As the global LGBT community marks Pride Month, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people face growing, state-sanctioned homophobia and violence in Russia, activists say.
In its World Report 2023, the New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) noted that Russia has adopted “new, homophobic legislation and ramped up homophobic…rhetoric.”
“The [Russian] government continued its trajectory of…LGBT discrimination,” the report said.
LGBT persecution has been particularly severe in the North Caucasus region of Chechnya, where the Kremlin-backed strongman leader Ramzan Kadyrov has styled himself as the defender of so-called traditional Muslim values. His personally controlled security forces, called Kadyrovites, have been accused of abducting, torturing, and killing Kadyrov’s political opponents and members of the LGBT community.
HRW singled out the region for particular criticism, saying that Kadyrov “continued to ruthlessly quash all forms of dissent.”
RFE/RL’s Caucasus.Realities spoke with two members of the LGBT community from the North Caucasus region and one from the bordering southern Russian region of Stavropol. The two interviewees from Chechnya have left Russia and are living in Europe, although they requested that their location not be revealed. All of them requested that their surnames also be concealed.
‘Police…Stuck Him In The Trunk Of Their Car’
Akhmed, 25, Chechnya, left Russia in 2019
When I was a kid, the thought of being attracted to men did not seem abnormal to me. It wasn’t until I was 13 that I understood I was not “the same.”
My father has always criticized everything that he considered nontraditional. I remember once seeing the [pop music] group Ivanushki on television and my father commented that one of the singers was too flamboyant. I mentally compared myself to that singer and he didn’t seem so flamboyant to me.
Later my parents found a photograph on my phone of a young man with no shirt on. Papa started questioning me, but mama stepped in and told him that I just wanted such a physique myself. That’s when I first understood that I needed to conceal my thoughts.
Mama signed me up for an Islamic school and I began to study the Koran. I understood that my desires were bad and against my religion. I convinced myself that I should be with a woman and have a family. I observed the fasts, went to prayers, and asked God to make it so that I would not be attracted to men. For seven years I struggled and refused to accept myself.
And I couldn’t talk to anyone about any of it.
I had no friends in the village where I lived. I only made friends when I went away to university. At 22, I wanted to have a relationship. I started seeing a boy in another region, telling a friend I was going to see a girl. After a while, I confessed to my friend. At first, he didn’t believe me, but he accepted it and we continued to be friends. Later my friend became very religious and stopped answering my messages.
Mama always knew that I was gay. But we only spoke about it for the first time recently. She called me and asked me directly for the first time if I could be with a woman. I gathered up my courage and answered her honestly. She said they would cure me, help me. I tried to explain to her that this wasn’t a sickness, but I couldn’t convince her.
I was shaken for a long time. I went and spoke with a psychologist after that conversation. I decided I needed to be completely open with mama.
I wrote to her and asked her to accept me like I am. I told her I can’t be anything else even if I tried and that I didn’t know how we could get along if she couldn’t accept me. She wrote back a day later and apologized to me. She said that she loved me and many other wonderful things. My heart leapt with joy, and I wept. She understood me.
We haven’t talked about marriage since then. I cannot imagine anything better for a [gay] Chechen than having your mother stop talking about marrying you off or curing you and, instead, just treating you normally.
I realized that a witch hunt against gays was going on in Chechnya back in 2017 from the woman I worked for. She told me that the police had detained a young man out of our building and stuck him in the trunk of their car just because he had a “strange haircut” like mine.
Even before then I’d always been careful. I had been harassed every now and again, but it never occurred to me before that I might be killed. I made the final decision to leave when I saw an interview with Maksim Lapunov. (In 2017, Lapunov, from the Omsk region, reported that he had been tortured in Chechnya because of his sexual orientation.)
As long as I was in Chechnya, I was constantly afraid that they would stop me and find something on my phone. It wasn’t just that they would beat you up — there you have to worry about being abducted, tortured, and killed. In 2019, I left Russia.
Leaving was really scary. But I understood there was no life for me in Chechnya, and there never would be. So I made up my mind, tried, and it worked out. I would urge others not to be afraid and to come out of the closet, where we are so unhappy. Life in Chechnya or even in Russia will never work out normally. Things are only getting worse. First there is the war [against Ukraine]. Plus no one pays any attention to crimes against LGBT people.
You need to leave and follow your own path. That can be scary, but you can find connections, find opportunities abroad, and leave.
‘This society…wants to chew up people like us’
Artyom, 24, Pyatigorsk, Stavropol region:
I was born in a village outside of Pyatigorsk into an Armenian family. We have a large diaspora and there are neighborhoods where everyone speaks Armenian.
My family doesn’t know about my orientation. They are very traditional. But my parents are upset that I am not dating anyone. Three times already they tried to force me, but I was able to put them off.
I can’t make up my mind to tell them. I’m afraid of what they might do. There are rich and influential people in my family. I don’t think they would kill me, but they wouldn’t let me leave. In Daghestan, for instance, if they find out that you are LGBT, they might report to the police that you stole something or whatever so that you would be detained and not allowed to leave the country. We are learning such things here too.
Pyatigorsk is considered a relatively progressive city. I know a lot of people in the LGBT community who came here from Chechnya or Ingushetia. Of course, they have to live quietly and are constantly afraid they will be found out. It is only a three-hour drive to Chechnya and I have often seen how they come and search for Chechens and spy on them.
Personally, I don’t face such serious threats. No one is going to kill me or throw me in a mental hospital. But the pressure would get much worse if people found out about my orientation. My family wouldn’t let me come into the city or any of the Armenian neighborhoods. I might have problems finding work in Pyatigorsk – that’s why I left to study in another city. In order to get away from the diaspora. I don’t ‘friend’ any of my relatives on social media. I don’t use my real photograph on Telegram.
I know what would happen if my orientation became known. My father would beat the hell out of me. My parents wouldn’t let me leave the house. They would take away my phone, my books.
Source: RFERL