Editor's Note:Gay rights activist Scott Long is in Moscow observing plans for the city's first-ever Gay Pride parade, which was banned by Mayor Yuri Luzhkov. Following are his reports from Russia. Long is director of the LGBT Rights Program at Human Rights Watch and is not an employee of the Washington Blade or Window Media.
We broke into small groups. First mistake: the decision to go over to the unknown soldier’s tomb separately, so as not to attract attention. It was a mile or so away. With Louis-Georges and a couple of Russian friends, let’s call them Boris and Serge, I bought token flowers, set out for the site.
Nikolai had spent the morning negotiating in the hotel with police representatives. He’d described the afternoon’s plans; they’d assured him he would have adequate protection. One of them, I’m told, a Colonel Vyacheslav (he wouldn’t give his last name) specifically warned there would be right-wing demonstrators, but said they’d be kept separated.
Under the Kremlin there’s an enormous… what? Morgue?
Crypt? Bomb shelter? No, shopping mall. When we got to the memorial, in the Alexandrovsky Garden just north of Red Square, rain was drizzling down and so we descended to the bowels of the mall. We wandered around for forty-five minutes or so, looking for a place to have a coffee. Crowds of New Russians in trendy sneakers and subtle colognes. Shops crammed with fashionwear price twice their western tags. We were wet, lightheaded, and it was a consumer phantasmagoria where we circled, passing other knots of people we knew were headed for the demonstration--furtive “hellos,” after all we didn’t know each other---and somehow the most vivid images of this day get merged with rows of jockey shorts hanging off muscular mannequins behind plate glass, or expensive ice cream heaped in obscene multi-coloured coils. When we emerged the rain was pouring and I had to go back and buy two umbrellas and that was why we were slightly late to the first onslaught.
We were meant to assemble at 2.30, coalesce out of nowhere, and lay our roses on the tomb of the unknown warrior against fascism, Russia’s anonymous hero of the Second World War. At 2.25 the first contingent came, Nikolai Alekseyev and Merlin Holland (Oscar Wilde’s grandson) and a couple of other people, approaching the gate of the tomb with their votive roses. A little early. Dangerously alone.
We got there at 2.30.
As they neared the entrance, draggled in the downpour, the skinheads came out of nowhere. I say “skinheads”
as a useful generalization. In fact very few of them fit the stereotype. There were three waves.
First there were the Boys, the most numerous, mostly young (though some ranged into their late thirties), black-clad, short-haired though usually not shaven, thuggish and enraged. They were the shock troops.
They were followed by the Priests. These, fatter, older, carried crosses or icons.They had beards, often, leather jackets trimmed to look like orthodox cassocks, sometimes black T-shirts with crosses bent fascist-style as if ready to administer a black mass.
They chanted. Chanted. Finally, in the rear, there were the grandmothers. Old babushkas, kerchiefed, also carrying icons. They turned their backs on the mayhem the leaders were causing, faced the curious or outraged crowd, vented their tearful misery at the spectacle of their grandsons being arrested behind them, sang hymns, presented a pathetic face of suffering. Excellent PR.
The little band of people trying to present their roses were suddenly surrounded. The Boys began shoving them, grabbing them, thrusting and punching and shouting. Then abruptly the police moved in—Moscow cops and OMON, special riot police. There were hundreds planted around the square. The skinheads had circled the demonstrators, now the police circled both. They forced them back against the gates to the tomb. Nikolai Alekseyev was arrested almost immediately, grabbed by police and shoved into a waiting bus.
So essentially: the police let the extremists in to beat and terrorize the lesbians and gays, then coursed in to drive the skinheads out.
Scott Long is the director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Rights program for Human Rights Watch, and can be reached via their website.
The skinheads kept tangling with the lesbians and gays as the cops compressed them. Then the cops released the pressure and they all broke loose, a melee surging from the Garden into Manezhnaya Square. That was what it looked like when we arrived, a tangle of flailing arms and shrill screams. “Moscow is not Sodom”: “For a clean Moscow”: “Faggots Out.” Merlin Holland was kicked. Sophie in’t Veld, a Dutch member of the European Parliament attending the march, was jostled
severely. I ran down to the center of things and
tried to make out what was going on. The Boys had retreated northward across the square. The Priests and Grandmothers were left behind. The Priests gathered and sang orthodox chants. The Grandmothers prayed. The babushkas were not beyond violence, however. One, seeing Pierre Serne—the diminutive LGBT counselor to Paris’ mayor, also a guest of honor—didn’t bother throwing an egg at him; she smashed it over his head.
A few of us tried to regroup in the rain. But the skinheads kept trying to reinvade the square from the north, and the police would charge them to keep them out. Finally the police massed, several hundred, and rolled forward against the skinheads—who had served their purpose there, and were wanted elsewhere. They drove them across Ohkotny Ryad, a wide street at the north end of the Red Square ensemble, stopping squalling traffic. The routed extremists threw flares, which exploded fiercely in the street and left mushroom clouds of steam in the rain.
Police rounded up twenty or thirty skinheads, lined them face against a wall, beat many, then hauled them to a bus with brutal force. Later a police spokesman would claim that the “homosexual marchers” had thrown the flares. This was transparently false to anyone present, but it was part of a strategy, to blame all the violence on the lesbians and gays and pretend the neo-fascists weren’t even there. This revealed, however, the incoherence of the official version, since its other side was that the march provoked the neo-fascists and brought violence to Moscow.
The 30 or 40 “pride marchers” were hopelessly split by now. Nobody had drawn up a phone list or decided on a meeting point in the case of disaster; nobody knew how to find anybody else; all we knew was the other goal was to reach city hall, up Tverskaya Ulica (a wide shopping street) from the Kremlin. In small, frightened, and disconnected bands, people started heading there.
Two activists, Dima Morozov and Alexei Kozlov, from the non-gay leftist Youth Movement for Human Rights and the Green Alternative respectively, had applied to hold a picket opposite City Hall, in support of freedoms of assembly and expression. The city cannot arbitrarily deny permission for a picket (as opposed to a march); moreover, as of Friday evening, they still hadn’t received a response. The idea was for the lesbian and gay participants to assemble there as peaceful picketers.
I had run ahead trying to photograph the police clashing with the skinheads. Now, as I walked slowly up Tverskaya in the rain, I passed and joined with a few people I knew: Volker Beck, the openly gay German member of parliament, the author of his country’s same-sex partnerships bill, making his way up the street with his partner; Bill Schiller and Boris and Serge. At last we reached city hall, formidable and gated. Across the street from it was a statue of Igor Dolgorukii, one of the founders of Moscow. The plan had been for us to assemble there, unfurl rainbow flags, and hold a silent vigil of protest against Mayor Luzhkov.
Maybe fifteen of us formed a knot on the statue’s steps. Volker and his partner and I pulled out our flags and began waving them.
Suddenly the Boys were there.
They came, again, from nowhere, like a black-jacketed flood climbing up Tverskaya. At one moment they were twenty feet away from us, fifty or so of them, in a knot around, Nikolai Kuryanovich-- a deputy from Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s far-right Liberal Democratic Party, who had also abruptly materialized and grabbed a microphone and started speaking, shouting again about a Russia free of sodomites.
Meanwhile (so I learned later) Dima Makarov and Alexei Kozlov, the young activists who had applied for permission for the gathering, had arrived on scene and saw the mounting chaos. They demanded to see the commanding police officer. They were taken to him—it was Colonel Vyacheslav, from the morning. They said they were the organizers of the picket, and showed him their application for permission. “Take them to the bus,” said Vyacheslav. They were arrested.
There couldn’t be clearer evidence that the police lured the lesbian and gay activists there to be beaten, then selectively jailed.
Volker was trying to talk to an assemblage of media.
The Boys, though, had moved in and were all around us.
One of them, a tall thug with a scarred lip and a bent nose, tore away the flags from myself and Volker’s partner. He shoved both us of hard, and I fell. Others of the Boys charged in to the middle of our little group. Volker tried to speak above the screaming; faces distorted with hate, the skinheads were cursing.
All of a sudden the OMON police were there too.
Instead of trying to separate skinheads and gays, though, they surrounded all of us in a double line, constricting the circle and shoving the crowd tightly together so that we were jammed up against each other—for maximum damage. The crush was paralyzing--I could barely breathe. The extremists were delivering body blows to people around me right and left. Volker was hit in the right eye with a rock. A punch in the same eye from the bent-nosed thug followed. He fell to the ground.
Finally the circle opened enough for most of us inside to escape. Various other people were arrested outside the circle. Yevgeniya Debryanskaya, one of the founders of the lesbian movement in Russia, was giving a media interview nearby. Police seized her and a friend and bundled her into the police van. I saw a reporter from Russia’s version of Newsweek being beaten by an older man (who was, it seemed, the editor of an Orthodox publication) while a woman held him to keep him from running. All three were arrested.
Volker and his partner too were seized, though I didn’t see it. (Police held them in the van for two hours, giving Volker no assistance for his bleeding eye, until they realized who the MP was. Then they released them—saying they had only been detained “for their security.”)
Finally, police took control of the area around the statue. Outside their loose cordon, the Boys roamed menacingly, while the Grandmothers gathered in knots and sang and prayed.
It took me a long time to find anyone. Across the street, I saw Kurt Krickler—the longtime Austrian gay campaigner—talking to a German reporter. I joined them. Then, out of the underground underpass, came the bent-nosed thug who had beaten Volker Beck. He stood about five feet away, with a friend, smoking cigarettes. I wondered if we should run (trying to get the police was obviously pointless). But, while they eyed us with bemusement, it was clear their moment of violence was over. They’d done their bit for the cameras across the street. Now, with no one watching, we were simply objects of mild interest to them.
John Fisher, another conference guest who heads the Canadian-based ARC International, a group that spearheads LGBT presence at the UN, rang my mobile. I joined him and Andrey Kuvshinov, a Russian human rights activist, on a nearby street. Stunned and appalled, we still knew the first priority was to try to find out who had been jailed, and get legal assistance.
We walked to Andrey’s nearby apartment. On the way, a contingent of the extremists’ leaders passed us—including the bent-nosed thug, a black-suited and professional-looking man, and several young women.
They seemed happy, satisfied with a day’s work. Our eyes met. I soon understood what they were doing on that side street: the local police station was there.
A few more skinheads were gathered outside, talking to the officers about their colleagues held inside. They all seemed altogether cordial.
At Andrey’s, we began calling numbers to see who was free, who knew anything, collecting information. I contacted Human Rights Watch’s Moscow office to start finding lawyers to visit the police stations where arrestees were held. By calling Britain, then ringing colleagues of his here in Russia, we learned that Peter Tatchell had not been arrested. I kept phoning Nikolai Alexeyev’s mobile, hoping he might still have it in police custody. Press reports were beginning to pour in. The Moscow police were claiming 20, 50, even 120 “illegal gay demonstrators” arrested.
Characteristically, they made no distinction between the LGBT marchers and the skinheads.
The skinheads were still dominating the street, now with little further police interference. A Russian, newly arrived from Paris, who came by Andrey’s told us that as he emerged from the Pushkinskaya metro he saw a crowd of the Boys talking: saying they’d wait in a nearby McDonald’s and “monitor” the fags coming and going. Kurt Krickler, as he left the city hall area, was attacked by four of the Boys, kicking and punching him. He had to visit a clinic for X-rays; when we saw him later in the evening, he had an enormous bruise under his right eye. At about the same time, the LGBT counselor to Paris’ mayor was beaten so severely near a gay café that he had to be hospitalized.
At around 6:30, Nikolai finally answered his mobile phone. He was being held in a police station near the Kremlin; his papers were being processed for release.
He asked us to come meet him: he was being released along with a group of skinheads, and feared for his safety on the street. We took a taxi and met him as he was freed from jail, pale and shaken. He had a long cut on the palm of his hand, from being manhandled when arrested.
We all went to the Swissotel, site of the morning’s conference, where Volker Beck was staying. Volker spoke to a small press contingent about the attack.
German embassy doctors had bandaged his face, but the flesh was still raw beneath.
In the early evening, Evgeniya Debryanskaya was also released, along with Dima Makarov and Alexei Kozlov.
Most of the detainees were almost certainly free by now, skinheads and gays alike—though it will be sometime Sunday before either the numbers or the charges can be determined with certainty. Most of the LGBT people were apparently charged with participating in (or organizing) an illegal gathering, an administrative offense which carries a substantial fine.
I interviewed Dima Makarov that night after his release. He’s brilliant and intense, 23 years old, versed in the niceties of the law and committed to a democratic, open Russia. He’s been arrested many times, in demonstrations for the environment and for civil rights. This time, while in custody, police had punched him in the stomach, and smashed his hand against a wall. He and Yevgeniya Debryanskaya had been held in a van together with many skinheads, an awkward situation—but he said some skinheads had been treated even more humiliatingly by the police, insulted and forced to crouch on the floor. After all, the cops knew that the gays would offer no resistance and, in custody or out, were no real threat; the skinheads, though, carried the real possibility of further violence. Yevgeniya and he, in the van, were urging the police not to treat the arrested Boys violently. The odd cameraderie of rights.
It’s 1 a.m. I am exhausted, confused. All the day’s memories meld into a jumble. Somehow, as an ironic undertone to all of them, images from the shopping mall blaze by: the consumer spring of the New Russia. Bright flashes of polyester fashion, electrically colored coils of melting ice cream. They’re joined by quick pictures of open wounds. A bloodied eye. Flecks of blood on sidewalk cement cracked by decades of spring thaws.
Posted by Scott Long, Director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Rights program for Human Rights Watch | May. 27 at 2:51 PM
Walk to City Hall Saturday, May 27th | 10:41 am
The press conference scheduled for 11:30 is winding down. Some 100 reporters came, and fully 20 of us spoke, an exhausting roster. The room crowded, bristling with cameras.
At 2:30 we go, separately, those who dare, to the tomb of the unknown soldier in the anti-fascist war, near the Kremlin, to lay flowers, symbols of the new struggle against the fascists on the streets. Then we walk to City Hall to hold a vigil at the mayor's office at 3 pm.
Posted by Scott Long, Director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Rights program for Human Rights Watch | May. 27 at 10:41 AM
Debate Saturday, May 27th | 10:30 am
The police presence inside the hotel is
gradually growing, and it's impossible for anyone except Nikolai to
make out whether they are the ones our side is paying, or the ones
someone else's side is paying, or both at the same time.
Four young guys, not visibly skinheads but obviously out for a
headbashing good time, came into the lobby, talked to the police, were
ushered outside. Now they stand in the driveway, where the manager
occasionally drops over to chat them up. Presumably they're waiting
for more to arrive.
The day's turned brisk and sunny. Smooth winds comb the birches' hair.
Inside the conference, about 40 people are debating whether a "Moscow
Declaration on Human Rights" should read "human rights are indivisible"
or "the idea of human rights is indivisible."
Posted by Scott Long, Director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Rights program for Human Rights Watch | May. 27 at 10:30 AM
Waiting Saturday, May 27th | 10:02 am
At the conference now. While the meeting starts, the hotel's broad porte-cochere outside, the cold stone Brezhnev-style lobby, are already crawling with uniformed police.
A joke they used to tell when I lived in Romania:
Q: Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, an intelligent policeman, and a stupid policeman are all sitting around eating Chinese food. Who eats the most?
A: The stupid policeman, naturally. The other three are imaginary.
I hope the police are intelligent today. No: I hope they are imaginary. It seems unlikely.
Posted by Scott Long, Director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Rights program for Human Rights Watch | May. 27 at 10:02 AM
Morning Saturday, May 27th | 9:30 am
Moscow is clammy-looking. Today’s the 13th anniversary of the day Boris Yeltsin decriminalized gay sex in Russia. It’s also the day of the parade. Or non-parade.
I have to say how beautiful this city is. All its edifices, old or new, are sprawling. If in America buildings are measured against mountains, in Russia they are scaled against the boundless steppe. But on every facade a jocular kitschiness of detail humanizes the hugeness. Even Stalin’s contributions — the seven dull-white skyscrapers dotted round the city, called “wedding cakes” and often dismissed as monstrosities — fit in well with the older art-nouveaux style, with their Gothic stalactites and gargoylish overhangs. It feels like a form of resistance , at least among the architects, to the leveling overwhelmingness of autocracy: a reminder of the human scale.
Last night I had dinner with Max Anmeghichean. (The place: a cheapish, busy tavern. On the little-used English menu: “Chicken Alulas with Charging Farmer.”) Max is a remarkable young activist. I’m 42, and young for me now means under 50, but for Max it genuinely fits. Now in his early 20s, at 17 he started the first lesbian and gay group in his native Moldova, newly independent from the old USSR. He works at present for ILGA-Europe, lobbying the European Union for equality.
As a native Russian speaker (as are many fellow Moldovans, though he’s of ethnic Romanian descent) he found himself roped into a television appearance today. Nikolai Alexeyev was far too busy to appear, other prominent Russian activists were not supporters of the march (more below), and so Max was enlisted to defend it on a popular talk show. At the taping he was pitted against the president of Moscow’s Duma (city council). According to Max, he was surprisingly friendly to the gay activists before the taping started. He genuinely claimed the mayor was looking out for their safety; he said, “Look, we have supported opening gay clubs in Moscow, so you can dance and do what you want.” On camera, though, his language changed. Suddenly he was claiming that opening the gates — or streets — to a gay pride parade would mean turning the public sphere over to bestiality and pedophilia. The organizers were inciting violence even by announcing a march would be held.
Max argued against him, citing the European Convention on Human Rights. He was modest about what he said but apparently it was effective. The audience voted afterward on whether the parade should be allowed. By 34-28, they said it should. So much for Luzhkov’s claim that 99.9 percent of Muscovites support him.
Outside the studio, protesters were waiting. They threw eggs at the activists. “I think they were drunk,” Max said pleasantly, “They missed me.”
There’s no question that Pride has been divisive for a nascent gay community here. Many leading activists say they learned of it only from the news releases. Many genuinely felt a public demonstration to be premature. I hope to talk to some of them on Sunday and gain their perspectives, which grow from a longer history in Russian civil society.
Civil society in general here is under severe attack. On Jan. 10, President Putin signed a bill making the workings of many non-governmental organizations difficult if not, in some cases, impossible. The Ministry of Justice, heavily staffed with former agents of Putin’s old KGB, must certify all of Russia’s nearly half a million NGOs. It must approve all their funding; its agents can attend any events, or swoop down on their offices at any moment to demand any information of their choosing. Even the reporting requirements will exhaust the resources of many small organizations. Putin has spent the past several years using prosecutors and police to harass the independent press, the broadcast media, corporations, local governments, and other sources of separate authority into virtual quiescence. The new law gives him leverage to control one of the last areas of activity left outside the Kremlin’s purview.
Under these circumstances, it is understandable that many should feel that a parade is a provocation, an invitation to the central government (and local governments eager to curry its favor) to start shutting down gay websites, businesses and organizations. It is understandable that many others should feel this is a last chance, an opportunity to shove a doorstop into the closing gates of freedom, a narrow and shriveling possibility for protest — a last stand.
A reminder of the human scale.
Max and I both reflected that it may have been unfortunate for Russia’s LGBT movement (however fortunate for Russian society as a whole) that Yeltsin repealed the sodomy law so early and so quickly, by decree. There had been little domestic mobilization against it. The movement was deprived of the one issue that could have given it unity and direction. And Russian lesbians and gays were given the partly illusory feeling of freedom, able to lead their lives without immediate fear of arrest, to visit bars and websites and construct cocoons of consumer satisfaction without facing the deeper forces of prejudice and patriarchy in their society and families and homes.
This was particularly vivid in the large cities, where gays could find an easy niche in the emerging consumer world. They lost contact with lesbian and gay life in the enormous provincial world beyond, where oppression and silencing remain severe, and where it can cost a day’s income to log on in an internet café for an hour and access that universe of promises beyond.
The controversy over the parade, even given the internal debates it has caused, could give a sense of unifying purpose — a renewed knowledge of the need for legal and social change, and a revivified engagement with the political process.
But if that does happen (and Max doubted whether it will) it may happen at the same time that politics itself is withering in Russia.
Last night the news reported a Moscow official as saying, “There will be 1,000 policemen in the city’s center during the anticipated gay parade. … All the central streets will be under control, as the exact location where the organizers plan to hold the event is unknown.”
It's time to go to the conference.
Posted by Scott Long, Director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Rights program for Human Rights Watch | May. 27 at 9:30 AM
I want to march Friday, May 26th | 12:29 pm
At the podium, Peter Tatchell makes a passionate plea not to settle for standing in front of the locked doors of Moscow's city hall. He wants the crowd to march tomorrow. Foreigners will be there with you, he tells them, the eyes of the world will be on you. You can make a statement as the civil rights marchers did in the American South in the 60s. Your blood will become our rallying cry, the Russian movement's rallying cry.
The problem is, of course, that the foreigners (like me) will be there for the day, then go home. We might spend a night or even a few nights in a Russian jail. An adventure to tell our nephews and nieces. It is the Russians who will have to deal with the longer-lasting reverberations, the results they can't escape.
The entire discussion is being carried out in English now. The Russians present (save for Nikolai, sitting beside me at the podium) have gathered around a single translator; it allows things to proceed faster, but isolates most of them from participating.
Personally, I want to march. It's partly simply the frustration of being sessile: twelve hours in a plane, then sitting in a crowded room listening to all this talk, and knowing your enemies are exulting at your immobility. And partly it's anger. It's not a pleasant thing to admit sometimes, but most of us who are gay and lesbian activists, maybe most of us who work for human rights period, do so out of a deep-rooted anger. We've suffered pain and we want others not to, but we also want to give it voice. I want to show Luzhkov that we--the "we" composed of all of us who, wherever we're from, know about the contempt of families and the fear of neighbors and the constant hammering rhetoric of perversion and immorality and depravity, know about the insults and the ignorance, know the hatred and the hurt it leaves--yes, I want to show Luzhkov that we can talk back, that we're not afraid.
But the "we" that counts here isn't that largely imaginary collective of common experience. It's the "we" the Russians have, tentatively, managed to form among themselves, the "we" who will have to stay when the rest of us are gone, and face the consequences.
Bill Schiller, a Swedish campaigner and old friend from the Nordic LGBT Cultural Network, reminds everyone that whatever they do--even if they only drink a beer together on Saturday--they can still claim victory. THey have been together; they will have acted together. Affirming their solidarity and acting on it is the main thing. But he also reminds them of the 2001 pride march--or abortive march--in Belgrade. Gangs of skinheads attacked the march. Blood really did flow in the streets. The pictures flashed around the world; the world saw the meaning of neo-fascist fury and the wounds it left.
My friends Vanja and Amar, young gay Muslim activists from Bosnia, both speak about that, as former citizens of the former Yugoslavia. Yes, Belgrade pride showed what hatred was about. But what did it matter that the world saw it? What ordinary Serbians saw was that hatred won. As a result of that violent victory, no one dared to march again: there wasn't a pride in Belgrade again for years after.
The Russian activists from the Radicals and Greens repeat: there should be a public demonstration. But people should be ready--for police attacks, for violence. They offer a training on security if people want to march.
I finally raise my voice with the suggestion that the foreigners have offered their advice, and should now leave the room, and leave the decision to the Russians. Let them make it among themselves,without interference.
Somewhat to my surprise, there's general agreement. Gradually the foreigners file out, and the room is closed to non-Russians. We wait outside, drinking coffee.
It takes an hour.
Finally, our Russian colleagues emerged. They had discussed at great length, and taken a democratic vote. The margin was narrow: many people wanted to cancel the pride event altogether. But the majority decided to hold a demonstration.
I can't tell you more. We all agreed the exact place and time should be kept secret--as secret as possible. We'll circulate the details only among the local activists we trust. Let the police and the skinheads work to find out; no reason to make it easy for them.
Tomorrow we'll see whether they found out, and what will happen.
Posted by Scott Long, Director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Rights program for Human Rights Watch | May. 26 at 12:29 PM
What to do Friday, May 26th | 11:59 am
The morning's sessions break up in disarray. Nikolai tries to raise the question of whether any public demonstration should take place tomorrow. Most of the responses in the room are in English or German. I realize, with some alarm, that the question of who's on gay Russians' side has an answer encouraging from some perspectives, discouraging from others. Lots of people from abroad: relatively few Russians. The room is about three-quarters foreigners, from western Europe and from other eastern European countries, Latvia, Poland, Belarus, Bosnia ... Everyone offers support; everyone also offers advice, drawn from their own experiences. Some of those experiences may make sense to Russians; others are about as remote from a recent history of authoritarianism as San Francisco is from Kazan.
The strongest voices in favor of marching are from the few Russians outside the LGBT movement who have turned up in support: representatives of the Green and Radical parties, leftists clad in black. One of them, sporting an armadillo armor of piercings and silver rings, argues eloquently for the importance of not backing down: but also for the importance of planning, thinking about security, ensuring that enough supporters will know about any public manifestation in advance...
Part of the insecurity is about how that can happen and keep the participants secure. The disruption of last night's lecture by Wilde's grandson is on everyone's mind. It had only been advertised over a listserve of registered conference participants. It wasn't public. The neo-fascists found out about it nonetheless, and brought their mace. Whatever is planned for tomorrow, we can assume they will know about it and come.
Louis-Georges presides over the meeting. In his French-inflected English, he keeps referring to everyone as "militants": the "foreign militants for LGBT rights," the "Russian militants"... No one seems particularly militant here. No one seems, in fact, able to decide. And few of the voices proposing decisions are Russian.
A news crew is in the room, filming. No one can tell me from what network they come. With nothing determined, the plenary disbands for lunch. They approach the speaker's table, where I sit next to the dispirited Nikolai. Nikolai breaks into a long monologue about what-is-to-be-done; perhaps we should simply approach the mayor's office with a small delegation, armed with a letter protesting his outrageous decisions? Perhaps that would be the safest thing to do? Should we hold a march simply to let the skinheads beat us? The crew films him, thinking aloud.
In the old days, any thought louder than a brainwave, any idea that achieved voice, might have been recorded by a hidden microphone. This is the new Russia: the microphones are out in the open.
I'm appalled: amid the confusion there's really no space or time for Russians themselves to make a decision. In a nearby restaurant, Nikolai and Louis-Georges and I are joined by still another film crew: this one German, making a movie about human rights and the eastern european threat to pride marches. Fortunately, they put their cameras away. But Nikolai is constantly on the phone, harassed by media demanding to know what will happen the next day. The waitress brings us the wrong orders, takes them back, brings us a different set of the wrong food. Peter Tatchell of London's Outrage had planned to join us, but has disappeared, off to buy a bottle of water which apparently could only be purchased in Siberia.
Back at the hotel. This is our safe space, with guards at the door. I'm reminded how inaccessible it is to ordinary Russians--not so much because of the guards as because of the huge divides that now transect the country. Buying a bottle of water at the bar costs twelve dollars--no wonder Peter went off to find one in a grocery. A cup of coffee costs almost ten. T he prices are meant to cater to foreign expense accounts, and to the tastes of would-be oligarchs trying to set themselves off from the Russian masses by their capacity for conspicuous over consumption. Seeking safety means cutting oneself off from the people out there whose support one needs, whose hearts and minds one is trying to win.
And back in the plenary room, I'm reminded again how fragile is that security, and how few Russians are here to participate. I'm called to the fore again, not so much to contribute as to serve as a reminder that the outside world and its organizations are watching, supporting. People need to know that, see that. (Yet Human Rights Watch, which has worked in Russia for almost fifteen years, monitoring human rights disasters from Chechnya to the sadistic hazing endured by recruits in the Russian army, knows better than many how little international scrutiny affects anything the Kremlin does. In the era of Putin, secure in its grasp on the once-fractious regional governments, with iron-tight control of the army and the former KGB, with the media intimidated and prosecutors pursuing political opponents, the government can sit on its supplies of natural gas and defy the world that demands to buy its resources.)
The question again is: tomorrow, tomorrow, what to do?
Posted by Scott Long, Director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Rights program for Human Rights Watch | May. 26 at 11:59 AM
Friday Morning Friday, May 26th | 11:07 am
Here is what Mayor Luzhkov has to say about lesbian and gay people:
"Morality works here"--in Russia. "If any one has any deviations from normal principles in organizing one's sexual life, those deviations should not be exhibited for all to see and those who may turn out unsteady should not be invited to do so. .... I thank the citizens of Moscow as 99.9% of them in recent days also believe it is unacceptable to hold such parades." (In an interview on Russkoye Radio yesterday).
And here are the results:
Last night, as part of the Pride festivities, Merlyn Holland gave a reading at a local gay-friendly bookstore. About 20 people came in late and sat at the back--well-dressed, not your usual skinheads. Soon they stood up, shouted in unison "Russia free of faggots!" and began spraying Mace around the room. Security threw them out. The guests were understandably terrified.
Morality works here. Thank you, Muscovites.
Everyone today seems jittery, spooked by last night's attack. About 75 people are meeting in two conference rooms at the Swissotel, south of the Kremlin near the Moskva River. The Russians, nervously caffeinated, pace and wonder what to do. Nikolai Alexeyev, the Pride festival's organizer--slight, blond, his narrow eyes creased with sleeplessness--talks incessantly on his mobile.
Louis-Georges Tin, a French activist, the founder of the International Day Against Homophobia, has been intimately involved in helping conceive and further the Russian event. Rotund and perpetually enthusiastic, he worries about the uncertainty; and the cost. Hiring security even for the almost-secretive two-day conference at the hotel has been exorbitantly expensive, costing 10,000 Euros (about $12,000). Most of the plainclothes guards who hover outside the entrances do little but smoke and cast intimidating glances at passersby; they don't seem disposed to keep anyone from actually entering, however visible a menace they might pose. Most are retired Moscow policemen, or even on-payroll ones available to moonlight in their off-duty hours. This means the very forces Mayor Luzhkov might call in to close the proceedings have been deputized--bribed, in effect--to guard it.
In the morning, many participants head off to court: the court in Moscow's Tverskoi district has agreed to hear an appeal against the mayoral ban. It's a last-ditch effort. Nikolai argues that the city must not surrender to skinheads and fascists who want to prevent lesbians and gays from assembing on its streets. He cites the international presence (including Human Rights Watch.) The judge is peremptory, dismissive. The vast majority of Russians oppose fascism, he says. WHy then do you need to march against fascism?
He throws out the appeal. The ban stands.
Nikolai, afterward, seems dazed, almost despairing. His hopes had been briefly raised, then dashed.
Indeed, a general despair's set in at the hotel. It expresses itself in a contagious listlessness, a gray spirit blank as the cloudy cream-colored skies. In the plenary, Nikolai raises the question of where to go from here. The streets of Moscow seem to have been handed over to the skinheads by the authorities. Should they still try to march? Nikolai has been full of grand statements in the past weeks: "We will not surrender to the dictator of Moscow." A harsher reality has sunk in. The Russia that looks, from a tourist's perspective, full of golden domes and refurbished brightness, is a dark place. Violence is a real possibility, and the police won't be there to protect anybody. Surrender appears the only option.
Solzhenitsyn, in the Gulag Archipelago, tells the story of how, during Stalin's Great Terror, in some provincial town, a party meeting was held and someone mentioned Stalin's name. INstantly the entire room leaped to its feet, frantically, compulsorily applauding. Stalin! Stalin! The applause went on for minutes. Then tens of minutes. No one dared to stop--to be the first one to stop. Twenty minutes passed, thirty. Finally, a minor official in the back, exhausted, gave up, sat down. The room stopped, relieved.
The next morning the official was arrested.
Russia has a thousand-year tradition of autocracy. The authoritarian in the Kremlin, the authoritarian in Moscow city hall all benefit from the apathy and fear it instilled. To defy the double threat of violence and the state's authority appears, as people stare at the reality of it, appalling. Nobody could blame them for backing down.
Even Solzhenitsyn, after all, has said for years that he never meant freedom for Russia to mean freedom for everybody; in recent days he has gone out of his way to criticize the "Western" perversions, such as gay rights, that liberation has brought.
When gay and lesbian Russians look at the facts, who, after all, is on their side?
Posted by Scott Long, Director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Rights program for Human Rights Watch | May. 26 at 11:07 AM
Leaving for Russia Thursday, May 26th | 12:05 pm
Yuri Luzhkov cultivates the flat-capped, bull-necked look of a Russian worker. He’s been mayor of Moscow for more than a decade: a brilliant maneuverer who allied with oligarchs and billionaires to renovate the capital’s decaying real estate and turn it into a boutique city where vast wealth conceals grinding poverty. He ran for president in 2000, then became a key supporter of the authoritarian victor, Vladimir Putin. His political appetite and ambitions are enormous. And he doesn’t like lesbians and gays.
I’m leaving for Russia today. A twelve-hour flight. A country that spans seven time zones. The enormousness of Russia is, has always been, intimidating. You look at it on the map and it seems some overgrown animal more formidable than the stereotypical bear: an immense Jabba the Hutt sprawling across Europe and Asia, its paws planted on the Pacific and its raw snout rubbing against the Scandinavian tundra.
Thirty years ago no one would have imagined this diverse hugeness becoming a democracy. To think of a democratic Russia now is still incredibly exciting. If elections in India mean the hope of preserving both unity and the popular will in a country of a billion people, freedom in Russia means people overcoming a thousand-year legacy of autocracy, a hundred-year-long history of modernized repression and Gulag and state terror.
The transition has been chaotic. It’s still a fragmented country dominated by local warlords who wield astonishing power in their fiefs--figures of whom Mayor Luzhkov is merely one of the most presentable. Violent centrifugal forces, of which the long and brutal war in Chechnya was the most conspicuous example, have threatened to wrench Russia apart. The former KGB and its surveillance apparatus dominate the Putin administration.
But huge advances have been made. It’s easy to forget looking back on the last fifteen years—with the 1991 coup, the siege of parliament two years later, the currency collapse in 1998, the monstrous Beslan massacre of schoolchildren—that one of the first affirmations of Russia’s democratic values came in 1993, when president Boris Yeltsin repealed the old Soviet-era sodomy law by decree. The decriminalization of homosexual conduct was no small or casual thing, though the history books may now neglect it-- and it was only partly a capitulation to western European pressure. It was also a body blow against Stalinism, against the claims that a surveillance state made over people’s privacy and bodies. At least in his soberer moments, Yeltsin understood that democracy meant more than putting ballots in a box. It meant giving people a sphere of autonomy for their decisions and desires. It meant acknowledging that the government was no longer all-powerful and could not claw through keyholes, that its authority could neither enforce uniformity nor regulate intimacy.
This is what is threatened in Moscow today.
Russia’s first gay pride parade is scheduled for this Saturday, May 27. It is the logical culmination of Yeltsin’s step: the moment when diversity declares itself as something no longer contained behind closed doors, but asserts its freedom in the public sphere. Lesbians and gays and bisexuals and transgender people in Russia are claiming the ordinary rights of citizens, to march and take up political space and breathe the air. Last week, after months of threatening and blustering, Luzhkov announced definitively that he would ban the parade. The organizers will not back down. From all over Russia, from the former Soviet Union, from eastern and western Europe, activists are coming to Moscow to support them. Meanwhile, in Moscow, it seems likely that skinheads and other antagonists are also making violent plans.
It’s a historic moment. For me, it’s an emotional one. I lived in eastern Europe for many years in the early 1990s. In Romania, I saw people emerging from a totalitarian society of fear, and I saw gays and lesbians slowly working for the repeal of a brutal, draconian law that saw many of them imprisoned and tortured. I saw first-hand how dictatorship represses diversity, how democracy cannot survive without it.
Across eastern Europe, repressive political leaders have been threatening and harassing open manifestations by gays and lesbians claiming their rights. In Poland, the onetime mayor of Warsaw banned pride parades for two years running; now he’s president, and his government is carrying on a campaign of vilifying gays and lesbians that would make Pat Robertson or Robert Mugabe proud. A member of the Polish parliament said last week that if a pride parade is held, he would bash the marchers with batons. “They’ll run away at the first sign of pain,” he said. “Gays and lesbians are cowards by definition.”
They’re not. The Russian marchers, defying their city’s tsar by carrying on with the parade, prove it. I’m going to Russia because democracy is going to be at stake on the streets on Saturday.
Posted by Scott Long, Director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Rights program for Human Rights Watch | May. 26 at 3:05 PM
