Сергей Медведев - The Return of the Russian Leviathan

But what we have to understand is that along with the growth in paranoia, we are losing our competitiveness. Closed systems are no longer capable of tackling complex problems. They will be affected even more strongly by global flows, but they will no longer be in a position to control them, thus condemning themselves to becoming peripheral. In our interdependent world, questions of sex, gender, race and tolerance are no longer matters of ethics or identity, but to do with the economy and the survival of the country in global competition.

Therefore, I would switch from an ideological approach to a pragmatic one. For a start, by special decree alongside the Skolkovo Innovation Centre a gay quarter could be set up, like Castro in San Francisco. Maybe something non-traditional would grow out of it – or, at least, something innovative.

Sometimes it seems that those who were drawing up Russia’s laws in 2013, banning the promotion of homosexuality, achieved completely the opposite effect to the one they actually wanted. You hear speeches about homosexuality now on every corner, in the Duma and on television. They use the term to insult opponents and to frighten parents. An acquaintance of mine told me that she called the doctor out to examine her sick child. The doctor, a woman of about fifty years old, prescribed antipyretic suppositories, having explained that they don’t use rectal suppositories now for boys over three years. When asked why, she answered emphatically: ‘Homosexuality!’. It seems that at long last Russia has found its national idea; and this idea is homophobia.

Homophobia has become the platform on which the state’s repressive laws and the Stone Age instincts of the mob have been brought together. According to a sociological survey by the Russian Public Opinion Research Centre (VTsIOM), the law banning the promotion of homosexuality is supported by 88 per cent of Russians. Being openly antisemitic or racist in Russia is already considered not quite proper, at least in politics; but being a homophobe is normal, worthy and even patriotic. The bastards who beat a gay man to death in Volgograd on Victory Day, 9 May 2013, said that they did it for patriotic reasons. The official rhetoric has opened up a carnival of hatred in Russia; it’s hunting season on homosexuals. Each year there are now dozens of attacks recorded on gays, many of them ending in death, and the number of unrecorded crimes are too many to count. And even tortures carried out by the police – at least, the ones that become known, such as the rape of people who were detained, one using a champagne bottle in Kazan and another a crowbar in Sochi – follow the same homophobic logic: the state degrades people, using the kind of sexual violence that is common in the criminal world.

Politics in Russia has been brought down to the level of vulgar physiology; what the Italian philosopher, Giorgio Agamben, calls ‘the naked life’. The biological becomes political, whether we are talking about the hunt for paedophiles or the ban on foreigners adopting orphans; about the censorship of homosexuality or the concept of family policy, as put forward by Duma deputy Elena Mizulina, according to which ‘normal’ should mean a patriarchal family with four children, living together with their grandparents. The state intrudes upon the sphere of what should be intimate and private, using repressive measures to impose from above a patriarchal and authoritarian ‘norm’, which it then calls ‘a national tradition’. Aggressive homophobia rises up from the depths of the patriarchal consciousness to meet it. In this way homophobic fascism is born.

This is exactly what it is: fascism. These ‘spiritual bindings’, which President Putin loves to talk about, tie together the lictor’s bundle, the fasces, from which the word ‘fascism’ comes. Fascism always appeals to biology, to the primacy of birth, blood and soil; it is no coincidence that the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, considered homosexuality ‘the syndrome of a dying people’. Homophobia becomes the focal point for national self-awareness. It relies on masculine stereotypes, which are written about in folklore, jokes and swearing, and on rituals of initiation and stigmatization in school, the army and prison. What’s more, homophobic fascism is simple and convenient for the state, because it is not aimed at a particular group on national or race lines (at least the Caucasian people can fight back) but against a defenceless minority with no voice in society. Virtually no one will stand up for homosexuals in Russia, unlike human rights activists in the West. In Russia, sexual minorities are the ideal target for hatred, just like the Jews were in the Third Reich.

Homophobia is an anti-Western and anti-globalist idea: it seeks out internal enemies from amongst its own, be they paedophiles, gays or ‘foreign agents’. The insult ‘liberast’, a corruption of the words ‘liberal’ and ‘pederast’, shows that in Russia homosexuality is associated solely with the liberal West, which is mired in tolerance, same-sex marriages and debauchery; conservative and Orthodox activists insist in all seriousness that in the West paedophilia and incest are actively encouraged. Such hysteria demonstrates an embittered, alienated and provincial consciousness, one that is unable to adapt to the post-industrial and post-patriarchal world, in which producing children is no longer considered to be man’s principal task. It is a consciousness that finds itself lost before a multicoloured contemporaneity, just like our principal homophobe, Duma deputy Vitaly Milonov, who was shocked when the highly genial Stephen Fry dropped in on him. Homophobia is a characteristic of weak people who are uncertain of their own orientation, and who are afraid of losing what they are sure of when they first come up against reality. The weaker the country and its identity, the more fiercely homophobic it is.

This is exactly why Russia desperately needs an injection of tolerance in order to defend and publicize the rights of sexual minorities. One often hears that ‘sexual orientation is a private matter, let them carry out their sexual preferences at home, among their friends, and not bring it out in public’. But a call for ‘closet homosexuality’ is false at its very root. In the same way, you could say that Jewishness is a private matter: they should just sit at home, not go to their synagogues or wear their kippahs on the streets, because this annoys normal citizens and is opposed to Russian national traditions and foundations. After the Holocaust, Jewishness is no longer a private matter for Jews, but a subject of public policy. Analogous to this, the Russian state was the one that made sexual orientation a public matter, taking away homosexuals’ human rights, from the right to create a family to the right of self-expression, and thus the answer to this discrimination should be public and political.

As Michel Foucault taught, a person’s sexuality remains one of the last bastions of freedom and also one of the main targets for repression; and the battle takes place on the territory of the sovereignty of the individual. Russia is in desperate need of collective therapy: people coming out; gay parades; a battle for full citizens’ rights for homosexuals, from same-sex marriages to the right to adopt children. Support for sexual minorities is not easy: people may sympathize with them, but they won’t speak out openly for fear of being marked out as one of them. But it is important to understand that this is where fascism makes itself most apparent, supported by the whole weight of the legislative, law enforcement and propaganda machine. And that’s why each of us must go through a test for homophobia in our own souls: these days examining our own feelings about citizenship and humanity is as important as it once was in terms of antisemitism.