Russian LGBT Network

• 1. Introduction

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  The Russian LGBT Network operates in one of the most hostile environments for queer people in Europe, and it does so from a country where, for much of the twentieth century, homosexuality was a criminal offense. Founded in 2006, the organization became the first inter-regional LGBT rights body in Russian history on the 19th of October 2008. Led by Igor Kochetkov, the network spread across fourteen regional branches stretching from Saint Petersburg to Novosibirsk, holding together a fractured community under relentless pressure. What kind of organization chooses to document torture in Chechnya, challenge a deputy newspaper editor in the prosecutor's office, and mount flash mobs in thirty Russian cities, all at the same time? And how does a civic movement survive when the state begins to call it a foreign threat?

• 2. A Nation's First Survey

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  At a Moscow press conference in February 2009, the Russian LGBT Network and the Moscow Helsinki Group jointly released a 100-page document titled "The Situation for Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals and Transgendered People in the Russian Federation." It was the first in-depth study of the legal position of LGBT people in all of Russian history. The paper analyzed relevant Russian laws and cited specific examples of rights infringement and discrimination, giving legal advocates a foundation they had never previously had.

  2009 had also been declared the Memorial Year for Gay and Lesbian Victims of Political Repression, marking the 75th anniversary of the criminalization of homosexuality. On the 15th of July that year, network representatives met Russian Federation human rights commissioner Vladimir Lukin and delivered a copy of the report. According to Igor Petrov, this was the first official meeting between a state representative and LGBT activists in Russian history. Lukin stated that LGBT people held the same rights as others and that his office was prepared to act if those rights were violated.

  The network did not wait for official goodwill to translate into protection. On the 24th of August 2009 it filed a complaint with the Prosecutor General against Sergey Ponomarev, the deputy chief editor of Komsomolskaya Pravda, for making defamatory public statements about the sexual orientation of individuals. On the 11th of January 2010, the public prosecutor's office issued a formal warning to the newspaper's publishing house, stating that Ponomarev's statements had expressed a negative attitude toward people with homosexual orientation and that breaches of the law in the mass media are intolerable.

• 3. Building the Network

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  Fourteen regional branches formed the backbone of the organization, running from Petrozavodsk and Pskov in the northwest to Novosibirsk and Kemerovo deep in Siberia. Two offices, in Krasnoyarsk and Khabarovsk, were closed at the beginning of 2010. Alongside those branches, eleven affiliated LGBT organizations connected to the network, among them Exit LGBT Organization in Saint Petersburg, Ural-Positive in Ekaterinburg, Anti-Dogma Info in Chelyabinsk, and Rainbow House in Tyumen.

  Governance followed a formal structure. A conference met at least once a year and elected a council headed by a chairperson. Igor Kochetkov held that chair from 2008 until November 2014. During his tenure, in 2013, Foreign Policy magazine included him in its list of Leading Global Thinkers. In 2014 he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

  Tatiana Vinnichenko succeeded Kochetkov as chairperson of the board in November 2014, herself a human rights defender and feminist who had been elected to the board for a second time that year. The board elected alongside her included Kseniya Kirichenko, director of the Transgender Legal Defense Project and coordinator of the strategic litigation program at the LGBT initiative group Coming Out; Elena Shakhova, chairperson of the Saint Petersburg human rights NGO Citizens Watch, founded in 1992; Anna Gizullina, head of the Sverdlovsk regional branch; Mikhail Tumasov, who had founded Samara's social LGBT movement Avers in 2011; and Polina Balyaeva, an individual member since the organization's founding who had worked across more than twenty-five NGO projects.

• 4. Rights in Numbers

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  Starting in 2007, the Russian LGBT Network ran an annual anonymous survey on human rights violations and discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. Each year, between 1,000 and 3,000 people participated. When the 2014 survey ran from the beginning of August to the end of September, 1,092 people took part.

  The results were stark. In 2014-47 percent of respondents said they had faced psychological violence. Fifteen percent reported physical violence. Twenty-one percent encountered violations related to personal data protection, and 37 percent had experienced difficulties with employment or with an employer because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. Only 7 percent said they would be willing to report rights violations to the police.

  The network's PR manager Svetlana Zakharova stated that the survey showed the so-called propaganda law, adopted in 2013, had negatively affected the LGBT community in Russia. She noted that years of research consistently proved that claims by some politicians that LGBT people in Russia face no discrimination are unfounded.

  In 2015, the network documented 284 reported cases of violence and discrimination recorded by monitoring teams in nine Russian cities. Those cases included 52 instances of physical violence, 21 abuses by law enforcement officials, 22 violations of labor law, 20 documented cases of discrimination and violence against transgender people, and 26 violations of the right to freedom of assembly. Nine cases involved family violence or parental rights violations, including the expulsion of LGBT teenagers under the age of twenty from their homes.

• 5. Public Action Under Pressure

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  On the 17th of May 2009, the International Day Against Homophobia, the network organized a rainbow flash mob in Saint Petersburg. Between 100 and 250 people gathered, and the network considered it the largest demonstration for LGBT rights in Russian history at that time. Smaller demonstrations took place the same day in more than thirty Russian cities.

  From the 23rd to the 29th of March 2009, the network had sponsored the third Week Against Homophobia in Russia, bringing roundtables, films, demonstrations, and performances to twelve cities including Arkhangelsk, Tomsk, Omsk, Naberezhnye Chelny, Novosibirsk, and Saint Petersburg. In September of that year, an International Festival of Queer Culture ran in Saint Petersburg from the 17th to the 27th, featuring groups Kolibri, Iva Nova, Betty and S'nega; poets Dita Karelina, Liya Kirgetova, and Elena Novozhilova; and singers Olga Krauze and Tatiana Puchko, alongside photo exhibitions, theater performances, art workshops, films, drag-king shows, and seminars.

  By 2015, on the 17th of May, rainbow flash mobs and events took place in sixteen Russian cities, from Arkhangelsk and Moscow to Vladivostok-adjacent Nakhodka and Khabarovsk in the Far East. Over 350 people gathered on Marsovo Pole in the center of Saint Petersburg, making it the largest LGBT rally in Russia to that point. The organizer of the flash mob in Khabarovsk, Alexander Ermoshkin, was attacked before the demonstration even began. From November 7 to 9 that same year, a Forum of LGBT activists drew 150 people from 26 cities to the Moscow region.

• 6. Chechnya

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  In March 2017, the Russian LGBT Network began receiving reports that mass detentions, torture, and killings of homosexual men had started in Chechnya. On the 29th of March, the organization opened an email hotline. On the 1st of April, Novaya Gazeta published an article reporting more than a hundred illegally detained men and at least three murders. Journalists cited an unprecedentedly large number of sources, including LGBT activists and unofficial contacts inside the local UFSB, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the prosecutor's office, and the administration of the republic's head. Famous muftis and journalists were said to be among the detainees.

  Novaya Gazeta journalist Elena Milashina said on the 3rd of April that the death toll could exceed fifty people. The newspaper's investigation traced the first wave of detentions to the early days of February, when police arrested a young man while intoxicated, examined his phone, and found intimate materials along with contacts of other gay men. A second wave followed after activists from the GayRussia.ru project applied for gay parades in several North Caucasus cities, including Nalchik, Cherkessk, Stavropol, and Maykop. Radio Liberty's investigation placed the start of mass arrests in December 2016.

  Since April 2017, the Russian LGBT Network evacuated around 150 people out of Chechnya, with the majority settling outside Russia. On the 17th of May 2019, seven people broke into the apartment of a network volunteer in Saint Petersburg. Three assailants were identified as Chechen, and four implied they were police officers from Grozny. They interrogated the activist while searching for a young Chechen woman who had fled the region, and for the network's emergency programme coordinator David Isteev. "They told me to tell David Isteev that they were going to find and kill him," the activist recounted.

• 7. Designation and Dissolution

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  In October 2021, the Russian LGBT Network was designated as an unregistered public organization performing the functions of a foreign agent. An attack campaign against the organization ran across multiple Russian media outlets the following November. In February 2022, the Ministry of Justice filed a lawsuit seeking the liquidation of the network's parent organization, Sphere Charitable Foundation, arguing that its activism was contrary to traditional values and state policy and thus a threat to public order and the rule of law.

  Igor Kochetkov criticized the suit as being grounded in ideology rather than law. On the 26th of April 2022, a Saint Petersburg court ordered the liquidation of Sphere, ruling that the organization had illegally conducted foreign-backed political activity. The court's finding closed the legal chapter of an organization that had, for more than fifteen years, filed cases before the European Court of Human Rights, conducted surveys, evacuated people from active persecution, and brought together activists from Vladivostok to Murmansk under a single inter-regional structure. The network's affiliation with the International Lesbian and Gay Association had made it part of a global body; the court's ruling cut that thread inside Russia's borders.