“First they came for the communists, / and I did not speak out because I wasn’t a communist”, begins Martin Niemöller’s famous poem that so hauntingly critiques the complacence of the German intellectuals who looked on while the Nazis rose to power. Who, eighty years later, is speaking out while Russia comes for its LGBT population?
There’s clearly a loud and desperate voice for gay rights within Russia, as harrowing images of bloodied activists are becoming increasingly common. Further west, Barack Obama recently condemned Russia’s increasingly draconian anti-gay laws in an interview with Jay Leno on the Tonight Show. Meanwhile, this week, Stephen Fry wrote an open letter to David Cameron and the International Olympic Committee calling for a the fast-approaching 2014 Winter Olympics to be pulled out of Sochi. In his letter, which went viral, Fry makes a potent comparison between the upcoming games in Russia and the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany. In arguments, comparisons to Nazism are usually idle and misplaced. In this case, however, likening the dead-eyed marsupial Putin to Hitler couldn’t be more apt. In Russia, a supposedly progressive democracy, new anti-gay legislation is truly reminiscent of the anti-Semitic Nuremberg Laws. It is paving the way for a state in which LGBT people are tortured to death, while the authorities do nothing.
In a series of bills pushed through the Duma, Putin has criminalised “homosexual propaganda”. That’s right, this guy has a problem with camp. This guy. Anyone who “looks gay” (cough) is committing an arrestable offence. This now includes tourists. Adults have been banned from “corrupting” under-18s with the idea that homosexuality is anything but sordid and unnatural. Their perpetrators safe from prosecution, homophobic attacks have become pandemic in Russia. Many of these are carried out by neo-Nazi gangs who are leading a campaign called “Occupy Paedophilia”. Russia has a bizarre history of confusing love between members of the same sex with child molestation. In 1933, Stalin outlawed homosexuality for this very reason. Stalin also famously thought that Holland and the Netherlands were two separate countries – enough to make UKIP’s Godfrey Bloom look like a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.
Russia’s relationship with its gay population has been complicated for hundreds of years. Homosexuality was first outlawed by Tsar Peter the Great in the eighteenth century. It was decriminalised by Lenin, shortly after the 1917 Revolution, then recriminalised by Stalin. In 1993, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Boris Yeltsin decriminalised homosexuality for the second time. The common factor in Russia’s intermittent scapegoating of LGBT people is a sycophantic desire to buddy-up to the Orthodox Church. Even Stalin, some historians have argued, had the church in mind when he outlawed homosexuality. Putin’s current war on gays is a noxious combination of the authoritarianism of the former USSR and the social conservatism of the Orthodoxy. In the name of traditional Russian values, the former KGB man has stripped millions of Russians of their human rights and facilitated some of the most heinous hate crimes in recent years.
Outrage at Russia’s legalised gay-bashing has been widespread. From calls to boycott Stolichnaya vodka in bars all over the world, to this petition by LGBT rights group All Out, demanding, as Stephen Fry did, that the IOC speak out against Russia’s human rights abuses in the lead-up to the Winter Olympics. The petition has received over 300,000 signatures and was presented to the IOC headquarters in Switzerland earlier this week. A failure by the committee to uphold its commitment to equality and protect gay athletes by pulling the games out of Putin’s cesspool of oppression would be an enormous blow to the global struggle for LGBT rights. The IOC has the power to take a meaningful stand against tyranny and a decision against doing so would be devastating.
Last month, Desmond Tutu, speaking at the launch of a South African gay rights campaign, said that he would rather go to hell than worship a homophobic God. He added that he is as passionate about this campaign as he was about the one against apartheid, in which he was so instrumental. I accept that the Anglican Church, of which Tutu is a member, is vastly different from that of the Russian Orthodoxy. Yet the bishop pointed out that there is not only a place for gays within Christianity, but that failing to protect LGBT people is simply un-Christian. It may be a long while before the likes of the Orthodox Church, which Putin, while so ostentatiously camp himself, is so keen on placating, recognises this. In the meantime, the persecution of gays in Russia needs to be taken just as seriously by the global powers that be as the discrimination against Palestinians in Israel, or the Rohingya Muslims in Burma. This Saturday, a protest against Russia’s anti-gay legislation is taking place in Westminster. Londoners, I hope to see you there.
Content from our partners
Related
