nineteen
IN AUGUST 2012, Lyosha got a call from a university administrator informing him that he needed to obtain a police clearance to be allowed to continue teaching. Everyone was getting these calls, including a friend of a friend who worked in the toy section of a department store. Such were the new rules, the administrator explained, nothing personal.
The Russian labor code had always forbidden convicted felons to teach. It had just never before occurred to local authorities to extend the rules to people who sold toys or taught at the university level. Now a few things had changed: the country was on the lookout for the “pedophile lobby”; in the spring of 2012 the parliament had passed a law adding convictions for “crimes against the state” to the list of reasons to ban someone from teaching; and everyone had become an enforcer.1 Lyosha went and got himself certified as never having been convicted of violent, sexual, or political offenses.
In August he was feeling all right. A ban on “propaganda of homosexuality” had passed in St. Petersburg in November 2011,2 but he thought that maybe it would not pass at the federal level. It was not the first such city law in Russia, after all. Still, this was the country’s second-largest city, and it was Putin’s city. Also, the law had a particularly prominent advocate there, a local legislature member, Vitaly Milonov. As a scholar, Lyosha could not stop watching Milonov. As a gay man, he felt sickened and terrified by him in a way he had never experienced before. Flamboyant and at times effeminate, Milonov read as gay—though, obviously, not to his current audience. Lyosha knew that the world had seen this before. Milonov introduced the St. Petersburg law, which prescribed fines for “propaganda” from roughly $100 to about $1,500, by saying that “the wave of popularity of sexual deviations has a negative impact on our children.” His fellow legislators did not simply support him: they immediately wanted to go further. “Children who have been crippled by pedophiles jump out of windows, they commit suicide,” said another legislator during the discussion of the bill. “Pedophilia is a threat to a child’s life. That sort of propaganda should be punished by at least twenty years in prison.” Other legislators picked up from there, making Milonov look like a moderate.3
Once the law was passed, Milonov tried to get Madonna fined for alleged propaganda during her August 2012 St. Petersburg concert.4 Other legislators wanted to ban a chain of drugstores called Rainbow and a popular brand of cheese with a rainbow on the package.5 Milonov kept raising the stakes. He teamed up with an organization called Parental Control and went hunting—his word—for pedophiles. It was the old entrapment technique: “hunters” posing as teenage boys met men on social networks and scheduled a date, to which they showed up accompanied by television reporters. The mark was made to confirm, on camera, that he had written the messages to the fictional minor, whereupon he was delivered to a police station and written up on “propaganda” charges.6 Under the new law there was no need to demonstrate that the messages were sexual in nature: as innocuous a message as “It gets better—you can be gay and happy” was plainly a violation. For his next legislative initiative, Milonov wanted to introduce a mandatory psychological test for teachers to weed out the pedophiles—a reasonable enough idea, now that psychiatrists across the county were learning to diagnose “pedophilic sexual orientation.”7
The ban on “propaganda of homosexuality” was introduced at the federal level in March 2012. Yelena Mizulina, head of the parliamentary Committee on the Family, took up the mantle—and now she, too, finally shot to national fame, edging out Milonov. This would be her project, an amendment to the Law for the Protection of Children from Information.8 The parliamentary office of legal review seemed dubious about the bill, though: it noted that Russian law did not provide a clear definition of the word “homosexuality.”9 Lyosha thought that maybe this was an elegant legalistic way of scuttling the bill. But then Mizulina fired back with a long letter:
Propaganda of homosexuality is widespread in Russia today: there are gay parades, demonstrations, and television and radio programs in support of same-sex unions that are broadcast on all channels in the daytime.
Such widespread distribution of propaganda of homosexual relations exerts a negative influence on the development of a child’s personality, dilutes his concept of the family as a union of man and woman, and practically creates the conditions for limiting a child’s freedom to choose his own sexual preference when he grows up.10
Clearly, only the pedophile lobby could advocate delaying the passage of the bill, which in the federal parliament was referred to as a ban on “propaganda that negates traditional family values.”
On television, the debate centered not on whether “gay propaganda” should be banned but, as in the St. Petersburg city legislature, on whether this measure would be enough to protect the children.
It is not enough to fine gays for propaganda to teenagers. We need to ban blood and sperm donations by them, and if they should die in a car accident, we need to bury their hearts underground or burn them, for they are unsuitable for the aiding of anyone’s life.11
This was one of the country’s best-known television hosts, speaking at the beginning of an hour-and-a-half special on the largest state television channel. The show was structured as a debate, or a mock court: two opponents and three witnesses on each side, all of them famous and all of them straight. It also so happened that everyone on the ban-the-gays side was an ethnic Russian while their opponents were two Jews, a Georgian, and an American citizen, the old dissident Ludmila Alekseeva. The pro-ban side rehearsed the proud history of anti-homosexuality laws of the twentieth century. Both Stalin and Hitler persecuted gays, both saw them as probable spies, and both saw them as bringing moral decay to their armies. Anti-gay laws, it seemed, were an attribute of strong state power. A priest on the pro-ban side pointed out that it is indeed easier for an intelligence agency to recruit a homosexual, so the perception of gays as spies was rooted in fact. No wonder West Germany kept the ban, in the form in which the law had been redrafted under Hitler, even after the war—it was sound policy. But Russia had foolishly rushed to get rid of its sodomy ban as soon as the Soviet Union collapsed.
“They are unable to reproduce,” said Dmitry Kiselev, the famous TV host and the leader of the pro-ban team. “This forces them to steal children from the healthy majority.” Gay propaganda was a tool of this theft.
A lawyer on the pro-ban side read out the Constitutional Court’s definition of “propaganda of homosexuality”: “information that can cause harm to the physical or spiritual development of children and create in them the erroneous impression of social equality of traditional and nontraditional marital relations.” In other words, the ban was explicitly meant to enshrine second-class citizenship in law.
The anti-ban side tried valiantly, but reason was helpless against demagogy. Nikolai Svanidze, a historian and also a prominent television personality, who led the anti-ban team, tried saying that all this talk of homosexuality was a maneuver to draw attention away from important issues.
“Are you saying that children are not an important issue?” the pro-ban side erupted. “We are talking about children! Our children!”
In his closing statement Kiselev said, “This is a time when we especially need to protect the children we have borne. We all want them to be loved, to live a long time, and to bring us the joy of grandchildren. Sexual minorities have a different plan.”
Svanidze asked the audience to “imagine that your very own child has a nontraditional sexual orientation. Will you love him less? Will you want him to be bullied?”
Svanidze’s vote counter, which had been ticking slower than Kiselev’s all along—viewers could call in to vote for one or the other throughout the show—stopped dead. Russian television viewers were not willing to imagine that they had a gay child. Svanidze’s side lost, 7,375 votes to 34,951.
Gays were shaping up to be the perfect scapegoat: they were spies, they were bad for the army and dangerous to children, and whatever acceptance they had gained was a mistake made in 1993, under pressure from the West. Banning the gays, or at least shutting them up, was a shortcut to health and power, a rebuke to the West, and a guarantee of a populous and healthy nation.
Still, when the bill lingered in parliament, when there had been no vote on it half a year later, Lyosha convinced himself that it might not pass.
—
OLEG CHIRKUNOV, the Perm governor, resigned in April 2012: he had been under attack from state television for some time.12 The funder of his “cultural revolution” project pulled out of Perm: Gordeev faded from view, having resigned his senate seat and sold his companies. Guelman, the art dealer and former political technologist, continued to run the PERMM, the contemporary art museum. For the White Nights festival in 2013 he organized several shows. One, called Russian Baroque, was shut down by the city when it was discovered that it featured photographs from the 2011–2012 protests. Another show, Welcome! Sochi 2014, satirized the preparations for the winter games. This one was shuttered as soon as it opened. Soon Guelman was fired as director of the museum. A short time later he moved to Montenegro, together with his family and his curatorial projects.13
In September 2012, teaching started as usual, except it was harder. Lyosha submitted a chapter to the department’s annual. It was called “Queer Identity in Russia and the Discourse of Human Rights.” People in the department gave him good notes. Everyone liked it, and Lyosha was happy with it and happy with his colleagues, who were just being good academics, like there was no madness on television. Then there was a review meeting, and all the same people trashed the paper. They said it was politics, not scholarship. Lyosha said that he would be willing to rework the paper, but consensus was that the paper was beyond repair.
The department chair’s recommendations to tone down his research became an order. Lyosha would no longer be allowed to travel to LGBT studies conferences, even if the other side paid for the trip—he was free to travel in his personal capacity, that is, but he should not mention the university. The department had a new grant to study social media. Lyosha was welcome to travel to international conferences under the auspices of this project—all he had to do was change his topic. He did. He started writing about social media. Then he went to conferences in Switzerland and Berlin and delivered papers on “social networks as the new closet.” Back in Perm, no one said anything. Except once a friend texted him from a conference: she was sitting next to their department chair, who was complaining that Lyosha was exposing the department to risk. “That’s what I get for taking a faggot under my wing,” the chair said, and the friend put her phrase in her text message.
It was all true. Lyosha was a faggot, and the chair had had him under her wing. She had been very kind to him. She had cared about him, and she had confided in him. He felt like he had been slapped.
He and Darya still had their gender studies center. They still had the money to hold the annual Gender Aspects of the Social Sciences conference, buy tea and cookies for the participants, and print three hundred copies of the collection of conference papers.
That fall he and Darya were called to a department meeting to talk about the work of the center. They decided that Darya would talk about their work in general and Lyosha would talk about its LGBT aspects. He was better at keeping his cool.
“You and I,” said Lyosha, addressing fellow faculty members, “we say that we produce knowledge. LGBT people exist. Their experience is a factor in politics.”
No kidding. If you so much as turned on the television, you would get the impression that LGBT people were the only factor in politics. The department listened in silence. It was a horrible, angry and sticky silence, but they did not say anything and this meant that the gender studies center continued to exist, for now.
Much of the center’s work happened outside the university. Darya and Lyosha had long ago agreed that educating the public about gender was part of their mission. Darya maintained a public page on VK.com, the Russian social network that used to be known as VKontakte. This started to get tricky. People were writing hate messages. Some of these commenters were their former students, who were now accusing Lyosha and Darya of propaganda. Every time this happened, Darya wanted to take down their page. The messages did not scare her—she really was fearless—but they hurt. Lyosha talked her down. This was work. They were producing knowledge.
—
LYOSHA’S IDEA of “social networks as the new closet” had a connection to his own life, much of which was happening online. Soon after he broke up with the other Lyosha, a man named Mitya wrote to him on VK. They had seen each other once, during one of those big Perm “cultural revolution” events. Mitya had an incomprehensible-sounding job—he was a marketing coach—and an exotic Moscow lifestyle. He meditated, rode his bicycle for exercise, and watched what he ate. He was driven and ambitious, and he pushed Lyosha to seek recognition by entering his poetry in competitions. He also demanded that Lyosha start taking care of his body, especially because Lyosha’s kidney problems—the aftereffects of that playground gay-bashing in Solikamsk—had been flaring up. They messaged about everything—what they did, what the world was like, and what love was. They did not see each other, though. More than a year after they started messaging, Mitya invited Lyosha to spend a couple of days in his native Nizhny Novgorod. It was a great two days and three nights. The weather was brutally cold, but they went for walks anyway. Talking to each other was easy and fun, as was the sex. But then they did not see each other again for about a year, and then another year after that. In between, Mitya sometimes disappeared for weeks or a couple of months at a time, only to pop back up on Skype as though he’d never been gone.
Andrei showed up during one of Mitya’s absences. He had graduated from Perm State University the same year as Lyosha. Lyosha had had a crush on him during their first year, but they never really talked: Andrei came from a wealthy family and traveled in different circles. Now he was a lawyer in Geneva. They ran into each other when he was visiting Perm and soon started Skyping every day. Lyosha talked about the pressure at his department.
“What are you still doing there?” asked Andrei, meaning, What are you still doing in Russia? “You’ve got to get out. And you’ve got to start learning English.”
Andrei kept complaining about his girlfriend, who lived in New York, until one day he confessed that this was actually a boyfriend.
“I knew that,” said Lyosha.
After that, Lyosha spent a couple of months coaching Andrei through his coming-out process.
Maybe it was not exactly a closet, but Lyosha’s social and emotional life was neatly compartmentalized. In Perm, he had his work and a close friend and collaborator in Darya. His romantic life happened in messages, and, during the periods of Mitya’s disappearance, in his imagination. His emotional support came from Andrei via Skype.
In the fall of 2012, Lyosha swung by Geneva to visit Andrei after delivering his paper on “social networks as the new closet” at a conference in Basel. He had just arrived back in Perm when he went to meet a friend for dinner. The friend brought another friend, and Lyosha could not stop talking—about the conference, his paper, Geneva. He might have felt self-conscious afterward, had he not heard from his friend’s friend immediately. His name was Ilya. He messaged Lyosha that he was impressed.
Ilya was a few years younger, a recent chemistry department graduate working as a waiter. Dating him was easy. There was none of the anxiety, competition, or obsession that Lyosha had experienced in his previous involvements. There was no talk of love. They did not move in together. They just enjoyed each other.
—
ON JANUARY 25, the parliament took the first of three required votes on the “propaganda” bill. A couple of members, including Masha’s former boss Ilya Ponomarev, questioned whether the measure was necessary.
“You shouldn’t treat this issue so lightly!” objected Mizulina. “Just two years ago seventy percent of all sexual crimes were committed against girls. Now many of them are committed against boys! Think about why that is!”
In the end, only one parliament member abstained from voting for the bill and one voted against it—although this member, a novice who had just recently been called up to fill an empty seat, soon said that he had accidentally pushed the wrong button. Three hundred eighty-eight voted in favor. Several, including Ponomarev, left the hall to avoid the vote.14
At the entrance to the parliament, LGBT protesters were outnumbered by thugs who threw Nazi-style salutes, tossed eggs and excrement at the protesters, and beat them. A protester’s nose was broken. The police watched for a while and then arrested the protesters, not the thugs. A small group of supporters stood to the side of the protesters—they had no banners or pink-triangle buttons, and they kept the physical distance necessary to avoid beatings and arrest. One of them, a biology teacher from a prestigious Moscow high school, was caught on camera trying to reason with one of the thugs. The following day, the teacher, who was straight and married to a woman, lost his job.*
In the spring the Levada Center tried to take a measure of public opinion toward LGBT people. Seventy-three percent of respondents said that they wholeheartedly supported the law. The figure was shocking—for more than two decades the Homo Sovieticus surveys had shown the level of aggression toward “sexual minorities” gradually subsiding. What did this 73 percent mean, and what did people think they were supporting? It occurred to Gudkov that his staff did not know what they were measuring. He asked them to take another look at the questions they had been asking. Every phrase used in the survey had been beaten to death on television, and including these phrases in questions predetermined the answers. Gudkov asked the young sociologists to redesign and re-administer the survey. They tried. They brought in advisers—LGBT activists they knew. They got stuck.
There were only so many ways to say “gay.” The Homo Sovieticus survey had traditionally used the phrase “sexual minorities,” but the advisers were adamantly opposed to it: they thought the term was demeaning. Perhaps more to the point, it dated back to a time before gays became a topic of political conversation in Russia, had fallen out of use, and probably was not the best term to measure current attitudes. “LGBT” would be incomprehensible to most Russians. “Nontraditional sexual orientation” was the term the state used, so it would inevitably frame the question and the answer. By equating “homosexual” with “pedophile” and proposing to burn gay hearts, television had appropriated those terms for the propaganda campaign as well. “Queer” was even more obscure than “LGBT.” They could think of no other way to ask the questions: the Kremlin had hijacked the language.
—
ON MAY 9, 2013, Lyosha turned twenty-eight. He cooked dinner for seven or eight friends that evening at his apartment—he had been living alone for over a year now. Ilya was working the late-night shift; he left after the dinner, to return in the wee hours.
That morning Putin shouted “Glory to Russia!” Eleven thousand troops marched through Red Square and across television screens, followed by at least three kinds of armored vehicles and tanks, five kinds of missile launchers, and sixty-eight different helicopters and airplanes.15 The city of Volgograd also held a parade. Earlier in the year, the local legislature had voted to use the city’s old name during the festivities, so that day it was Stalingrad.16
All over Russia, there were fireworks that night. The people of Volgograd/Stalingrad watched them from the city’s Volga embankment. When the fireworks ended, a little after ten, a twenty-three-year-old named Vlad Tornovoy and his friends left the embankment to start the long trek home to the working-class outskirts. It was after midnight when Tornovoy was drinking beer with two friends on a bench in a playground in their neighborhood. Then his friends killed him. First they beat him and kicked him, then, while he was lying on the ground, they pushed a half-liter empty beer bottle up his anus. Then another. The third bottle went in only halfway. Then they kicked him some more, and one of the bottles popped out of his body. They threw a flattened-out discarded cardboard box on him and set it on fire, but the fire went out quickly. Then one of them picked up a forty-pound boulder and threw it at Tornovoy’s head five or six times. Tornovoy died. Then his friends went home and went to sleep.
The killers were arrested the next morning. They explained that they had killed Tornovoy because he was gay. Television reported that the killers said his homosexuality “offended their sense of patriotism.” Other news media got hold of a video in which an investigator was interrogating one of the suspects.
DETECTIVE: Why did you do it?
SUSPECT: Why? Because he is a homo.
DETECTIVE: Is that the only reason?
SUSPECT: Yes.
It turned out that there was an eyewitness, a man who happened on the scene, sat down on the bench, and watched the murder happen. “I don’t feel guilty,” he told a reporter. “But I do still feel kind of queasy inside. . . . They killed him, you know, because he was gay.” The eyewitness faced no charges.17
Ilya came to Lyosha’s apartment from work in the early hours of the morning, wished him a happy birthday again, and went to bed. Lyosha got up, sat down at the computer, and read about the murder of Vlad Tornovoy. It had been a year since the televised anti-gay campaign began, and many people made the connection. A barrage of posts on social networks asked Mizulina, the backer of the “propaganda” bill, if this was what she wanted.
“If you accuse crime fighters of creating more crime, then we will never be able to defeat crime,” she told journalists, responding to the social media storm. “That’s just dumb.”18 In other words, Tornovoy was killed because he had been flaunting his sexuality—exactly the thing she was trying to ban. She pledged that she would get the law passed in the next few weeks. Now Lyosha believed it.
—
THE PARLIAMENT VOTED for the ban in its second and third readings on June 11, 2013. A few dozen activists staged a protest at the entrance to parliament and were beaten by counterprotesters while police looked on. Eventually the police pushed the LGBT protesters onto paddy wagons and drove them to a precinct. The counterprotesters stayed and beat up two young gay men who had been left behind.
Masha was late for the protest: she had overslept. When she got there, she saw the paddy wagons pulling out. She walked to the nearest police precinct—she had spent time there before, so she knew the location and the drill: bring water for the detainees, who might be stuck in an unventilated room for many hours. She saw two plainclothes cops walking out with a man she recognized. He was the thug who had broken a protester’s nose back in January. The men turned the corner. She followed them. She was not sure what she was going to do, but she had to do something.
One of the men stopped abruptly and turned around. He was tall and athletic. Then Masha must have passed out. She came to on the ground, on the sidewalk around the corner from the police station. The men were gone. Her abdomen hurt like something huge and hard had been slammed into it. It was a sunny summer afternoon in the very center of Moscow; office workers were coming back from their lunch breaks. Someone called an ambulance.
At the Sklifasovsky trauma center Masha could not produce a urine sample. She could not pee. The doctors were nice about it: they inserted a catheter. After the X-rays and ultrasounds they said there was no permanent damage and in a day or two she would pee for herself again.
—
TWO DAYS after the law passed, the parliamentary committees on the family and on foreign relations held a joint session attended by five foreign guests. Brian S. Brown, head of the National Organization for Marriage, formed a few years earlier to pass legislation against same-sex marriage in California, and French National Front activist Aymeric Chauprade were among them. The foreigners had come to praise the Russians and urge them to use their momentum to go further. Said Chauprade:
You must understand that patriots of countries the world over, those committed to protecting the independence of their nations and the foundations of our civilization, are looking to Moscow. It is with great hope that they are looking to Russia, which has taken a stand against the legalization, the public legalization of homosexuality, against the interference of nihilistic nongovernmental organizations which are manipulated by American secret services, and against the adoption of children by homosexual couples.
Ladies and gentlemen, members of parliament, Russia has become the hope of the entire world. . . .
Long live the European Christian civilization! Long live Russia! Long live France!19
Gays had become Public Enemy Number One: foreign agents, the foot soldiers of a looming American takeover, a threat to the foundational values of the European civilization. One hardly had to mention pedophilia anymore to communicate that gays were dangerous. The fight against them, on the other hand, positioned Russia as the European civilization’s bastion of hope.
The joint committee resolved to pass legislation that would ban adoption by same-sex couples or single people from countries where same-sex marriage was legal. They stressed that even this measure would be insufficient, because there was no foolproof way to ensure that Russian children adopted by heterosexual foreigners would never be re-adopted by homosexuals. After the meeting, Mizulina told journalists that she would also devise a way to have biological children removed from same-sex families.20
The adoption ban was passed just a week after the ban on “propaganda”—in time to become law before the parliament went on summer break. Both bills passed unanimously. A bill to enable the removal of biological children was introduced as soon as the parliament went back into session in September.21
That year Putin hosted his tenth annual Valdai Club, a weekend junket at which he made his case on a topic of choice to a select group of foreign Russia experts. This year he spoke about Russian sovereignty and national identity:
Russia is facing a serious challenge to its identity. This issue has aspects of both morality and foreign policy. We can see many EuroAtlantic countries rejecting their own roots, including Christian values, which form the foundation of Western civilization. They reject their own moral foundations as well as all traditional identities: national, cultural, religious, and even gender. They pursue policies that place large families on an equal footing with same-sex partnerships, and faith in god with satan worship. An excess of political correctness has led to the point that there is talk of registering political parties that promote pedophilia. In many European countries people are ashamed and frightened to talk about their religious affiliation. . . . And this is the model that is being aggressively forced onto the entire world. I am convinced that this is the road to degradation and primitivization, a deep demographic and moral crisis.22
Satan, pedophilia, American aggression, the death of the Christian civilization, and, of course, a demographic threat: it was all about the gays now.
The following September, it had been announced, the Kremlin and the Church together would host the World Congress of Families, the organization founded at the sociology department back in 1995. Its headquarters were in Illinois, and its meetings had been held in Europe, the United States, and Australia. In the United States, people who monitored far-right organizations perceived it as an American political export.23 But Russians, with their money and the high stature afforded their cause by the state, were taking leadership roles in the organization,24 which would now be coming home in high style. Congress sessions were slated to be held in the Kremlin Palace of Congresses, inside the fortress walls, and a small distance away, at the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, the country’s largest—where Pussy Riot had staged their “Punk Prayer” in 2012.25
—
LYOSHA WAS IN NEW YORK when the law passed. He and Ilya were on vacation together. They had been seeing each other for more than half a year. It was still the most companionable relationship Lyosha had ever had. Ilya was a bit immature, but he knew his limitations, and both of these traits made him a perfect weekend-and-holiday partner. That, the distance, and the splendor of New York kept Lyosha from spending too much time thinking about the passage of the law.
Teaching began again in September. Budget cuts had led to some changes in the department. When Lyosha was an undergraduate, all students had been required to take a set of core courses common to the given area of specialization in all Russian universities—this was called the “federal curriculum”—and at least one elective a semester, out of a small number on offer: the “regional curriculum.” Now the regional curriculum had been cut down to two courses, and in September each student was asked to pick one. The course chosen by more than half the students would be the only one offered—an elective in the sense that there had been an election of sorts. All the students in a particular specialty would be required to take it that semester.
This was how Lyosha ended up with two groups of more than twenty students in his Gender Approaches in Politics course. He was teaching it twice a week, once to international relations majors and once to political science majors (he was also teaching a “federal” course, Political Processes in Contemporary Russia, which met twice a week). The political scientists were a joy, but some of the international relations students made it clear that they did not want to be there. One student rose and left the room every time the subject of sex came up—as when Lyosha had them discuss The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm, the classic feminist essay by the American Anne Koedt. Then there were two young men, both of them straight-A students, who always sat together and took turns standing up to object every time Lyosha made reference to the patriarchy.
“It has been proven historically that men are the stronger sex,” one would say. “What you are saying now harms the institution of family.”
Lyosha would calmly try to steer them back to the text under discussion.
“But those are Western studies that you are citing,” the other would get up and say. “They are always trying to foist their values on us.”
Lyosha had the class watch and write about The Times of Harvey Milk, a 1984 documentary about the openly gay San Francisco city supervisor who was assassinated by another legislator. One of the two young men in the class turned in a paper arguing that gays, not being real men, could not be politicians. The paper dripped with homophobia, but unlike the comments the same student left on the gender studies center’s VK page, it contained no obscenities. Lyosha gave the student an A: within its framework, the paper was well argued.
—
LATER IN THE FALL Lyosha got a text message from Darya.
“A friend has been entrapped by Occupy Pedophilia.” Lyosha had heard something about this. Occupy Pedophilia was the skinhead version of the online entrapment movement. He knew it was operating in different cities, but he did not know about incidents in Perm. Lyosha looked up the Occupy Pedophilia/Perm page on VK.
“Our next safari will take place on Thursday. Open to all. Entry fee 250 rubles.”
The group included more than two thousand members. Lyosha recognized many of the names: he had graded their papers.
He clicked on a video. It showed Darya’s friend Valeriy*—Lyosha had met him too. He stood against a tiled wall—it looked like a pedestrian underpass or perhaps the basement of a shopping center, flanked by two large young men. At the beginning of the clip he stated his full name, age, and place of work: he was thirty and taught at a trade school.
“We used to treat pedophilia with urinotherapy,” one of the thugs said about halfway through the ten-minute clip. “But especially for you, we have chosen the banana treatment. This is a sacred banana.”
From that point on, Valeriy stood with a half-peeled banana in his hands.
FIRST THUG: Have you been gay a long time?
VALERIY: Since I was eighteen.
FIRST THUG: What made you that way?
VALERIY: Nothing.
SECOND THUG: How is that possible? Did you grow up with both of your parents?
VALERIY: Yes.
SECOND THUG: Maybe something went wrong for you with a girl?
VALERIY: Not really.
SECOND THUG: Do you believe in God?
VALERIY: Yes.
FIRST THUG: What’s your religion?
VALERIY: I am Orthodox.
SECOND THUG: What was it that Jesus said?
FIRST THUG: His kind must be stoned.
There was a splice and then you could see Valeriy squatting, as instructed by the thugs, and eating the banana as they guffawed.26
In another clip the thugs had filmed themselves barging into the apartment of Mikhail, an older man Lyosha had seen around for years. The clip had been edited down to twelve minutes and fifty-six seconds from what must have been a much longer ordeal. In that time, the man went from telling the thugs sternly to get out to begging for mercy. Lyosha could see repeated flashes of a taser gun. Most of the clip had been filmed through the open apartment door. At one point, someone must have been walking up or down the stairs, because the thugs called out: “Hey, did you know you have a pedophile living here?” That was when Mikhail looked terrified for the first time and said for the first time, not yet pleadingly, “That’s enough.”
A few minutes later in the clip Mikhail was on the floor. He had been beaten. The words “I’m fag” had been written in ballpoint pen on his bald head. The thugs pulled him up and propped him against the wall because he could no longer stand on his own. Then they took him around the building, knocking on doors and informing neighbors that he was a pedophile. The thugs introduced themselves as representing “the social movement to prevent pedophilia.” The neighbors were receptive. One man in a T-shirt and jeans, with a good haircut—he looked like a young banker or maybe a marketing executive—took down the name of the site where he would be able to watch the video. An older woman in a housecoat popped out of her apartment to testify: “I’ve seen it! He’s got young men coming around all the time!”
The clip ended with Mikhail on his knees, promising never to correspond with boys and saying, “Long live Occupy Pedophilia.” He also said, “Death to blacks,” and “Glory to Russia.”27
The was also a clip shot on a sunny afternoon on a busy Perm street. Another acquaintance, Andrei, was being held, yelled at, and tasered by two thugs while two more looked on in view of the camera. Andrei kept calling out to passersby, asking them to call the police. No one stopped, it seemed. But Andrei kept refusing to answer questions about his sexual orientation, or about what he thought of people from the Caucasus. The taser gun kept crackling, and he kept saying, in response to every question, “What does it matter.” In the end, the thugs called the police themselves. The clip ended with Andrei being pushed into the back of a police car by two officers and two Occupy thugs.28
The thugs in each clip were different. They must have taken turns starring. And then there were the people off-camera, who had paid 250 rubles (roughly eight dollars) a pop to watch.
Lyosha got up and checked the door. Living alone had all at once lost all sense of accomplishment and romance. The door was locked, but it looked useless to Lyosha now. It would take but a few minutes to break down this door, and no one would know.
Darya told him that Valeriy went to the police to try to report having been kidnapped and tortured, but the police threatened him with arrest. He resigned his job at the trade school without waiting for the video to be posted online.
—
THAT FALL the university got a new staff member. He was in his mid-forties, had close-cropped gray hair, and always wore a suit. His job title was Security Adviser. There had been someone in that role before him, a retired military man of advanced age. He had had no presence and, as far as Lyosha knew, no job title. This one was different. “I think we’ve got our First Department now,” Lyosha said to Darya.
“First Department” in the Soviet Union existed in all organizations that had anything to do with state secrets—which, in that country, covered many if not most organizations—as well as organizations engaged in what was called “ideological work,” such as the media or any educational institution. First Department staff reported to the KGB rather than the head of the organization where they ostensibly worked.
In October, Darya went on maternity leave. This left Lyosha alone in charge of the gender studies center. It also meant that Lyosha temporarily took over the administrative duties of assistant dean. He was told that in this capacity he needed to have an introductory meeting with the new security adviser, whose name, as it turned out, was Yuri Gennadyevich Belorustev. He had an office in an old dormitory building. Lyosha recognized the office: a wall of shelves crowded with thick binders; stained wallpaper on the other walls; two well-worn chairs with wooden armrests; a not-quite-matching desk; a potted plant; and white lace curtains on the windows. Lyosha’s uncle and cousin, military officers both, had identical offices. This one seemed too small for Yuri Gennadyevich. Or too old. Or a stage set.
“Let’s use the informal pronoun with each other,” said Yuri Gennadyevich. “This is a friendly conversation.”
Lyosha waited. You cannot say no when someone older than you proposes switching to the informal pronoun. Yuri Gennadyevich had a peculiarly soft, treacly voice.
“Do you have students in your department who are restless?”
“I’m not sure what you mean.”
“You know, nationalists, radical communists, homosexuals—”
“I don’t think keeping abreast of students’ personal lives is part of my job description.”
“Well, you just make sure to let me know.”
Yuri Gennadyevich called Lyosha once a week after that. Lyosha tried not to say a word that could be interpreted as meaning anything. That was difficult to manage on the phone. Sometimes, Yuri Gennadyevich asked Lyosha about a particular student, who Lyosha knew was troubled. It was hard not to notice, but Lyosha pretended to be oblivious. “Do you think he needs psychological help?” Yuri Gennadyevich would ask.
Not from you, Lyosha would think. He would say, “I’m not sure what you mean.”
He saw Yuri Gennadyevich every day. The old security adviser must have spent his days sleeping in an armchair in his office. Yuri Gennadyevich was everywhere all the time.
In December the gender studies center held its annual conference. Lyosha chaired the panel on queer identity. As he was exiting the room, he bumped into Yuri Gennadyevich.
“What do you have here?”
“Our annual conference.”
Yuri Gennadyevich took a printed program. “Looks very interesting.”
Two weeks later Lyosha realized that he was under surveillance. When he came home, there were always plainclothes men milling near the building entrance. As soon as he walked up, the intercom would ring, then the landline, then his cell. A man’s voice would repeat the same phrase over and over:
“Your kind deserves to die.”
Sometimes Lyosha was sure that the omnipresent “security adviser,” the men at the door, and the calls were connected. Sometimes he thought he was paranoid. Whichever was the case, he could not survive intact much longer: if he did not get killed, he would go crazy.
—
“YOU ARE MOVING IN WITH ME,” said Stas. He said it as if they had discussed it.
It was a good option for both of them. Stas had just ended a destructive relationship after four years, and nights alone in his apartment were unbearable. But Stas’s apartment was in a secure building with a fence, cameras, and guards. Stas was a wealthy executive. He told Lyosha not to tell anyone where he was living, and he had his personal driver ferry Lyosha wherever he needed to go, which was just to work and then back to the apartment in the evening. Stas and Lyosha cooked for each other. Over dinner, night after night, they told each other everything. Stas talked out the details of his awful relationship. Lyosha obsessed about the university and his future. They cried like neither of them had cried before, two grown men terrified of their lives, their hearts breaking for each other. They had sex once or twice, but this clearly was not why they had each other, even though Lyosha’s companionate relationship with Ilya had ended: Ilya knew when he was out of his depth, and he left as easily and kindly as he had come. After a couple of months, Lyosha realized that he had a family now, someone who made him feel safe.
—
IN APRIL 2014, Lyosha was getting ready to go to work when he got a message from a friend, an administrator at the university: “Lyosha, what is this? Yuri Gennadyevich has brought it to the rector’s attention.”*
Lyosha clicked on the link. It was a VK post called “What Is Perm Thinking? Propaganda of Sodomy at Perm State Research University.” The post went on to describe the gender studies center and ended with a call to action:
How long can this abominable situation go on? Avowed enemies of the Motherland and of morality are using our money to corrupt students in every sense of the word. When will we put an end to this?
Draw community attention to this! Write to the Perm [State] University rector; file complaints with the police! We are Russian patriots! Victory will be ours!
Photos of Darya and Lyosha were pasted below.29
“You are going to have to leave,” said Stas that evening. Lyosha already had a ticket to New York: he had liked it so much the previous year that he wanted to resume that vacation. He started living on two tracks. On one, he submitted his lesson plans for the coming fall semester. He took part in worrying about further budget cuts and lamenting the fact that the state had no interest in political science anymore. On the other track, he was wrapping up research and friendships. The telephone threats continued. Yuri Gennadyevich kept calling too, asking, “Why don’t you ever come and see me?”
In May, Stas threw a birthday party for Lyosha and invited all his friends. No one had done this for him before. In June, they packed up Lyosha’s stuff. In July, they drove out to Solikamsk to drop off many of his things and tell his mother that he was leaving.
“What are you going to do there?” asked Galina.
“I like that boy,” said Lyosha’s aunt. “I hope you bring him around again.”
Wouldn’t you know it: they had finally accepted him.
—
STAS GAVE LYOSHA $18,000.
“It’s an investment in my future,” he said. “I plan to retire in America. You go and get things ready.”
It was enough to pay a year’s rent in Brighton Beach, where apartments were cheap and the landlords spoke Russian and did not care if you had a credit history. There were many Russian queers in the neighborhood—mostly men around Lyosha’s age, single and in couples. All of them had fled Russia in the last year. Everyone had a story, and they taught Lyosha how to package his into an asylum claim and how to find a lawyer, and how to apply for a work permit when the time came. Then Lyosha helped teach people who came after him.
In August, he wrote to the department: “I had no choice but to leave the country.”
The chair responded with a perfectly mixed message: “Did you stop to consider what kind of trouble that would cause here? Now I have to find someone to take over your teaching load. I always knew you were going to do it. I wish you luck.”
Then he heard from Darya and another friend: Yuri Gennadyevich had been calling people in for talks, grilling them about Lyosha. The words “foreign agent” were said. Also, they had figured out that the person who wrote that “What is Perm thinking?” post was someone who had attended the Soros-funded seminars in Ukraine with them.
Then he heard from the department chair again: “We have informed the administration that you are obtaining postgraduate education in the United States. Kindly conform to this story.”
—
LYOSHA STARTED putting together his asylum case. He wrote to a close friend, a former student, who had gotten a phone call from the FSB in the spring of 2013.
“Whom do you have in your department at the university who engages in the propaganda of homosexuality?”
“Are you kidding me?” she had responded. “I graduated a million years ago.”
Now Lyosha messaged this friend asking if she would put this story in an affidavit.
“Dear Lyosha,” she wrote in response. “I don’t know what you are talking about. I never got any such call, and you should be aware that libel is a criminal offense.”
Lyosha mentally crossed another friend off the list. The rate of attrition was staggering. He still had Andrei in Geneva, and Stas, who had moved to Moscow. For a while, he continued to correspond with Darya. She had shut down the gender studies group on VK. “I have no desire to continue to do gender studies,” she wrote. About eight months after Lyosha left the country, they just did not seem to have anything left to talk about.