well enough, but it makes for an unpredictable environment. For non-heterosexual people trying to navigate it, the trends are hard to read and the stakes enormously high. Will persecution escalate, or will attention shift to a new group? Where will the Kremlin’s violence franchise take them?

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In 2006 however, the Ryazan regional legislature made a quiet change to their administrative law that ended up echoing throughout the former Soviet Union. The amendment created a new offense: “public actions intended to propagandize homosexuality amongst minors.” In practice, this meant potential fines for public discussion of homosexuality in positive or even neutral terms.

The Ryazan amendment was taken up by local legislators in Arkhangelsk (2009), and Kostroma (2011). But it wasn’t until 2012 that the idea began to gain traction nationally. A version of the amendment was passed in several regions across Russia before being passed at the federal level in 2013. Copycat laws have since been discussed from Yerevan to Bishkek.

There is no single cause for the rapid spread of this legislative agenda. But one major factor is undoubtedly the unprecedented anti-government protests which accompanied Vladimir Putin’s re-election to the presidency of Russia in 2012.

Russian President Vladimir Putin first came to power as a relative unknown in 2000, and staked his political and personal legitimacy on quashing terrorism in the restive North Caucasus. The drums of war set the pace for his first two terms in office, but when the Chechnya campaign ended in 2009, it left a narrative vacuum. To rally people around his third term, Putin needed a new set of criteria with which to define Russia, her champions and, most importantly, her enemies.

It was at this point that Russian officials began to speak the language of “traditional values.” In this discourse, Russia was cast as the defender of Orthodox family values against the hedonism of the West. This worldview was outlined most clearly in Putin’s 2013 speech to the Valdai Discussion Club — a Russian-led international affairs discussion forum.

“We can see how many of the Euro-Atlantic countries are actually rejecting their roots, including the Christian values that constitute the basis of Western civilization. They are denying moral principles and all traditional identities: national, cultural, religious and even sexual. They are implementing policies that equate large families with same-sex partnerships, belief in God with the belief in Satan,” Vladimir Putin stated.

Homophobic rhetoric began to rise in the state-owned media, and physical attacks on the LGBT community increased alongside it.

This new mood didn’t stop at Russia’s borders. Ukraine, then under the Russia-backed presidency of Viktor Yanukovych, became the first former Soviet republic to pass its own so-called “gay propaganda” law in 2012. The law was never implemented though, and was repealed after Yanukovych’s ouster by pro-EU demonstrators in 2014.

In June 2013, Moldova passed legislation banning the promotion of relationships “other than those linked to marriage and family,” although it was subsequently repealed. Just a month later, a similar bill was proposed in Belarus, then Armenia. Kazakhstan passed its own copycat law, before it was struck down by the constitutional court. In Latvia, anti-gay groups began collecting signatures to hold a national referendum on gay propaganda.

The sudden enthusiasm for Russia’s gay propaganda laws in former Soviet satellite states is, at first glance, hard to explain. The days when Kremlin orders traveled to the furthest reaches of the Soviet Union are long gone.

But Russia’s influence remains strong, fuelled by old relationships between the elites, new economic interests, security arrangements, and, increasingly, by Russia’s resurgent soft power.

Political elites of former satellite states don’t require instructions from Moscow to start echoing its agenda. They may even find it useful for similar reasons that Putin did. To rally people around his third term, Putin needed a new set of criteria with which to define Russia, her champions and, most importantly, her enemies.

The Republic of Kyrgyzstan is a case in point. Long considered to be the most democratic of the Central Asian states, it has moved closer into Moscow’s orbit over the past five years.

A small country of 5.7 million people, it once strove to maintain good relations with all major powers and even hosted an American airbase just 30 miles away from a Russian one. In recent years however, the Kyrgyz parliament has opted to close the American airbase, and the Kyrgyz prime minister has cancelled a long-standing aid treaty with the United States. For its part, Russia has written off nearly half a billion dollars of Kyrgyz debt and oversees much of the country’s gas network.

In 2015, Kyrgyz lawmakers began passing laws closely modeled on some of Russia’s more controversial ones. In June 2015, the Kyrgyz parliament overwhelmingly voted to pass its own “foreign agents” bill which, like its Russian counterpart, labels NGOs that receive foreign funding as foreign agents.

At the time of writing, Kyrgyzstan is poised to pass its own, far harsher law on gay propaganda. Should the bill pass its third and final reading in the parliament, it will impose jail sentences for public activities which may create a “positive attitude” towards homosexuality.

There is no consensus on what drove Kyrgyz lawmakers to emulate their Russian patrons quite so assiduously. The relationship between legislation in former Soviet states, Kremlin calculations, and international politics is not a straightforward one. But understanding the region’s gay rights crisis is impossible without at least trying to untangle it.

The post The Kremlin’s Reach appeared first on Coda Story.

It was April 2015. The fighting between the Ukrainian government and Russian-backed rebels that had wrought so much destruction in the east of the country had quieted down, but for Anfisa the war was far from over. When the conflict erupted in the spring of 2014, she had been a student in Kiev. She used to dream of traveling the world and on occasion even joined her friends at pro-European demonstrations in Kiev’s Maidan Square. Then, shortly after Russian President Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea and pro-Russian demonstrators came out across the east, Anfisa visited her family in the east’s industrial heartlands. Everything changed.

“When I came back home and saw what was happening here it felt like a fog had lifted in my head. I know we are on the right path and now I know there is an alternative to all the crap that the West is feeding us,” she said.

What kind of Western crap? Anfisa didn’t blink: “Gay marriage.” Homosexuality, in her view, was a byproduct of Western liberalism, a sign that the West had lost its way.

The alternative of which she spoke so ardently is called “Russki Mir” — literally “Russian World” — an umbrella term coined by the Kremlin to promote the idea of a Russian civilization that is superior to the materialistic individualism of the West. The Russki Mir is not about geography, although for a while the idea of recreating Novorossia, the 18th century Russian Empire which included parts of modern-day Ukraine and Moldova, fuelled the rebel movement in eastern Ukraine.

Russki Mir, as Putin explained when he popularized the term, is a civilization which Russians and Russian-speakers all belong to, but any right-thinking person can also join. In April 2014, Putin used his annual televised phone-in with members of the public to talk about the deepening civilizational gap between Russia and the West. A person who belongs to the Russian World, he said, was a higher, more moral being, “preoccupied with thinking about his or her own moral role in the world.”

Ever since, the Russian media has presented Russki Mir as an Orthodox Christian antidote to Western liberalism, and homosexuality as one of the greatest dangers facing both societies.

This idea found fertile ground among the young people of rebel-held Ukraine. Vadim Topalov, a 20-year-old political science student at the Donetsk National University, says he is worried about the spread of values like tolerance or freedom of expression, which he believes are dangerous for post-Soviet societies.

“I don’t get that whole concept of tolerance,” he told me, adding that Joseph Stalin was right to send hundreds of thousands to the Gulags, because otherwise “dissent would have ruined the Soviet Union.”

Vadim may have no first-hand experience of the Soviet Union but, like Putin, he believes that its collapse was a great catastrophe. Preventing further societal collapse, he argues, is a priority and it is directly linked to homosexuality.

“Homosexuality has become a political tool that Western countries use to break up our society. It’s unacceptable in our culture and it should stay as a taboo. If you start discussing it, it will divide us and eventually break up the society,” he explained.

Homosexuality has become a political tool that Western countries use to break up our society.  —Vadim Topalov, student in Donetsk

Vadim, like many in eastern Ukraine, was influenced by the work of Aleksandr Dugin, one of the founding fathers of Russki Mir. Until recently, Dugin was an obscure political scientist calling for the destruction of America and the revival of the Russian Empire through the reunification of all Russian-speaking lands.

Today, Dugin’s theories have entered Russia’s political mainstream. He is even credited with being the brains behind Putin’s domestically popular decision to annex Crimea (Dugin has also advised the rebels in Eastern Ukraine). He has often denounced Western consumerism and lack of spirituality. But when I rang Dugin to ask for an interview, his wife and secretary Natalia Makeeva told me that due to the “dramatic increase in demand” Dugin no longer spoke to journalists for free, but would happily explain Russki Mir to me for a 500 euro fee.

Demand for Dugin may be declining though. As the sanctions-pressed Kremlin has toned down its involvement in Ukraine in recent months, public discussions of Novorossia and Russki Mir have also subsided.

But the traditionalist ideas behind it continue to be promoted by dozens of Kremlin-backed non-governmental organizations across the world. In the same way that US-funded organizations openly support initiatives that promote US-style democratic values, Russia supports organizations promoting so-called “family values.” From the Caucasus to the Baltics and beyond, these groups tap into a conservative vein in the societies in question, promising them protection from the corrupting influences of the West, and from homosexuality in particular. It seems to be working.

In certainly worked in Ukraine, where the Kremlin’s influence came under serious threat with the explosion of anti-corruption protests in 2013. Though protesters succeeded in toppling the government, their reform agenda was soon drowned out by talk of a clash of civilizations. This narrative rallied people like Anfisa, who might have otherwise found common cause with the pro-European protesters. The villain in this story was not Ukraine’s venal political elite, but the West and its determination to impose its values. In case anyone doubted what those values were, Russian TV coined a memorable portmanteau: “Gayropa.”

The “Gayropa” idea was just a bridgehead into more deep-seated fears among the people of eastern Ukraine that their interests and way of life were under threat.

The new, pro-Western government in Kiev didn’t help matters when it repealed a law making Russian the official language of the eastern provinces. Although it was never enacted, the Russian media portrayed this as a ban on the language and the start of an offensive against Russian speakers everywhere. Thousands took to the streets, occupying local administration buildings and declaring their loyalty to Russia and Putin. The ban, many of them said, was just the beginning of a new American expansionism, which would inevitably result in the spread of homosexuality. “The gays from Europe are coming,” one protester in Luhansk told me in April 2014. “They’ll force you to sleep with another woman. Is that what you want?”

There is more to Russki Mir than conspiracies and homophobia. Its supporters argue that it is truly and fundamentally different from the world of Western values. Andrei Purgin, one of the rebel leaders and a co-founder of the self-declared Donetsk People’s Republic, says the basic difference between the Russian and Western civilizations lies in their approach to justice. “The Latin tradition uses the rule of law, while in the Byzantine tradition, which informs the Russian civilization, justice is based on a feeling of fairness rather than the rule of law,” he said.

Europe’s troubles, including the rise of the far-right, he said, proved that it was only a matter of time until the West collapsed under the corrupting weight of individualism.

We spoke in his office in Donetsk, surrounded by portraits of Stalin and Putin.

“President Putin is an unexpected man and he is the hope of all traditionalists around the world. The world is changing, and we all need things that are immutable,” he told me. “President Putin is immutable.”

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