EXPLAINING THE STRUGGLE FOR HUMAN RIGHTS IN RUSSIA |
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Hello and welcome back to the Digest. And a special welcome to everyone I met in DC and Baltimore! |
Today we have another update on the persecution of LGBT community. |
In solidarity, Dan Storyev |
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Trigger warning:
This is a newsletter about Russian repressions. Sometimes it will be hard to read. |
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The Kremlin continues its attack on Russia’s all things perceived to be queer in Russia. Just this month we saw nightclub raids and fines for memes. For instance, Georgy Rezankov was charged with displaying extremist symbols — for a meme with Pepe the frog and a photo of Clara Zetkin and Rosa Luxemburg.
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The district police officer who initiated the case found the pictures on Rezankov’s page on the social media platform VKontakte. The officer said that these images contained a “symbol of the international LGBT public movement.” |
| Pepe the frog from Rezankov’s VKontakte page |
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The court documents state that one of the pictures depicts an “anthropomorphic frog from comics, wearing a rainbow wig on its head,” and the second one depicts a “historical photograph” of Zetkin and Luxemburg with an image of a rainbow flag.
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Rezankov himself explained in court that the meme of Pepe “has nothing to do with LGBT.” And the photo of Zetkin and Luxemburg “also does not indicate LGBT propaganda, although some researchers believe that they were in an intimate relationship.”
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“Auntie Clara and Auntie Rose wish you a Happy International Women’s Day. 8 March is kosher! Fashionable! Youthful!” — Zetkin and Luxemburg meme from Rezankov’s VKontakte page |
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The Luxemburg picture, by the way, is vaguely antisemitic, the caption mocking distinct features of post-soviet Jewish dialect. The court made no mention of this. |
The judge also did not accept the argument that Rezankov published the pictures in 2020 before the “LGBT movement” was declared “extremist” by the Kremlin. She stated that Rezankov had committed an ongoing offense and had to “bring his page into compliance with the law.” The court fined Georgy Rezankov 1,500 rubles — roughly 19 USD. |
Notably, there were also errors in the court ruling. Instead of Zetkin and Luxemburg, the German feminist activists became “Zentkin” and “Luxinbur.” And in the list of colors of the rainbow flag, instead of the last color, purple, orange was indicated for a second time.
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On a more serious note, the authorities also came after the queer community in a novel and disturbing manner. The authorities have long put pressure on the book industry, occasionally forcing publishers to put out books with entire paragraphs blacked out. The censorship impacts prominent authors as well as obscure philosophical literature. The most censored topics include queer rights, gender studies and various questions of historical memory.
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| Pages of the Russian edition of the biography of Pier Paolo Pasolini by Robert Cornero, published by AST / Photo: Ivan Davydov |
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Last month, police showed up at bookstore Podpisnye Izdaniya, where they expropriated dozens of books mentioning the LGBT community. Last week they escalated. |
A Moscow court placed Pavel Ivanov, former sales director of the Popcorn Books and Individuum publishing houses, warehouse manager Artem Vakhlyaev, and executive director Dmitry Protopopov under house arrest. Popcorn Books in particular is famous for publishing an extremely popular queer novel, Pioneer Summer. |
The investigation apparently believes that Ivanov, Vakhlyaev, and Protopopov were aware of the designation of the “international LGBT movement” as extremist, thus breaking the law by publishing books on queer topics. The Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation stated that the defendants “published and sold books promoting the activities of the LGBT movement for selfish reasons, <...> to an unlimited number of people, including minors.”
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Russia was once a frontier of higher education, attracting top teachers and students worldwide. Today, Russian universities are being rapidly militarized while their overall quality has tanked.
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“According to the investigation, an ‘unidentified person’ was in Moscow and knew that an ‘organisation’ (publishing house), unnamed by the investigators, had unsold books on LGBT topics, which they supposedly planned to sell for profit,” as lawyer Maxim Olenichev from the NGO “First Department” said in an interview. |
The investigation claimed that people simply reading LGBT literature could then allegedly become supporters of the “international LGBT public movement”, which would make Ivanov, Vakhlyaev and Protopopov responsible for involving those people in the activities of an “extremist LGBT organization” by having sold them the books in the first place. |
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1 — Pavel Ivanov and Artem Vakhlyaev in Zamoskvoretsky District Court of Moscow; 2 — Dmitry Protopopov in Zamoskvoretsky District Court of Moscow / Photo: Court press service |
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“According to the investigation, at least eight women were thus ‘involved’ in the activities of a non-existent [extremist] organization,” Olenichev added. The entire criminal case is built around business processes, the lawyer emphasized. The investigation considers the distribution of LGBT literature to be an extremist activity. |
“Formally, not a single queer book has been recognized as “extremist” in Russia. As a crime, investigators accuse the defendants of mass distribution of queer literature with the aim of involving them in the activities of the “International LGBT Public Movement,” the lawyer for “First Department” noted.
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Unfortunately, this is yet another example of the Kremlin tightening the screws on the queer community. It is likely to go on like this, escalating and getting worse before it gets any better. |
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