10 Horrific Videos Of Russian Violence Against LGBTs - Queerty

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10 Horrific Videos Of Russian Violence Against LGBTs

It’s been nearly a year since Vladimir Putin’s staunchly anti-gay regime passed legislation allowing the beating and assault of any LGBT person for any reason.Despite a number of charitable campaigns and viral news stories designed to raise awareness and spark resistance, as well as political pressure abroad, Russia continues to allow shocking human rights violations against LGBTs or anyone merely perceived to be LGBT.

Below are some of the most horrific instances of anti-gay enforcement in action. None of the aggressors below have or will ever be charged with a crime.



Last August, a video surfaced on the Putin-friendly Russian social network VK.com showing a gang of five men brutally beating a trans woman in the middle of a park in broad daylight. In the video above, she is referred to as a “homosexual,” kicked in the head and body, thrown onto the grown, and stripped of her clothes.



Gay activist Kirill Kalugin was attacked and punched by a group of paratroopers last August while standing in St. Petersburg’s Dvortsovaya Square with a rainbow flag in support of Russian LGBTs. As you can see in the video above, police intervened only to arrest Kalugin for the promotion of “homosexual propaganda,” allowing his attackers to walk away scot-free.

#Ukraine Alexander Bohun, jeune star de X Factor a été attaqué par une bande de néo nazis russes (extraits) sur WAT.tv

Ukrainian X-Factor contestant Alexander Bohun was captured by skinhead vigilante group Occupy Pedophilia in December 2013 and filmed being tortured by the extremist group’s leader, Maxim Martsinkevich. In the video above, Bohun has his head shaved, is forced to suck on a dildo and drink a cup of urine. “I was referred to as ‘pedophile,’ mocked, and forced to admit actions and desires that I have not committed in any circumstances,” he later said in a police report.



Members of the feminist punk rock protest group Pussy Riot were immediately beaten, whipped and pepper sprayed after staging an impromptu protest of Russian anti-gay legislation outside an Olympic venue in Sochi this February. Russian police forces even whipped and beat some who were not involved in the protest, including photographers and reporters, and subsequently arrested the Pussy Riot members involved.



Members of extremist vigilante group Occupy Pedophilia made headlines last summer when they began luring gay men to meet so they could bully, harass, and sometimes beat them — acts that are completely legal under Putin’s anti-gay regime. In the video above, Occupy Pedophilia members capture, taunt, kick, and pour urine on a 15-year-old boy they found in a park.



Two weeks after Russia’s legislation banning “gay propaganda” was passed, LGBT activists met in St. Petersburg to urge President Putin not to sign the bill into law. Demonstrators were soon met with brutal force, detained, and beaten by Russian riot police.



A video showing Occupy Pedophilia members torturing 20-year-old South African student David Smith surfaced on VK last November, prompting Smith’s immediate expulsion from Shukhov State Technological University. In the video, antagonizers can be seen humiliating Smith by shaving his head, smashing watermelon in his face and forcing him to perform fellatio on a beer bottle.



In March 2013, gay activist Artem Kalinin was assaulted and punched in the face during a television interview in Syktyvkar. Kalinin was discussing his attempt to get clearance to hold a Pride parade in the city when neo-Nazi activist Alex Kolegov lurched at him, bringing him to the ground. Kolegov was never arrested.



Last weekend, a group of homophobic thugs assembled to take down students performing in a dancing flashmob to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day. The performance was not related to the LGBT community in any way, but participants were attacked because they were merely perceived to be gay.



The granddaddy of all videos documenting human rights violations in Russia was compiled by Human Rights Watch early last month. The four and a half minute video above documents a number of acts that would be considered criminal offenses anywhere else in the world, from brutal assault to kidnapping and, in extreme cases, attempted murder. These things are all perfectly legal in Russia, so long as they are directed toward someone who is perceived to be “promoting nontraditional sexual relations.”

By:          Matthew Tharrett
On:           Mar 29, 2014

Russia's Anti-Gay Law, Spelled Out in Plain English

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Russia's Anti-Gay Law, Spelled Out in Plain English

Russia's Anti-Gay Law, Spelled Out in Plain English

On June 30 this year, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed into law a bill banning the "propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations to minors," thus opening a new, dark chapter in the history of gay rights in Russia. The law caps a period of ferocious activities by the Russian government aimed at limiting the rights of the country’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex people.

The violations of fundamental, constitutionally protected rights of Russia’s gay citizens have included multiple bans on gay pride parades in Moscow and other cities, hefty fines to gay rights groups accused of acting as a “foreign agent,” denial of registration to nongovernmental organizations, and regional laws banning the propaganda of homosexuality to minors, which served as a basis for the federal law enacted by Mr. Putin and unanimously passed by the State Duma. Against this backdrop, violent attacks on gays or “suspect gays” are becoming commonplace.

The state-sponsored initiatives relied on ludicrous assumptions. For example, the regional bans on propaganda of homosexuality equated same-sex relations with pedophilia even though the former has been legal since 1993 and the latter is, of course, a serious crime. The court decision denying registration to Sochi Pride House states that “propaganda of nontraditional sexual orientation” is a direct threat to Russian society, while calling attempts to confront homophobia “extremist” because they inherently “incite social and religious hatred.” Essentially, the court ruled that gays incite hatred toward themselves and should be “protected” from doing so. The court went on to argue that such extremist activities present a threat to “Russia’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.” The Russian government uses these flawed arguments when it defends its discriminatory ways to an international audience. Russian diplomats are fond of saying that discrimination does not exist in Russia because the country’s constitution forbids it. Some logic!

Russia’s courts and diplomats — and President Putin — cannot be trusted to explain the status of gay rights in the country, but the European Court of Human Rights can. In April 2011, the Strasbourg court fined Russia for violating articles 11, 13, and 14 of the European Convention by banning 164 pride events and marches between 2006 and 2008. The unanimous decision in Alekseyev v. Russia came into force after the Russian government lost its appeal in Strasbourg, yet although the Kremlin paid the fine, they continued to ban pride rallies. In May 2012, a district court in Moscow issued a ruling banning such events in the city until May 2112. That’s Russia’s approach: pay the fine, admit nothing, and make things worse.

The cornerstone of Mr. Putin’s “War on Gays,” however, is the vaguely defined and definitively antigay Article 6.21 of the Code of the Russian Federation on Administrative Offenses, which allows the government to fine individuals accused of the propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations amongst minors. The federal ban “builds on the success” of regional laws on “propaganda of homosexualism to minors,” passed in 10 regions since 2006. We have yet to see an example of the federal law in action, though we came pretty close when four Dutch citizens were briefly detained in the northern city of Murmansk in July. Regional laws were used several times to fine gay rights activists.

Here is what Article 6.21 actually says:

Propaganda is the act of distributing information among minors that 1) is aimed at the creating nontraditional sexual attitudes, 2) makes nontraditional sexual relations attractive, 3) equates the social value of traditional and nontraditional sexual relations, or 4) creates an interest in nontraditional sexual relations.

If you’re Russian. Individuals engaging in such propaganda can be fined 4,000 to 5,000 rubles (120-150 USD), public officials are subject to fines of 40,000 to 50,000 rubles (1,200-1,500 USD), and registered organizations can be either fined (800,000-1,000,000 rubles or 24,000-30,000 USD) or sanctioned to stop operations for 90 days. If you engage in the said propaganda in the media or on the internet, the sliding scale of fines shifts: for individuals, 50,000 to 100,000 rubles; for public officials, 100,000 to 200,000 rubles, and for organizations, from one million rubles or a 90-day suspension.

If you’re an alien. Foreign citizens or stateless persons engaging in propaganda are subject to a fine of 4,000 to 5,000 rubles, or they can be deported from the Russian Federation and/or serve 15 days in jail. If a foreigner uses the media or the internet to engage in propaganda, the fines increase to 50,000-100,000 rubles or a 15-day detention with subsequent deportation from Russia.

Huh? What?

The law passed by the Duma is so ambiguous for a reason. Without a legal definition of ‘propaganda’ or ‘nontraditional sexual relations’ — key operative words in Article 6.21 — we are not getting a clear picture of how the authorities will use it. Ironically, the best arguments against the adoption of this the antigay legislation come from none other than the Russian government. In 2004 and 2006, the government resisted attempts to introduce similarly ambiguous federal bans on “the propaganda of homosexuality.”

On February 20, 2006, then-Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Zhukov (currently serving as a Deputy Speaker of the State Duma and the President of Russia's Olympic Committee), submitted an official recall to a tabled antigay bill, arguing that the legislation contradicted Russia's criminal code that doesn’t allow to criminalize the propaganda of noncriminal behavior, contains “a row of mistakes and judicial-technical inexactitudes,” and relies on definitions that do not allow to clearly formulate corpus delicti. The May 20, 2004, rebuttal from Mr. Zhukov was even more forthcoming, pointing out that the bill “contradicts article 29 of the Russian Constitution, as well as articles 8, 10, and 14 of the European Convention on human rights.”

I couldn’t put it better than Zhukov. Unfortunately, his resistance to the anti-gay bills of 2004 & 2006 came at a time when the Kremlin cared about Russia’s international reputation. Now it appears to care only about nontraditional sex.

Russia passes anti-gay-law

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Russia passes anti-gay-law

Vladimir Putin signs bill that means people disseminating 'propaganda' about homosexual relationships to minors risk fines

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Associated Press
theguardian.com, Sunday 30 June 2013 17.38 BST

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Vladimir Putin's government wants to promote 'traditional Russian values' over what
it sees as western liberalism and tolerance. Photograph: Mikhail Klimentyev/AP

Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, has signed into law a measure that stigmatises gay people and bans giving children any information about homosexuality.

The lower house of Russia's parliament unanimously passed the Kremlin-backed bill on 11 June and the upper house approved it last week.

The Kremlin announced on Sunday that Putin had signed the legislation into law.

The ban on "propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations" is part of an effort to promote traditional Russian values over western liberalism, which the Kremlin and the Russian orthodox church see as corrupting Russian youth and contributing to the protests against Putin's rule.

Hefty fines can now be imposed on those who provide information about the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community to minors or hold gay pride rallies.

Russian parliament passes anti-homosexual laws

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Russian parliament passes anti-homosexual laws

By Clara Weiss
18 June 2013

On June 11 the Russian parliament adopted—by 436 votes to nil, with one abstention—two civil rights laws, making it a punishable offence to openly practise homosexual relationships, defend homosexuals or “insult religious sentiments”.

Both laws have yet to be approved by the parliament’s upper chamber and signed by President Vladimir Putin. Putin has already publicly declared his support for both laws.

The two laws constitute an assault on basic democratic rights. They are part of a campaign by the Kremlin, which is increasingly responding to growing social unrest and political instability by appealing to nationalist sentiment and exploiting right-wing forces such as the Russian Orthodox Church.

The new anti-gay legislation provides for penalties of up to €100 (US$135) for individuals and €23,000 (US$30,000) for organisations that “promote non-traditional sexual relationships”. Defending the basic democratic right of social equality for homosexuals is therefore made illegal.

Foreigners are not exempt from the laws. Convicted of an offence under the new statutes, they face a fine of €2,300, as well as possible detention for up to 15 days and forced deportation. The distribution of “homosexual propaganda” has already been criminalised in several regions, including St. Petersburg, since last year.

More than 20 people protesting against the laws were arrested at a demonstration in front of the parliament in Moscow. The demonstrators were also violently assaulted by supporters of the Russian Orthodox Church, pelted with eggs and doused with urine, without drawing any intervention from the police.

Arguing for the anti-gay legislation before parliament, Yelena Mizulina, a co-author of the law, declared: “Traditional sexual relationships are relationships between a man and a woman ... which is the basis for the preservation and advancement of the multi-ethnic Russian people. It is precisely these relationships that need special protection from the state”.

President Putin has also repeatedly criticised homosexuals for not contributing to population growth in Russia.

In recent years, the Kremlin has deliberately been encouraging reactionary prejudices and sentiments. According to surveys, the proportion of the population supporting the law increased from 40 to 47 percent last year. Homosexuals are often victims of violent attacks.

A recent survey revealed that 15 percent of the country’s lesbians and gay men had been physically assaulted in the past 10 months. By fomenting this reactionary mood, the Kremlin is building on the legacy of Stalinism, which for decades propagated “traditional family values” and national chauvinism as part of the political reaction to the October Revolution.

The second law passed by the parliament on Tuesday enables the Kremlin to continue blurring the boundaries between church and state. The law makes “insulting religious feelings” a punishable offence. Fines of up to €7,500 can be imposed and “desecration of religious temples” is punishable by up to five years in prison. The “public abuse” of icons and religious literature such as the Bible or the Koran can incur heavy fines.

The Kremlin is thereby siding with the court verdict against three singers of the feminist punk band, Pussy Riot, who were sentenced to several years in prison following a show trial last summer, because they had sung an anti-Putin “punk prayer” in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. The Kremlin exploited the case to launch a massive nationalist and religious propaganda campaign to divert attention from the economic and social crisis.

The two laws signal the Kremlin’s further shift to the right and closer alignment with the Russian Orthodox Church, a refuge of ultra-nationalist and fascist tendencies.

The Russian Orthodox Church, whose leaders shamelessly enriched themselves during the restoration of capitalism, have played an important role in politics since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Church and state have moved closer together particularly under Putin’s premiership. Confronted with mass protests from urban middle-class layers and growing social discontent, the Kremlin again last year significantly intensified its religious campaign in the press and fanned national tensions.

The Kremlin is currently enforcing brutal austerity measures against a largely impoverished population. More than a third of all universities and many medical facilities are being privatised or closed. Further pension cuts are also under discussion. This week, President Putin announced even more savage cuts and mass layoffs among state employees. These social attacks are bound to provoke opposition from the working population. The ruling elites are introducing repressive laws and the bolstering the authoritarian state in order to prepare for an open confrontation with the working class.

Under the duplicitous pretext of defending “democracy and human rights”, the imperialist powers and the liberal opposition are using the authoritarian laws to put pressure on the Putin regime.

Michael McFaul, the US ambassador to Russia, condemned the anti-gay law that violates “the spirit of a democratic society”. At the outset of the protest movement against Putin in December 2011, former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and President Barack Obama had stressed that the US regarded the defence of the rights of homosexuals as an essential part of the “struggle for human rights”.

The German government’s response to the legislation was particularly sharp. Instructed by Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle, the German foreign office tightened travel restrictions for Russian citizens. Government spokesman Steffen Seibert said that Chancellor Angela Merkel expected a reversal of the law.

The campaign by imperialist powers is completely dishonest. They react brutally to any social opposition in their own countries, set up vast networks for monitoring the population, and ride roughshod over basic democratic rights such as the right to freedom of expression and privacy.

For years, they have been supporting the liberal opposition and pseudo-left forces in Russia, both of which maintain close links to the extreme right. Fascist forces also play an important role in the Western-backed opposition movement. In reality, the imperialist campaign in defence of “democracy and human rights” aims to increase pressure on the Putin regime, which is particularly opposed to the NATO powers’ Middle East war plans against Syria and Iran.

It is the task of the working class to defend democratic rights as part of the struggle for a socialist programme, directed against the Putin regime and capitalism.

Hillary Clinton for HRC's Americans for Marriage Equality

Clip: hrcmedia

What do you think?

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Op-Ed Contributor
A Closet by Another Name

By DANIEL MENDELSOHN

Published: July 3, 2012

APPARENTLY the big news following Anderson Cooper’s public acknowledgment that he is gay is that it’s not news at all. “And the TV nation seemed to shrug,” in the words of one report on the oncontroversy.

Room for Debate Do Gay Celebrities Have an Obligation to Come Out? Boldface names like Anderson Cooper often argue that their romantic lives should be private. But does the need for gay role models outweigh that? Connect With Us on Twitter For Op-Ed, follow @nytopinion and to hear from the editorial page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, follow @andyrNYT.

In part, this is because being gay is less controversial today than at any other time in American history, even for celebrities: a recent cover story in Entertainment Weekly described “the new art of coming out” among stars on both coasts, made possible by a “defiantly mellow vibe” around sexuality. And yet for many gay people, particularly gay youth, and especially gay youth of color, the acknowledgment that you’re gay is still a process fraught with anxiety, if not terror and often violence. The irony is that they are victims of enduring prejudices that persist, in part, because gay celebrities enjoy the protection of a cozy omertà among the social and media circles like the one that shielded Mr. Cooper — whose homosexuality was an open secret for years in New York — until his welcome revelation, which took the form of an e-mail sent to the gay journalist Andrew Sullivan on Monday.

Mr. Cooper’s gesture was a righteous and worthy one, and there’s little doubt that it will make this already hugely popular figure someone who “will inspire countless others,” as Herndon Graddick, the president of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, put it. But what may be even more revealing about his e-mail was its tormented rhetoric — the justifications and evasions that inadvertently expose the ways in which even the most privileged and enlightened gay people are still constrained by, and often internalize, the prejudices that oppress them.

The secrecy of many closeted celebrities stems from a fear that revealing their homosexuality will destroy the public personae on which their lucrative and influential careers are based. This anxiety is particularly notable in the case of Hollywood stars and professional athletes, whose audiences, still prey to clichés about masculinity, can’t countenance gay heroes. But Mr. Cooper insisted that his concern was privacy. “As long as a journalist shows fairness and honesty in his or her work, their private life shouldn’t matter,” he wrote to Mr. Sullivan. “It is not part of my job to push an agenda, but rather to be relentlessly honest in everything I see, say and do. I do not desire to promote any cause other than the truth.”

What’s interesting is the assumption that simply being known to be gay could be considered pushing “an agenda”: by whom? Nobody thinks that straight journalists are pushing a straight agenda. The mere use of the word “agenda” smacks, unfortunately, of the substanceless rhetoric of the cultural right, with its paranoid fantasies that gay teachers are trying to convert straight children to homosexuality (as if such a thing were possible) as part of a gay agenda.

The privacy concern crops up again when Mr. Cooper defends his decision not to write about his sexuality in his 2006 memoir “Dispatches From the Edge” on the grounds that “it was a book focused on war, disasters, loss and survival.” But in fact a main theme of the book was that the pain that Mr. Cooper had known in his personal life — the loss of his father at age 10, the dreadful suicide, when he was 21, of his older brother — had given him insight into the pain caused by the horrors he witnessed as a CNN correspondent. To some, the omission of any reference to his sexuality in that book — surely an opportunity to reflect on sadness — seemed to betray concerns that were not strictly literary.

Like many other celebrities who have long hidden their homosexuality from the larger public while never denying it among the elites to which they belong — Susan Sontag was another — Mr. Cooper denied, in effect, being closeted. “I have always been very open and honest about this part of my life with my friends, my family, and my colleagues,” he wrote to Mr. Sullivan. “In a perfect world, I don’t think it’s anyone else’s business.” The high-minded appeal to privacy is, indeed, now a trope in the coming-out process of public figures and celebrities; Jim Parsons, the star of “The Big Bang Theory,” recently came out in an interview to a New York Times reporter who summarized the conversation thus: “he made clear that he never considered himself in the closet, per se, but was simply a private person.”

But all this talk about privacy reveals deep and troubling assumptions. Mr. Cooper compared disclosure of one’s homosexuality to revealing “who a reporter votes for” or “what religion they are,” but in a post-Freudian age in which sexuality is seen as a core aspect of identity, this comes across as disingenuous. If you’re really “happy, comfortable ... and proud” to be gay, as Mr. Cooper says he is, the simple fact of being gay should be no more a “privacy” issue than being straight is for straight people. It’s just who you are. (“Privacy,” on the other hand, would cover, say, whom you’re dating or hooking up with — nobody else’s business.) You can’t claim to be comfortable with being gay while trying to keep it a secret: When you conceal your sexuality, you’re buying, however unconsciously or reluctantly, into the notion that there is, at some level, something wrong with it.

The point here is not to chastise Mr. Cooper for not having come out earlier, or differently. But it’s unfortunate that even today gay figures as serious, intelligent, well-intentioned and progressive as Mr. Cooper seems to be can still be so conflicted. How great for Mr. Cooper that he will celebrate Independence Day liberated, finally, from the preposterous burden of having to pretend to be something he’s not. Whatever they tell themselves, public figures who haven’t followed his lead are still prisoners. The closet is still a closet, even if it’s a duplex on Fifth Avenue or a mansion in Beverly Hills.

Daniel Mendelsohn, a writer and critic, is the author of the forthcoming collection “Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture.” He teaches humanities at Bard College.

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on July 4, 2012, on page A23 of the New York edition with the headline: A Closet by Another Name.