Recognition of same-sex unions in Russia

• 1. Introduction

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  Recognition of same-sex unions in Russia is a story that stretches from forged passports in the 1920s to a landmark ruling by the European Court of Human Rights in 2023. When Irina Fedotova and Irina Shipitko walked into the Tverskoy Office for the Registration of Civil Acts in Moscow on the 12th of May 2009, they knew they would be turned away. They said so themselves. "We are no different from other people," they told reporters. "We love Russia, we were born and live here, and we want our marriage to be recognized in Russia." They were denied a license within hours. But the case they launched that day traveled all the way to Strasbourg, and the judgment it produced now places a legal obligation on every member state of the Council of Europe.

  The questions this documentary will explore are not simply about marriage law. How did Russia move from a Soviet-era silence on same-sex unions to a constitutional ban? What happened to the couples who tried to marry anyway, and what did they risk? And what does the tradition of two-spirit marriage among the indigenous peoples of Siberia reveal about the deep complexity of this subject in Russian lands?

• 2. A Century of Workarounds

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  During the time of the Russian Empire in the early 20th century, some same-sex couples drew up private "marriage contracts" and shared joint households. The historical record names at least one pair: Nikolay Polyakov and Stepan Minin, who lived together until 1933, when Soviet authorities arrested them in an anti-gay purge.

  The Soviet period produced a remarkable pattern of forgery as a survival strategy. In 1922, Evgenia Fyodorovna dressed as a man, forged identity documents, and married her partner in Saint Petersburg. Authorities discovered she was a woman and opened a criminal case, charging the couple with a "crime against nature". The People's Commissariat of Justice ultimately ruled the marriage "legal, as concluded by mutual consent". After Joseph Stalin came to power in 1924, oppression of LGBT people intensified, and same-sex unions between men were re-criminalized.

  The forgery strategy persisted for decades regardless. In 1965, a woman identified only by her initials O.A. forged a passport with a male name and married her partner. In the 1970s, Olga Krause used the same method in Saint Petersburg.

  By the early 1990s, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, activists including Evgenia Debryanskaya and Roman Kalinin began calling openly for the legalization of same-sex marriage. In April 1994, Slava Mogutin and his partner Robert Filippini applied to marry at a registry office in Moscow. The director of the office was sympathetic but said she could not legally perform the marriage. The application made the couple the target of criminal cases carrying potential sentences of up to seven years. They later fled and filed for political asylum in the United States.

• 3. The Law and the Constitution

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  Article 1(3) of the Family Code of Russia has banned same-sex marriage since 1995. Its language is precise: family relations "must adhere to the principle of a voluntary union between a man and a woman." The Soviet-era family law it replaced contained no explicit ban of any kind.

  A 2006 judgement from the Constitutional Court reinforced the statutory prohibition, rejecting arguments that banning same-sex marriages violated constitutional rights. That ruling came in response to a legal challenge filed by Eduard Murzin, a member of the State Assembly of the Republic of Bashkortostan who was himself heterosexual, and Eduard Mishin, editor-in-chief of a gay magazine. They had submitted an application to marry in January 2005 in the Butyrsky District of Moscow, arguing that the prohibition violated Article 19 of the Russian Constitution. The lower court dismissed the lawsuit on the 15th of February 2005. The Moscow City Court upheld that decision in April 2005. The Supreme Court later ruled it had no authority to modify the law, and the European Court of Human Rights dismissed the case without comment in June 2008.

  The 2020 constitutional referendum pushed the prohibition deeper into Russian law. After amendments passed unanimously in the State Duma, Article 72 of the Constitution was rewritten to include, among the joint responsibilities of the Russian Federation and its constituent entities, the "protection of marriage as a union of a male and a female." The referendum also allowed Vladimir Putin to serve as president until 2036. International observers criticized the vote, citing widespread irregularities including voter coercion, multiple voting, violations of ballot secrecy, and allegations of police violence against a journalist present to observe. All twenty-two republics of Russia now have constitutional bans on same-sex marriage, many of them amended in the wake of that referendum.

• 4. Transgender Loopholes and Their Closure

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  The Family Code's silence on transgender people created an unintended opening. Because marriages are only possible between partners of opposite legal sex, a transgender person who had not completed a legal gender change was technically still of their birth sex in state records. On the 7th of November 2014, Irina Shumilova and Alyona Fursova married in Saint Petersburg by exploiting precisely this gap. Shumilova had not completed a legal gender change and was still recorded as male. Both spouses wore wedding dresses at the ceremony. News of the marriage reached the media despite the couple's wish to stay private. Staff at the registry office stated they had "fully complied" with Russian marriage laws.

  A similar case had occurred a few months earlier, when Alina Davis, 23, and Alison Brooks, 19, applied to marry at a registry office on Kutuzovsky Prospekt in Moscow. The application was accepted because Davis was legally a man.

  These two cases prompted MP Vitaly Milonov to introduce legislation banning "inappropriate clothing" at marriages. The bill was not passed. In 2015, MPs Aleksey Zhuravlyov, Anatoly Greshnevikov, and Dmitri Gorovstov proposed legislation explicitly banning marriages where one spouse had completed or intended to complete a sex change procedure. A parliamentary committee rejected it as "impossible" to enforce, on the grounds that gender checks of all newlyweds could not be organized.

  In July 2023, President Vladimir Putin signed a law banning transgender people from modifying their legal gender on official documents. The law also annulled existing marriages in which one spouse had completed a legal gender change. Transgender people who have not completed a legal gender change may still, under current law, marry a partner of the opposite legal sex.

• 5. Foreign Marriages and the Passport Stamp

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  Russian citizens can legally marry abroad in countries that permit it, among them Argentina, Iceland, Norway, Portugal, and South Africa. Whether Russia recognizes those marriages is unsettled. Article 158 of the Family Code says that marriages conducted abroad are recognized in Russia, but article 167 allows the state to reject foreign family law that contradicts the "fundamentals of the legal order" of the Russian Federation. Lawyers remain divided on which provision takes precedence.

  A test case arrived in January 2018. Pavel Stotsko and Evgenii Voitsekhovskii had married in Denmark on the 4th of January 2018. On returning to Russia, their passports were indirectly stamped to acknowledge their married status. The passport official who applied the stamp was dismissed. The Ministry of Internal Affairs declared both passports invalid. A court case accusing the couple of "intentional damage to official documents" followed. Police issued a public statement that they would not protect the couple from homophobic vigilantes. The couple fled Russia, citing threats to their liberty and security.

  A quieter resolution occurred in June 2020, when Igor Kochetkov received a tax deduction from the Federal Taxation Service under the health insurance scheme of his husband Kirill Fedorov, whom he had married in the United States in 2017. The deduction suggested at least a partial administrative recognition of the union.

  On the 14th of October 2020, a bill was submitted to the Federal Assembly to explicitly ban recognition of foreign same-sex marriages. The government announced its opposition to the bill on the 20th of October, and it was not approved.

• 6. Fedotova and the European Court

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  On the 23rd of October 2009, Irina Fedotova and Irina Shipitko married in Toronto in a ceremony officiated by Judge Harvey Brownstone. Numerous journalists and local activists attended. The couple received their marriage license and returned to Russia hoping it would be recognized. On the 21st of January 2010, the Moscow City Court upheld the Tverskoy District Court's refusal to recognize their marriage. They appealed to the European Court of Human Rights, which registered their case on the 18th of January 2011.

  In June 2013, five more same-sex couples applied to marry at a registry office in Saint Petersburg. All five were refused. One of those couples, Dmitry Chunosov and Yaroslav Yevtushenko, challenged the refusal in court in the Gryazinsky District, Lipetsk. A lower court dismissed their case on the 2nd of August 2013. The Lipetsk Regional Court upheld that dismissal on appeal on the 7th of October 2013. Cases brought by the remaining couples in Gryazi, Voronezh, Saint Petersburg, and Moscow were also dismissed. The ECHR combined the cases of Chunosov and Yevtushenko, and of Ilmira Shayhraznova and Elena Yakovleva, with the Fedotova case for oral argument.

  In July 2021, the ECHR ruled that Russia "had an obligation to ensure respect for the applicants' private and family life by providing a legal framework allowing them to have their relationships acknowledged." The court rejected the Russian Government's argument that public disapproval of same-sex unions justified the restriction, stating that "access to rights for a minority could not be dependent on the acceptance of the majority." The Grand Chamber upheld the ruling on the 17th of January 2023, finding by fourteen votes to three that Russia had violated Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. That decision places a positive obligation on all Council of Europe member states to legalize same-sex partnerships. Russia was expelled from the Council of Europe on the 16th of March 2022 and ceased to be a party to the ECHR on the 16th of September 2022, so it will not implement the ruling. A lawyer representing the plaintiff couples said as much before the Grand Chamber issued its decision.

• 7. Shifting Numbers, Shifting Ground

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  In 1995, a Russian Public Opinion Research Center survey found that 18% of Russians held a positive view of same-sex marriage, while 38% were opposed. A decade later, a January 2005 poll from the same organization showed support had fallen to 14% and opposition had risen to 59%.

  The drop steepened after 2013. The Levada Center recorded support at 14% in 2010-10% in 2012, and 5% in 2013, the year the Russian gay propaganda law took effect. A Pew Research Center survey conducted between the 1st of July and the 31st of July 2015 found only 5% of Russians favored allowing gay and lesbian couples to marry, with 90% opposed. Among Russians aged 35 and above, support stood at 3%. Among 18-34-year-olds it reached 9%. Among irreligious Russians it was 8%.

  Geography matters. A 2008 Agency for Social Information poll found 34% of Saint Petersburg residents supported same-sex marriage. In 2011, support stood at 21% in both Moscow and Saint Petersburg. The RPORC's communications director, Alexei Firsov, framed the national trend in stark terms, saying his country was "swimming against the current, strengthening, despite global trends, intolerance toward homosexual relationships," and suggested the statistic "might serve as a parameter of national identification."

  A 2021 RPORC poll showed support had edged back up to 12%, with 75% opposed. Whether that uptick is a reversal or statistical noise, the broader trajectory since the 1990s has moved consistently against recognition, driven by anti-gay state propaganda, Orthodox Christian influence, and growing hostility toward Western liberal norms under Vladimir Putin.

• 8. Siberian Two-Spirit Traditions

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  Among the Aleut people of the Aleutian Islands, two-spirit individuals known as ayagigux̂ wore women's clothing and, according to historical accounts, copied "all aspects of the feminine role" with such authenticity that "strangers to the tribe were not able to distinguish them from biological women." Marriages between ayagigux̂ and cisgender men were commonplace and carried social prestige. The sources note that a husband "regarded his ayagigux̂ as a major social accomplishment, and the family profited from association with their new wealthy in-law." Wealthy Aleut men typically maintained polygynous marriages, so the ayagigux̂ were likely part of a polygynous household rather than exclusive wives.

  The Siberian Yupiks recognized two-spirit individuals called aghnaasiq, who occupied the cultural role of shamans and were "regarded as especially powerful." They wore women's clothing and could marry either men or women.

  These traditions share no direct legal lineage with the contemporary marriage debate in Russia. But they document that the lands now called Russia have, for a very long time, held space for unions that fall outside a simple male-female binary, a fact that current Russian law does not acknowledge.