Attacks on LGBT people in Russia have increased as much as tenfold since the Russian Duma voted in June of 2013 to outlaw “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations among minors.”
A recent Human Rights Watch report documented physical attacks, abductions, aggressive harassment and verbal abuse of LGBT people and activists in 16 Russian cities. LGBT employees working with children were routinely sacked from their jobs if their sexual orientation became known.
Another report, by a Russian LGBT-rights group, reported 300 homophobic attacks during 2014, a tenfold increase compared with the survey they conducted in 2013.
Most attacks go unreported. Where attacks have been reported to the police, the response varies from indifference to blaming the victim. Only three prosecutions for anti-LGBT hate crimes took place in 2013, resulting in two convictions (and light sentences).
Attacks on individuals have been accompanied by organised attacks on LGBT events, such as QueerFests and Gay Parades, and on the premises of LGBT-rights organisations.
These attacks are the most visible, and most violent, expression of a much broader homophobic campaign which the Russian media and authorities have not only failed to challenge but have positively encouraged.
Reports about LGBT people on the television channel Rossiya 1 increased from 11 in 2011 to over 160 last year, almost all either negative or hostile.
According to the channel’s “reports”: LGBT people are “an aggressive minority” opposed to “parents who give their children a healthy upbringing”; 40% of children brought up by gays have venereal diseases; and Russia is in danger of being engulfed by “a homosexual sodomite tsunami.”
News reports have also linked Islamist terrorism to homosexuality. According to one report about an alleged Islamist bombing in Volgograd:
“In the Wahhabi underground homosexualism is a very widespread phenomenon. Homosexualism literally penetrates the Wahhabi organisations. Their secret hideouts are veritable gay clubs. The autopsy carried out on one of them showed that he was an active (more accurately: passive) supporter of ‘non-traditional relationships’.”
On Twitter the use of the terms “paedo” to describe gays increased from 7,000 a month to over 70,000 a month between 2011 and the end of 2013. Over the same period of time the use of the term “sodomite” to describe gays increased from two or three times a day to over a hundred times a day.
While mainstream and social media have stepped up their homophobic content, Russian politicians have promoted homophobic legislation.
A bill to outlaw “gay propaganda” was proposed four times in the Duma prior to its eventual adoption in June of 2013. By that time, similar bans had already been imposed by local parliaments in a dozen of Russia’s federal regions.
Different versions of the local bans variously outlawed propaganda about “homosexualism and paedophilia”, “homosexualism, bisexualism and transgendering”, and “homosexualism and bisexualism”.
In St Petersburg the ban on “gay propaganda” was an initiative of Vitaly Milonov, a member of the city council and Putin’s United Russia party. According to Milonov, homosexuality is a sin which is encouraged by the West in order to weaken Russia, and is also a manifestation of the decline and decadence of the West.
Milinov’s views on homosexuality reflect a more fundamental linkage between homophobia and a resurgent Russian nationalism, in which the most far-right and xenophobic versions are also the most homophobic.
Vladimir Tor, a founding member of the National-Democratic Party (party-slogan: “Russia for the Russians!”) has called for “the elimination of all gays”, has equated homosexuality not just with paedophilia but with bestiality, and has likened the impact of gay marriages on Russia to that of an atomic bomb.
The “Night Wolves” (a politicised bikers organisation which backs Putin and others politicians much further to the right) has called for the defence of Russia against Gay Parades, “so that Russia does not become a sewage drainpipe for all the shit coming to us from the West.”
Sergei Kuryaginyan’s “Essence of Time” movement (which campaigns for the restoration of the USSR) had identified “feminisation” as one of the supposed threats to the very existence of Russia, with homosexuality identified as a form of “feminisation”.
The pro-government organisation “Russian Mothers”, originally launched to campaign against a separate judicial system for juveniles, has evolved into a campaign against supposed homosexual violence against minors (which, it claims, has become a “tradition” in Norway).
The film commissioned by “Strength in Truth” — a pro-government organisation launched to counter foreign criticism of the banning of “gay propaganda” in 2013 — was billed as “a shocking film about the crimes committed against children by homosexuals.”
(“Strength in Truth” described itself as “a mass asymmetrical response to the international homosexual hysteria and calls for a boycott of the Olympics in Sochi because of Russia having adopted a law banning the propaganda of homosexualism among minors.”)
According to the “Will of God” (a mixture of Russian-Orthodox bigotry and Russian-xenophobia), “homosexualism is a real plague, a real virus, which must be destroyed. It must be stoned to death, as God has said.”
Placards produced by the “Will of God” read: “The More Churches, the Less Sodomites” and “The More Churches, The Less Paedophiles”.
The Union of Russian Orthodox Standard Bearers (slogans: “Moscow is not Sodom” and “Russian-Orthodoxy or Death”) , along with United Russian Orthodox Youth, has a record of physical attacks on LGBT events, as well as public book-burnings, marches against science, and pickets of western consulates in Moscow.
According to its leader, Igor Miroshnichenko: “The LGBT movement spells death for all humanity, the end of demographic growth (obviously, a reduction in the number of ordinary people is what those who run the world behind the scenes want), and this, in turn, is a breach of the divine commandment: Go forth and multiply!”
Although the radical-nationalist wing of Russian paganism and neo-paganism is anti-Christian — a “Jewish religion” which is automatically unacceptable to their anti-semitism — they share the hostility of Russian Orthodoxy to homosexuality.
According to one of their websites (“Midgard-Info”): “Sexual minorities are a breeding ground for paedophiles who commit acts of violence against children, and for sadists and other maniacs who rape and kill their victims. … All unnatural phenomena (drug addiction, homosexuality, etc.) are to be condemned in the ruthless manner.”
For the pagans and neo-pagans gay sex fails to fulfil the basic purpose of sexual activity: “Every Russian woman — from the Tsarina to the peasant — should have an average of seven children. Let this be an example to our contemporary ‘Russian’ feminists.”
(Inverted commas in the original. To be a feminist, in the eyes of pagans and neo-pagans, is simply not Russian.)
In part, the homophobia of most currents of Russian nationalism is a by-product of their shared admiration of Stalin’s Soviet Union: admired both as a world power with Russia at its centre, and also as an authoritarian state which clamped down on homosexuality, with a causal connection drawn between the two.
Homosexuality was outlawed by Stalin in 1933. According to Yagoda, then then head of the secret police, homosexuals had organised spy networks and “paedophiles were involved in seducing and perverting healthy Soviet youth.”
In an article published in Pravda the writer Maxim Gorky wrote that proletarian humanism demanded the destruction of “homosexualism” as it was, he claimed, a cause of fascism.
(During and after Stalin’s rule, the term “homosexualism”, not “homosexuality”, was used. Contemporary Russian nationalism uses the same expression, reflecting their “understanding” of homosexuality as a pathological condition.
Until the formal de-pathologisation of homosexuality in 1999, Stalinist and post-Stalinist medical dictionaries included “homosexualism” in a list of “sexual perversions”, defined as “illnesses which conflict with sexual orientation or the conditions of its satisfaction.”)
More fundamentally, homosexuality is seen by Russian nationalism as being at odds with its basic goals:
It contributes nothing to the reproduction of the population, needed to save the Russian people from extinction and to protect its borders. This view of homosexuality as an existential threat explains the constant amalgam of homosexuality and paedophilia, given that children represent “the future”.
Homosexuality is also understood as something intrinsically anti-Russian and non-Russian:
Gay rights are a European phenomenon, and Europe, in its current form, is hostile to Russia (even before the imposition of sanctions). And the incorporation of a homophobic Russian-Orthodoxy into Russian identity results in a counterposing of the “true” Russian identity to homosexuality.
Like any other national identity, there is nothing intrinsically anti-LGBT about being Russian. What is involved here is an attempt by far-right and even some mainstream versions of Russian nationalism to construct a Russian identity in which homophobia is a constituent element.
Denunciations of gay rights as a western plot to undermine Russia are no reason for socialists and LGBT activists in the west to hold back from campaigning in solidarity with LGBT activists in Russia.
In fact, the level of hostility and violence which they face on a daily basis makes such solidarity all the more important.
