Another in our series of translations of the latest Carnegie Politika articles.
Resolving the Gay Question. Why was LGBT+ designated the main domestic enemy in Russia during the era of the Special Military Operation?
Unlike the Soviet approach, Putin’s neo-Victorianism is not directed against same-sex relations as such, or even the people who practice it. It is directed against any information about LGBT — that such a phenomenon exists and is a variant of the norm.
Andrey Shaskov
The situation with LGBT+ rights in Russia began to deteriorate long before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. But in the three years since then, the regime has gone much further down this path than in all the previous 22 years combined. Nevertheless, the idea of the notorious “Orthodox Sharia” does not accurately reflect the logic of the regime’s actions, whose homophobia has a special, political nature. Unlike the USSR or Iran, the authorities of today’s Russia are trying to exterminate LGBT+ not so much as a stratum of society with certain sexual practices, but as a civil and cultural phenomenon.
2022–2023
The war was impacting the situation of Russian LGBT+ as early as the first weeks after it kicked off. In mid-March 2022, Russia was expelled from the Council of Europe – a symbolic milestone, if we recall that in 1993, the legalization of male homosexuality was a condition for joining that very Council. After that, many were anxiously awaiting the restoration of the corresponding criminal article, which was discussed among pro-government speakers as a logical, long overdue step. However, domestic policy ideologists ultimately took a fundamentally different path.
At that time, formally the only sign of discrimination against LGBT+ in Russia was the 2013 law “On the Prohibition of Propaganda of Homosexuality Among Minors.” But already in the fall of 2022, the Duma prepared amendments expanding the ban to all ages.
The timing here is telling: the Ukrainian counteroffensive was in full swing, “referendums” on the annexation of “new regions” had just taken place, and partial mobilization had been announced. But even at such a moment, the anti-gay front turned out to be no less important than the fight against the “Ukronazis.” “The SVO is happening not only on the battlefield, but also in people’s minds,” the author of the amendments, Aleksandr Khinshteyn, explained at the time.
In July 2023, transgender transitions were banned in Russia. This time, it all started in a direct — albeit completely absurd — connection with the SVO. The head of the Investigative Committee, Alexander Bastrykin, started talking about the alleged mass fraud with legal “gender change” from male to female in order to avoid military service.
No evidence or even an assessment of the scale of abuses was ever provided. The actual volume of transgender transitions in Russia at that time was around 3,000 per year in a country of 140 million (in both directions) and was unlikely to undermine the country’s defense capability. But the Russian authorities, in their turn away from the corrupt West, decided to outdo even Iran, where there is no such ban. And the Russian healthcare system, which had long been guided by international standards and WHO recommendations, officially suspended the switch from ICD-10 to ICD-11. [ICD – International Classification of Diseases]
The Main “Before and After”
By the end of 2023, stalling on the external fronts only exacerbated the need for decisive victories over the domestic enemies. On November 30, 2023, Supreme Court Judge Oleg Nefedov granted the Justice Ministry’s lawsuit filed just two weeks earlier to recognize the International LGBT Movement as an extremist organization.
The hearing of the claim, potentially affecting around 5-10 million Russian citizens, was held behind closed doors and took four hours. The choice of judge was also characteristic: a 49-year-old graduate of the Ulyanovsk State University, who had worked in his position for less than five months at that time and had previously considered mainly land and property disputes.
During the trial, no justification was presented for how exactly LGBT+ people manifest their extremism, nor even the basic signs that they form some kind of organized movement with leadership, regulations, budgets, and declared goals. Hitler could have carried out the Holocaust on the basis that Jews form an “international extremist movement.”
Only after some time did the “justification” for Nefedov’s historic decision appear in the media. The 19 pages stated that a single international movement that emerged in the US in the 1960s had taken root in the USSR since 1984. Its representatives (almost 300 individuals) were counted in 60 subjects of the Russian Federation. According to the Ministry of Justice (through Nefedov), the participants of the movement are distinguished by “the presence of certain morals and customs” and “radicalism and a tendency towards repression.” A separate important feature was the use of feminine gender-specific grammar in speech.
Nevertheless, despite all the absurdity, Nefedov’s decision may only at first glance seem like an attempt to a quasi-return to the article on sodomy from the Soviet era. In fact, a much broader decision was made. Instead of persecuting same-sex sexual relations, the Russian authorities chose to persecute any public discussion about LGBT.
Simply “displaying extremist symbols” (for example, a rainbow avatar on social networks) could land an offender up to 15 days and a fine (Articles 20.29 and 20.3 of the Code of Administrative Offenses), and for organizing/participating in “activities of the movement” (Article 282.2 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation) you can go to prison for up to 12 years. For comparison: in the USSR, the “sodomy” law it wasn’t rainbow colors that were punished, but sex between two men — for up to 5 years.
The verdict was followed by a wave of raids on gay clubs. Since then (December 2023), similar news was repeated in various LGBT sites in Moscow and other Russian cities at least several more times.
On the one hand, such raids were regularly carried out before, and it is not even possible to say that their frequency has increased dramatically. However, since 2024, security forces have stopped pretending to break into gay clubs as part of anti-drug raids. Now this is officially presented as “prevention of LGBT extremism” — the fight against gays as such, which means that problems may arise not only for those who are found with prohibited substances.
They started searching more than just pockets, but also the contents of phones, for prohibited information. LGBT chats, rainbow avatars on social networks from many years ago, and other signs of participation in an “extremist association”. However, the captains of the LGBT business in Russia did not see any problems in what was happening. “This decision has nothing to do with us, if you read its wording correctly,” said Ilya Abaturov, the owner of Moscow’s largest gay nightclub, Central Station. In a situation where the West “is trying to squeeze us out of all its sports, cultural and other values, and is directly waging war against us by transferring its weapons…we need to wait a little for the situation to evolve and rule out any possibility of enemy propaganda,” Abaturov continued.
Repression and Censorship
At the same time, actual statistics of LGBT repressions are not yet striking in comparison, for example, with laws on discrediting the army, justifying terrorism, and other more common ones. Even under the most widespread specialized article (6.21 of the Code of Administrative Offenses, “Propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations”) in 2024, the Judicial Department of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation counted only 214 protocols received for consideration against 221 individuals.
Law enforcement practice on criminal (extremist) laws related to LGBT+ is only beginning to take shape. In 2024, the publication “We Can Explain” was able to count only 13 cases from open sources. But the dramatic nature of each incident has increased many times over.
The most resonant illustration: the arrest of tour operator Andrey Kotov for organizing trips for groups of men. He was soon found dead in a pretrial detention center — allegedly he slit his own wrists after the investigation stated that child pornography was found on his phone. Nevertheless, it was announced that Kotov’s case would not be closed just because the accused was dead, but that he would continue to be tried posthumously — an exceptional case even for Russian justice.
Another high-profile LGBT trial was dubbed “the book publishers’ case.” On May 14, a dozen searches were conducted at the homes of employees of the Individuum and Popcorn Books publishing houses, which are part of Russia’s largest publishing house, EKSMO. Three people were placed under house arrest. The security forces were interested in ten books on LGBT topics, including the novel “Summer in the Red Scarf,” which sold over 250,000 copies.
Now the Russian book market is in a panic: publishers are urgently sending distributors lists of books for immediate destruction with mandatory confirmation.
Less high-profile but far more numerous examples of censorship concern video content. The most diverse things are censored: from individual lines and characters in films and TV series to entire storylines. A detailed study on the topic was published in February 2025 by Verstka. According to this data, almost four hours of total running time were cut from “Game of Thrones” on Amediateka, for example.
Putin’s Formula of Homophobia
At the same time, the Russian regime itself still does not shy away from homosexual aesthetics. From photos distributed by the Kremlin press service of Putin and Shoigu having fun together in the taiga, to the performances of the SVO’s main singer Shaman, dressed in leather and singing the song “My Fight,” in which too many people hear “My Boy.”
[Translator note: The Russian word for fight, “бой”, is pronounced exactly the same as the English word “boy”.]
However, there is no great contradiction in this. Putin’s neo-Victorianism is not directed against “non-traditional sex” as such or even against the people who practice it. The target is any information about LGBT – about the fact that such a phenomenon exists and is a variant of the norm. This is what is understood by “gay propaganda”, even if expressed not directly, but in hints.
It is therefore logical that the struggle on this front has intensified so much since February 24, the invasion date. Having created a threat to its own stability, the regime needs not only a scapegoat to which it can conveniently shift attention, but also a repressive campaign that will keep everyone in fear.
The LGBT+ community and all those who sympathize with them are not as vague as “foreign agents” and are much more inclusive than any ethnic or religious minority. Meanwhile, “proper” gays who do not publicly identify themselves as gay and work for Putin still remain as “friends” for the system. A striking example is Khinshteyn himself, whose public exposure as a participant in at least bisexual orgies in April 2024 did not prevent him from receiving a responsible appointment to the post of contingency governor in the Kursk region.
From now on, the anti-gay campaign will most likely evolve based on the inertial scenario. The regime will continue to purge public gay establishments and censor LGBT content, but will do without mass arrests for same-sex relations, limiting itself to several high-profile cases a year to maintain the necessary degree of tension. The Russian government has repeatedly proven that, despite all the fervor of the fight against LGBT, it is not at all bothered by the homosexual adventures of Volodin, Gref, Kirkorov, Baskov, Lazarev, Zhirinovsky and other “non-gays” – as long as they happen behind closed doors. After all, the essence of Putin’s policy towards LGBT comes down to a slightly modified phrase of Goering: “I will decide who is a gay.”
Translating History 