'Any positive talk about LGBTQ+ issues or people is outlawed' – revealing the reality for Russia's queer community

What was queer life like in Russia before the introduction of the country’s anti-LGBTQ law in 2013?

The Russian state was never particularly tolerant towards minorities in general, including LGBTQ+ people, although in the 1990s and 2000s there was no specific oppression against this group. Soviet law criminalising homosexual relationships between men was repealed in 1993, gay and lesbian clubs and bars were operating in big towns all over the country, LGBTQ+ literature was published, queer artists were free to express themselves, the topic entered mainstream pop music and art, and transgender people were able to receive necessary healthcare (though with big difficulties related both to transphobia and the nation’s flawed health system).

At the same time, queer people remained in the margins of society. There was no concerted effort to fight homophobia, and most queer people wouldn’t dare to come out publicly. Even those mainstream pop singers who were quite visibly queer on stage pretended to be straight. LGBTQ+ rights as a group were never protected, hate crimes were not considered as such (although the notion of hate crime does exist in Russian criminal code).

All this perfectly aligns with the history of modern Russia. The 2000s were years of prosperity where the general population in a way renounced its political rights in exchange for improved living standards (ensured by high hydrocarbon prices). This improvement in living conditions was very important, after a hungry and shaky 1990s that we spent in extreme poverty, with two wars raging in Chechnya. After 2000, Russia’s GDP grew on average 6.7% a year and average real income increased by 11% annually. So it was almost like, ‘Who cares who’s in the Kremlin if we get to eat so much better?!’

During this time, the state did not actively interfere in people’s private lives. It was a type of social contract: the state let you earn money and lead a decent life, not controlling what you did and what you said so long as you didn’t demand political freedoms or otherwise interfere with the country’s governance. One of the regime’s ideologists, Vladislav Surkov, called this sovereign democracy.

Things changed in 2012, when Vladimir Putin was elected to his third term, swapping places with Dmitriy Medvedev. Russia’s constitution forbade one person from serving as president for more than two terms, but it lacked the word consecutive. Putin exploited this loophole to get himself elected for a third term. Afterward, protests broke out in Moscow and other places, and, we can assume, that the holders of state power felt threatened for the first time.

Why did LGBTQ+ people become a target for the Russian state after Putin’s return to the presidency?

Many authoritarian and totalitarian regimes – from China to Venezuela, but also populist governments in liberal democracies like Hungary or the United States – build their narrative around so-called ‘traditional values’. This was the easiest choice for modern Russia too, especially taking into account that traditional Russian values and the Russian soul, in opposition to shallow western values, was a major theme for the pan-Slavic Russian intelligentsia from the 19th century onward. LGBTQ+ people were the easiest to attack in this field, as we are a relatively invisible minority of the population. We were not very well-organised and we lacked a robust civil society infrastructure focused specifically on our community.

How did Russia orchestrate its attack on LGBTQ+ communities?

First regionally, and then nationally, bills were passed that prohibited propaganda of ‘non-traditional’ sexual relations among minors – all this ‘to protect minors from information causing harm to their health and development’. Offenders faced fines, ranging from 4000 rubles (equivalent to £80 in 2013) for individuals up to one million rubles (£20,000) for organisations.

Like many populist laws, this didn’t have any immediate effect, except on LGBTQ+ minors themselves who turned out to be in even more precarious positions as their teachers or school psychologists were not able to speak to them openly on the subject fearing homophobic parents. And sexuality was taboo in the educational system for many anyways. But at this point, queer people were still dancing in clubs, and I published two gay novels, wrapped in plastic and with an 18+ sticker ‘to protect minors’. (One these novels was The Gospel According To…, which has been translated into English by Reuben Wooley and published this month in the UK.)

The government also passed another bill – this time targeting non-government organisations (NGOs) – that ultimately had a much more devastating effect on the LGBTQ+ community. Suddenly, any NGO that received money from abroad and engaged in unspecified ‘political activity’ had to register as a foreign agent, mention this in its materials, and also provide reports to the Ministry of Justice detailing where this money was coming from and how it was spent. Not only was this law discouraging donors from financing listed NGOs, and state agents cooperating with them, but it required NGOs to spend more resources on preparing those reports. This measure was not directed against LGBTQ+ organisations specifically, nor was it actively used before the annexation of Crimea and other Ukrainian territories in 2014. But at that point, dozens of NGOs were singled out as foreign agents under the law, including one LGBTQ+ organisation.

LGBTQ+ NGOs started to shut down their activities. They feared persecution and faced financial issues. Some moved their headquarters abroad to Latvia and Lithuania, which also involved higher costs and risks.

2014 was another turning point in the tightening of Russian politics. The state increased its clearing of the public sphere from independent media, NGOs, activists, politicians – anyone and anything who would be considered disloyal. People were imprisoned, exiled, or even killed like popular politician Boris Nemtsov, who was shot dead in the centre of Moscow in 2015.

2017 brought a crisis with gay and bisexual men in Chechnya. They were vulnerable in Muslim Caucasian republics and routinely trapped in fake dates, blackmailed, and physically violated both by criminals and by law enforcement agents. This was exposed in an article in Novaya Gazeta, then in other media. Journalists chronicled horrible stories of non-heterosexual Chechen men being held for weeks in dreary basements, sometime of police stations, tortured, humiliated and occasionally killed, although most were returned to their families who were then pressed to deal with these men (i.e. to kill them). Some did, others pretended to do so while quietly sending their relatives to Moscow and then abroad. I myself was covering the subject as a journalist and was even hosting a 19-year-old man, who later returned to Chechnya under family pressure and was allegedly killed. Those who managed to flee often faced persecution in Moscow, but also in foreign countries that house the Chechen diaspora, including Canada, USA, UK, Germany and France. I recommend the documentary Silent Voice (2020) by Reka Valeric, about a guy from Chechnya in Belgium who lost his voice due to the trauma he experienced during this period.

The horrors of the Chechen crisis did lead to some positive outcomes. People started to speak about LGBTQ+ rights in Chechnya; NGOs started to promote phone numbers and e-mails for those seeking help. An entire infrastructure was organised to meet these people or get them out of the region, to provide them with medical, legal, financial and psychological assistance and to help them to move further abroad. These requests happened to come not from men only – the situation with women in Chechnya and other North Caucasian republics, whether gay or straight, is even more complicated. If a man can leave his family and live in another town by himself, this is nearly impossible for women, many of whom face forced marriages, violence and even murders, while local authorities do nothing because they consider these ‘family issues’.

Then we had 2022 and the full scale invasion of Ukraine. All independent media in Russia were shut; all political and NGO activity deemed disloyal to the regime was outlawed. One million Russian nationals left the country, and scores of people are fined and imprisoned for their posts on social media, private talks and messages. Again, it wasn’t only LGBTQ+ people under attack but all vulnerable groups: new laws tightened up immigration rules; abortions were forbidden in private clinics (these were doing 15-20% of all abortions); a long-discussed law against domestic abuse failed to pass; religious minorities were persecuted, especially Jehovah's Witnesses who are imprisoned for practicing their faith. At the same time, we saw the introduction of family construction courses in schools and, in some regions, special payments to teenage girls who got pregnant.

What is queer life like in Russia today?

Remember that law that sought to protect minors from propaganda about non-traditional relationships? At the end of 2022, the law removed mention of minors. Now any positive talk about LGBTQ+ issues or people is outlawed, and anything really could be treated as propaganda – a young woman spent five days under administrative arrest in 2024 for wearing earrings in a shape of a frog in rainbow colours. She bought them legally in an online shop and claimed she had no relation whatsoever to LGBTQ+ causes. My books of course disappeared from online stores, who erased my name like I never existed.

But this propaganda law isn’t even the worst threat to Russia’s queer community. In 2023, the High Court in Russia declared the International LGBT Public Movement as extremist, banning its activity in the country. Does this movement even exist? Well, the High Court decided it did. A person charged with organising an activity on behalf of an extremist organisation can face up to 10 years in prison; participating in such an organisation receives up to six years; displaying extremist symbols is punishable with a fine for the first violation and imprisonment of up to 8 years for the second. The last bit essentially equates a Nazi swastika with rainbow flag. And under this law, alleged extremists are named on a list, before facing trial. These individuals cannot leave the country, their bank accounts are frozen, they cannot perform transactions with real estate and securities. Their life becomes quite complicated to put it mildly.

As of January 2025, there were 13 pending extremist cases in the Russian courts, including against owners of clandestine gay venues in provincial towns. One defendant, an owner of a gay travel agency, committed suicide in custody in Moscow. There were also 61 administrative cases for demonstrations of ‘extremist LGBT symbols’. Not only rainbow colours but also a photo of two young women holding hands was considered extremist.

Bizarrely enough, gay clubs and bars in Moscow still operate and attract customers, presumably in cooperation with police and secret services. They are constantly raided by police forces. Sometime a raid might be announced from a stage in advance, for those who do not wish to meet men in uniform, and sometime there is no warning. Anyone caught up in a raid is made to lay on the floor for hours, and has their ID photographed. There are rumours that a list of gay people is being prepared but no official confirmation of that exists so far.

The fate of transgender people is much worse. Whereas the Soviet Union carried out gender confirmation surgery, Russia banned everything related to the matter in July 2023. Moreover, law enforcement agencies opened several cases against those who had those surgeries and those who had their gender markers changed in their official documents, allegedly to investigate if those deeds were performed in accordance with law.

What spaces of resistance exist? Where do you find hope in these bleak times?

There are constant trials against people charged with high treason and terrorism who throw Molotov cocktails into military enlistment offices, burn railway transformer booths and transmit information to the Ukrainian army about Russian military forces. There’re also those who choose less violent ways of resistance, for instance by helping Ukrainians from occupied territories flee to third countries, helping young Russian men avoid military service, or helping deserters from the Russian army to escape abroad.

Despite the fact that any activity in the LGBTQ+ field is dangerous, there are still groups, mostly in Moscow and St. Petersburg, that concentrate on helping others with anything that a queer person, or even just a cisgender heterosexual woman from traditionalist family in North Caucasus, might need. There’s still a shelter in Moscow that has operated since the Chechen gay crisis, welcoming dozens of people each year from all over Russia. There are still courageous activists who work. They do fear but they continue to work. Sometimes they burn out and leave the field and sometimes the country, but there are always new ones joining. This endless stream of brave people, that I personally cannot explain and can only admire. This is what my novel The Gospel According To… is actually about – how ordinary people become activists if not messiahs under the pressure of these dire circumstances.

How did writing The Gospel According To… differ to your experience writing your earlier novel?

My first novel A Different Childhood was based entirely on my own experience of growing up as a gay boy in the late Soviet Union and then in Russia in the 1990s. You can find two extracts from it here.

When I was writing The Gospel According To… I was already working as a journalist and used a lot of this background. I spoke to many different people, learning about their stories that I then incorporated into my book. This is why I call it documentary fiction: it is 100% based on someone’s experience – mine or others. Like I was never arrested or jailed but I wrote a lot about the Russian penitentiary system, and, for this novel, I specifically spoke with gay guys who served terms in camps (usually for drug related cases) or even with straight ones who told me about their gay inmates. I tried to show not one man’s story only but that of the entire system, though I have to point out that the novel was written in 2017 and things got much worse after 2022. We read the stories of Ukrainian prisoners of war who are tortured, inhumanly and pointlessly, torture for the sake of torture – I think it demonstrates that the whole system, if not yet the entire society, has descended further into this vicious circle of violence. These people, the torturers, will never become less violent, and they will contaminate others with this cruelty. Now we have these veterans of the Ukrainian Special Military Operation instructing kids at schools, and offering special courses for pupils on how to use guns – violence and war are becoming an integral part of this new generation. This I don’t have in my book, though it does contain plenty of violence.

There’s a miraculous story about this novel. A year after it was published in Russia, I got an e-mail from an 18-year-old boy who ran out from home and was so afraid of his mother that he refused to meet at a café. We were chatting in a park despite of summer drizzle. Imagine my astonishment when I realised that this young man’s story was a retelling of my previously published fiction! He ran away from his hometown when he was 17, his friend offered him shelter in Moscow, and his mother corrupted police so it opened a criminal case against that friend for sexually violating the minor! The difference with my novel was that the real defendant wasn’t arrested but managed to flee abroad. Several articles were published on the subject and I found a lawyer for that boy who accompanied him to the Investigative Committee so he could testify that no sexual contact took place. Eight years have passed, yet the case is still opened; the defendant is in exile and the ‘victim’ is hiding from his mother, struggling to get a European visa to get himself out of the country.

What can those of us living abroad do to support our LGBTQ+ siblings inside Putin’s Russia?

We can surely speak about all this and raise awareness, and donate if we can, and help those who managed to get out of Russia (or Iran, Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia, you name it). When the Chechen gay crises broke out in 2017, Russian activists and journalists started to approach European embassies asking them to issue refugee visas to the guys from Chechnya, and you know what they said: we’re not going to give refugee visas to Chechens as there are so many Islamic extremists coming from the region, but if you manage somehow to get to the EU, then we will consider your applications. Which meant ‘get a tourist visa first’, though they would never issue those. The only country that really helped and welcomed dozens of people was Canada. Maybe we can pressure our governments to revise these policies, but I struggle to see how.

Banner image: Protest on Akademika Sakharov Avenue in Moscow on 10 August, 2019. (Image: Shutterstock/Irina Boldina)