Masha Gessen: Gay Propaganda

Russia has been sliding steadily into dictatorship since Vladimir Putin first came to power in 2000. Along with the crackdown at home, Putin’s Russia has become an active force for corruption and despotism well beyond its borders. But when it comes to standing up to Putin, leaders and pundits of the West alternate between indifference and feigned helplessness—so it’s a rare moment when an issue cuts through this cycle.

To paraphrase Tolstoy’s opening line in Anna Karenina : all dictatorships are unhappy in their own way. Putin’s Russia is not the USSR, but the fact that Russians are free to leave doesn’t mean they are free. Putin is no Hitler, but even though no one can be compared to the Nazi monster of World War II, there are important lessons to learn from how Hitler was enabled by his own people and the world when he was merely an esteemed leader in the 1930s. Perhaps such lessons are just too painful.

Dictatorships also have many things in common, and patterns are repeated from place to place and era to era, as each generation of autocrats seeks to abolish individual freedom and hold on to power at all costs. These regimes become less effective as they run out of positive agenda items and so must pursue purely negative ones. This isn’t merely a matter of power corrupting, or the rare tyrant with benevolent intentions failing to fulfill the needs and desires of his subjects. The problem is, simply put, a lack of communication with the people. An authoritarian administration may competently enact an initial plan or resolve an existing crisis, but without the feedback loop of democracy, moral and intellectual stagnation is inevitable. In Putin’s Russia this point was passed long ago, with the instability and violence of the Yeltsin years used as a pretext to crack down on every sort of political and personal freedom.

Another shared characteristic of authoritarian regimes is how they respond to that lack of a positive agenda by creating enemies against which they can bravely protect the citizenry. These enemies, internal and external, are also inevitably to blame for many of the nation’s ills, but scapegoating is not an essential element. Fear mongering and hatred are good enough to start, and when backed by a massive propaganda campaign, they can be effective in distracting people from the real problems of the economy, security, and lack of a voice in the face of oppression.

The best enemies are those against whom historical conflicts can be resuscitated. For a KGB man like Putin and his clique, it’s been most natural to drum up anti-Americanism, preying on old Cold War memories. Another popular target are those members of society who cannot effectively fight back, the outsiders and minorities who are already under great pressure due to the decay of civil society. Here Putin has again followed the old playbook by attacking Russia’s fragile gay community, both officially with discriminatory laws, and unofficially by failing to protect them from harassment and violence.

In a curious twist of fate, one of Putin’s grandiose pet projects has brought this pathetic assault into the global spotlight. The 2014 Sochi Winter Olympic Games, a festival of corruption and cronyism intended to highlight Putin’s power and wealth, has instead drawn attention to this institutionalized bigotry, and the attack on free speech promulgated by Russia’s “anti-gay-propaganda” laws. It’s a delicious irony that two practices historically beloved by dictators—hosting big international events and persecuting minorities—have again collided in this fashion. The 1936 Berlin Games served as a showcase for Nazi power, and their unchallenged success boosted Hitler’s confidence in his ambitious plans. Though Jesse Owens refuted Nazi racial theory in the heart of Germany at the 1936 Olympics, Owens’ personal heroics weren’t matched by the many world leaders who fawned over Hitler and his well-orchestrated spectacle.

To avoid a repeat of this in Sochi, the free world must unconditionally condemn the abuses of the Putin regime. Gay rights are human rights, and when the LGBT community suffers for their very existence, we all suffer. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Russian Constitution, and even the Olympic Charter prohibit discrimination of the sort being carried out against gay Russians today. The environment of polarization and hostility created by these unjust laws, as well as the cynical courting of the Russian Orthodox Church by the Putin regime in these culture wars, is poisoning the soul of the country.

Gay and lesbian Russians who are able to do so are fleeing the country, as are so many others. Intellectuals, liberals, entrepreneurs, out-of-favor ethnicities and religions: all have become targets, and Putin is happy to be rid of these “enemies of the state.” Brain drain and the disappearance of the educated creative class are not seen as a problem for the pipeline economy Putin has created. In the end, this is his greatest crime of all, turning Russia against Russians who love their country and who want little more than for it to be a strong and free place to live and to raise a family.

JOSEPH

This book started with a romance that sounded unreal, told to me in broad strokes by Tatiana, a shy Russian woman whom I met over the summer. I’m a sucker for a good love story.

We were at a picnic in a park overlooking the East River in Queens, NY, enjoying cold beet soup, Russian pastries, and plenty of wine. The picnic had been put together by a group of Russian and Russian-speaking activists, some of whom had been causing headlines lately for organizing vodka dumps and other disruptive protest actions around town. The global news media was starting to pay attention to Russia’s role as host country to the most expensive and, some feared, most homophobic Olympic Games in history. The controversy was also contributing to the growth of a tight-knit, increasingly visible, outspoken community of gay and lesbian Russian émigrés and exiles in New York and elsewhere.

It was Tatiana’s first time joining this crowd, mine as well, and I asked her why she was here. “I’m married now, so I know what it feels like to have the same rights as everybody else. I can’t just sit here and not do anything while things are moving backward where I’m from.”

Tatiana met her wife Ana online, and despite living on almost opposite sides of the earth at the time, they carried on an intense correspondence for months before finally rendezvousing in Moscow for a brief but unforgettable first meeting. The two fell in love, moved in with each other in New York, had a daughter, and after almost a decade together, were married shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act.

That picnic was a month or two after President Putin signed a now infamous ban on the “propaganda of non-traditional lifestyles,” an ill-defined piece of legislation making it a crime to give equal merit to gay relationships, distribute any materials referencing gay rights, or to use the media or the Internet to “promote” (to report on) the lives and romances of LGBT people. The love lives of people like Tatiana, who found an intercontinental romance both extravagant in origin and everyday in its domesticity, were now considered “illegal propaganda” in Russia, and especially if told within earshot, or mouse click, of a minor. Tatiana’s own daughter, for example.