Currents

Discussing the Russia-Ukraine war with my Western LGBT colleagues has been tough — and not just because, as a Ukrainian, the subject is so personal to me. Western LGBT people have a long and noble habit of siding with the downtrodden. In the brutal war of aggression that Russia launched against Ukraine, slaughtering children and indiscriminately bombing civilians, being on the side of the oppressed means being on the side of Ukraine. Or so one would think.

As it turns out, LGBT folks also have a long history of dissidence and mistrust of authority, particularly in the United States, and almost everything that comes out of the American foreign policy establishment is taken with a heaping pinch of salt. This is why many queer people, especially those who call themselves "progressive", have not been very willing to support any country that is considered to be an American ally and have essentially aligned with the far-right against helping Ukraine. But to side with Ukraine is not merely to side with the downtrodden or the West — it is to side with LGBT rights. Indeed, Russia waged a campaign of homophobic conspiracy propaganda in order to sell the war to its people.

In my own conversations with Western students, I have seen a troubling pattern, even among many who do not consider themselves pro-Putin: Once America began supporting Ukraine, the Ukrainian people became “privileged” because of their mostly white skin and Christian beliefs. The “America Bad” worldview that governs so much of far-left politics has made it impossible for many in that camp to support Ukraine if it means putting themselves on the same team as the US and other Western powers. As a result, many leftists simply lost interest in the war as an issue. Others, such as the prominent left-wing commentator Noam Chomsky, have suggested that Russia was provoked by NATO expansion and pinned the war squarely on the West.

If that’s true, who provoked Russia to attack Chechnya in 1999 at the beginning of Vladimir Putin’s reign? The Chechen Republic of Ichkeria was not supported by NATO. Moreover, Chechnya had a 400-year history of anti-colonial struggle. Having never chosen to become part of the Soviet Union or Russian Empire, after the USSR collapsed, Chechnya declared independence even before Ukraine but was attacked by Boris Yeltsin’s Russia in 1994. NATO might be a convenient “provocation” for today’s apologists to point to, but the fact is that Russian ambition and aggression have never been because of NATO. Rather, NATO had to be created because of Russian ambition and aggression. Regardless of the confusion underlying it, the fact remains that many Western leftists are ambivalent at best or hostile at worst to the plight of Ukraine.

As a Ukrainian trans person, I have not felt the same outpouring of support that many of my LGBT siblings have showered on Palestinians since the war in Gaza began. There have been no Western “Queers for Ukraine” marching alongside “Queers for Palestine.” It seems like the Western queer community refuses to believe that the war in my home country has anything to do with them. Instead, they have followed the broader far-leftist trend of turning a blind eye to the authoritarianism and imperialism of the Soviet Union and now Russia. US politicians like Ilhan Omar and Cori Bush, for example, both self-styled “progressives” who support the “Green New Deal”, joined Trumpists in opposing a ban on Russian fossil fuels in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Given what they believe, it makes sense for far-rightists to ignore Russia’s past and present. Left-wing or LGBT activists should know better.

Little do many of these activists realize that the war in Ukraine is one of the most LGBT-related international conflicts in modern history. According to Russian propaganda from 2014 — when they invaded, occupied, and annexed the Ukrainian territory of Crimea — Russia’s motivation was entirely about LGBT people. Or, more precisely, about a bloody Crusade that the Kremlin, Russian military, leading Russian intellectuals, and the most prominent Christian church in Eastern Europe started in the name of homophobia. From the very beginning of the Russia-Ukraine war, Russia has used the relative equality of Ukrainian LGBT people to justify the conquest of an independent country, including kidnapping Ukrainian children from their parents and massacring Ukrainian civilians. Russian homophobia, biphobia, and transphobia have been such an overwhelming and integral part of the messaging and rhetoric surrounding their war effort, in fact, that support for LGBT rights has surged in Ukraine simply because anti-LGBT bigotry is now seen as a Russian characteristic. But Russia’s mistreatment of LGBT people far predates the current conflict.

Queers as Foreign Agents

Since Soviet times, LGBT people in Eastern Europe were considered to be “class enemies” and Western agents. Any support for LGBT people — or the promotion of individual rights more generally — was seen as a threat by the Kremlin. In 1933, Genrikh Yagoda, a high-ranking boss in the Soviet secret police, stated that a spy network was operating under the cover of gay salons in large cities. Soon after, Soviet propaganda declared that homosexuality was, in essence, a form of fascism, leading to a purge of people found or accused of having been in same-sex relationships. Ironically, Genrikh Yagoda was himself executed in 1938, not just for allegedly plotting to kill Joseph Stalin, but also due to the accusation that he was a “pervert who had a dildo in his house.”

After Stalin’s death, the USSR’s homophobic laws stayed intact. Tens of thousands of gay, bisexual, and lesbian people were thrown in prison, shipped off to gulags, or locked away in psychiatric asylums. These policies were justified by the authorities and accepted by the masses with the assertion that same-sex behavior was a uniquely Western and pro-capitalist “sexual perversion.” Even after the Soviet Union collapsed and homosexuality became a trendy topic in Russian media and mass culture, it was portrayed in the same light as Coca-Cola, blue jeans, and Hollywood blockbusters — something fundamentally “Western.”

It makes perfect sense that the first LGBT organizations in the late Soviet Union were part of the dissident “anti-Soviet” movement, yet at the same time, it reinforced the notion of LGBT people as foreign agents. More recently, the fact that Russian LGBT organizations get much of their funding from Western donors and use a lot of English-language messaging has helped Russia’s political right push propaganda that equates being queer with being a spy or an untrustworthy outsider. It’s no wonder that some of the first groups to be recognized as “foreign agents” in contemporary Russia were LGBT organizations and activist networks.

But in the last decade, anti-LGBT attitudes have taken on a completely new, mystical role as a justification for Russian soldiers to slaughter Ukrainians en masse.

Russia’s Conspiracy Rabbit Hole

“Ukraine is just a freak country," announced Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin soon after the occupation of Crimea in 2014. He justified his statement with conspiracy theories: “Ukraine is under the power of homosexuals and Jewish oligarchy.” All conspiracies terminate in anti-Semitism, but usually not within the span of a sentence.

On the one hand, Dugin’s remarks sounded like any ordinary statement from a far-right leader. And, in a way, they were: Dugin is famous for his promotion of the work of esoteric Hitlerian thinker Julius Evola and the French ultra-conservative writer Alain de Benoist. Dugin also personally knows Vladimir Putin and has been a big intellectual influence on him, hence the nickname in the Western media “Putin’s Rasputin.” While it may be overstating things to claim that Dugin is dictating Russian state politics, it is difficult to ignore that he has had an outsized influence on Russian discourse about Ukraine.

Just like Dugin’s pal and former Donald Trump chief strategist Steve Bannon, Dugin is part of the ultra-conservative “neo-traditionalist” school of thought. Neo-traditionalism holds that we are currently living through the worst of times, and that regress is the only way to progress. Simply put, neo-traditionalists believe that the only way to cure what ails society is to abandon modernity and return to our roots, a prescription often left ill-defined and intentionally vague. The ideology also has a mystical side, complete with a cyclical view of time and a doctrine of eternal return, but in a political context, the most pertinent feature of neo-traditionalism is its rejection of modern Western liberal values, such as individualism and human rights, which are seen as the road to decay and decadence. This is why neo-traditionalists like Dugin cannot accept equality for women, racial and ethnic minorities, and LGBT people.

In the US, neo-traditionalism is shorn of its mysticism and relegated to the margins of society — to obscure forums, pseudonymous bloggers, and a bare handful of largely reviled public figures like Bannon or the self-identified “MAGA communist” Jackson Hinkle. In Russia, however, neo-traditionalist thinking is very much in vogue among intellectuals and is actively promoted by leading universities. From 2009 to 2014, Alexander Dugin was the head of the Department of Sociology of International Relations at Moscow State University, the most prestigious university not only in Russia, but in all of Eastern Europe. Dugin, along with his daughter writing under the pen name of Daria Platonova, developed their own neo-traditionalist-inspired ideology called “Eurasianism.”

One of Eurasianism's core ideas is that Russia, as the “Eurasian center”, is embroiled in an existential war with the “Atlantic” or “thalassocratic” center, also called the “collective West”, which is a popular term in Russian political circles. This collective West is largely believed to be controlled by the “Anglo-Saxons”, an umbrella term that stands for a collection of English-speaking countries imagined to be maliciously dictating world affairs. In this conspiracy theory, the Anglo-Saxons are trying to do everything in their power to destroy the “tradition” that Russia represents. This includes pushing other post-Soviet countries, like Ukraine, away from Russia and promoting "anti-traditional” ideas such as democracy, individualism, free markets, women's reproductive rights, gender equality, and LGBT rights. Just as with the Soviets, according to Eurasianism, LGBT people are seen as agents of Anglo-Saxon culture and the collective West and therefore enemies. And one of the most wicked attacks that Anglo-Saxons have committed against Russian civilization is promoting LGBT rights in Ukraine.

Together with the Russian government, Euroasianists do not believe that LGBT activism in Eastern Europe is a grassroots movement, but an act of cultural imperialism from the West. This idea has been repeated by Vladimir Putin himself, who has blamed the “collective West” for provoking the Russia-Ukraine war, destroying Russian traditional values by “promoting gender freedom” and satanism, replacing “mother” and “father” with “Parent 1” and “Parent 2”, and creating “dozens of genders."

Modern Russia is an extremely peculiar place filled with Orwellian doublethink, where high-ranking politicians can openly employ far-right homophobic ideologies to fight “Nazism” in Ukraine, without anyone noticing the irony. Another unacknowledged irony is that many of the anti-LGBT ideas circulating in Russia nowadays and thought to be “anti-Western” actually came from the West — for example, from the Satanic Panic of the 1980s and the more recent American QAnon conspiracy. And it’s not just intellectuals or politicians peddling anti-LGBT bigotry. The hate has gone mainstream.

According to a 2021 poll, 59% of the Russian population believe that LGBT people shouldn't have equal rights. This poll was taken before the war and its redoubled propaganda campaign — the numbers have likely only risen since. Now that LGBT groups are officially recognized as “extremist and terrorist organizations” by Russian authorities, it has become too dangerous for researchers to conduct similar studies at all.

The Right to Kill for Segregated Bathrooms

Saint Petersburg Governor Alexander Beglov has stated that Russian troops in Ukraine “understand well” that they are fighting because of “gender-neutral toilets in Ukrainian schools." As a person from Ukraine, I have never seen evidence of this in my experience. Of course, even if this were true, and even if one opposed it, deliberately bombing schools and killing Ukrainian children seems a strange way to protect them. For Putin’s regime, it appears preferable to kill a child than to let them use a gender-neutral bathroom.

Another practice Russia has engaged in, which was found to be genocidal by the Council of Europe, is the mass kidnapping and “Russification” of Ukrainian children. Separated from their families and forcibly taken to Russia, these children are being essentially reprogrammed with “traditional” Russian values.

Maria Lvova-Belova, Russia’s “Children’s Rights commissioner”, announced that more than 700,000 Ukrainian children have been kidnapped to Russia so far. Very likely, tens of thousands of them are LGBT and will be subjected to what amounts to conversion therapy in addition to kidnapping and cultural brainwashing. Few in Russia are vocally objecting. Homophobia, biphobia, and transphobia dominate the headlines and media coverage. It even has the backing of the largest church in Russia.

The Russian Orthodox Church’s Crusade Against Pride Parades

According to Patriarch Kirill, leader of the Russian Orthodox Church to which 71% of Russian people belong, Russians are not fighting in Ukraine not to conquer and annex. Rather, we are told, they are fighting to liberate a people who do not want to see LGBT Pride parades that were “forced” on them by “those who claim world power” — a common euphemism either for America, the collective West, or Jews. The “struggle” against LGBT Pride in Ukraine, the Patriarch insisted in a sermon, “has not a physical, but a metaphysical meaning.” And as history shows, when religious zealots name something a holy crusade against evil, the ends always justify the means. It’s no wonder that the Russian Orthodox Church is now sending its priests to the Ukrainian frontlines to assure the troops that their fight is just.

This is a bigger problem than it might at first seem to many in the West. Unlike the US, Russia has no separation of church and state, and unlike Western Europe, the Russian people in the post-Soviet era have rediscovered their religiosity. The Russian Orthodox Church is both culturally dominant and fully supported by the state. And its leader has declared that WWII-style conquest and the killing of children is necessary to stamp out gay pride.

When I was last in a Russian Orthodox cathedral, next to the bibles and religious icons for sale were copies of The Protocols of the Eldest of Zion, the notorious anti-Semitic conspiracy pamphlet originally penned in Russia but popularized in Nazi Germany. I also saw Protocols in Russian Orthodox shops in Saint Petersburg, Moscow, and even in Russian-owned churches in occupied parts of Ukraine such as Donetsk and Crimea. Now the Russian Patriarch blesses the army to fight Nazis in Ukraine. Only, “Nazis” in this context are not people who share racist, xenophobic, or hateful ideas, but those who support LGBT rights and individualism. This, to repurpose a term from the American right, is the real “clown world.” Russia is slowly becoming a dystopian state, not unlike Orwell’s Oceania, where words change meaning by fiat, history is rewritten, human life means nothing, and the truth is whatever the leaders say.

* * *

In modern-day Russia, LGBT people are not seen as people, but as Satanic entities that can “infect” an entire society. But the same Western values that the Russian regime so bitterly hates can also be used to oppose their propaganda.

Russian kids are now taught to hate any country that supports LGBT rights or individual rights. The war in Ukraine is not just about Ukraine; it is about the rights of LGBT people in Russia, Ukraine, and beyond. Russia does not want peace, but rather a new “world order”, one without, among other things, LGBT people. If you are LGBT, or support LGBT rights, or support individual liberty more broadly, then this is your war too, because, given the opportunity, Russia seeks to extend its sphere of influence across the globe. Russia will not stop at Ukraine, and in every country that falls within its reach, LGBT people will be the first to suffer.

Published Dec 12, 2024