LGBTQ history in Russia

was accused of having homosexual relations by his political opponents The Austrian royal councilor Sigismund von Herberstein described in his report Rerum Moscoviticarum Commentarii (Notes on Muscovite Affairs) his observations during his travels in Moscow in 1517 and 1526. He stated that homosexuality was present among all social classes. The English poet George Turberville who visited Moscow in 1568 when Ivan IV ruled Russia during a bloody phase, was not shocked by the carnage, but about the open homosexuality of the Russian peasants. Adam Olearius also reported that homosexuality among men existed on all levels of society and was not treated as a crime. There are also reports of homosexual relationships between women. Testimony of contemporaries in this regard is probably exaggerated, since any tolerant attitude towards homosexuals was equated to sodomy. In 1551, at the ("hundred-domed Cathedral"), a real ecclesiastical, but not criminal, punishment for a homosexual act was introduced - excommunication, but the spread of this punishment is doubtful, since the homosexual act was "nothing more than a joke" at the tsar's court and among the people. Ivan the Terrible was accused of being homosexual in an attempt to discredit him. Despite this, there have been outbreaks of homophobia, for example when Tsar False Dmitry I was overthrown, his broken body was dragged through the streets by his genitals alongside his supposed male lover. ==Russian Empire==

In 1706, under Peter the Great the first homophobic provision appeared, which provided for the death penalty in the army for a homosexual act, but 10 years later the decision was relaxed: corporal punishment was provided for a voluntary sexual act, and exile for rape. Such laws did not apply to civil society until 1832. Tsar Nicholas I added Article 995 which outlawed muzhelozhstvo (archaic Russian term for sodomy). While this could have created a ban on all forms of private adult voluntary homosexual behavior, the courts tended to limit its interpretation to anal sex between men, thus making private acts of oral sex between consenting men legal. The law did not explicitly address female homosexuality or cross-dressing, although both behaviors were considered to be equally immoral and may have been punished under other laws (similar to how the Church would punish girls for being "tomboys") as lesbians were previously punished by law in the 17th century and prior. Those convicted of a voluntary act were sent into exile for 4-5 years, and for a violent act - for 12. However, there were practically no lawsuits, in fact, this law was "dead", the persecution of homosexuals in Russia was less than in the rest of Europe. Another notable Russian lesbian couple were poet Polyxena Solovyova and Natalia Manaseina. Other notables included poet Alexei Apukhtin, Pyotr Tchaikovsky, conservative author and publisher Prince Vladimir Meshchersky, Sergei Diaghilev, who had an affair with his cousin Dmitry Filosofov and after the breakup with Vaslav Nijinsky. Mikhail Kuzmin's novel Wings (1906) became one of the first "coming out" stories to have a happy ending and his private journals provide a detailed view of a gay subculture, involving men of all classes. While there was a degree of government tolerance extended to certain gay or bisexual artists and intellectuals, especially if they were on friendly terms with the Imperial family, the pervasive public opinion, greatly influenced by the Eastern Orthodox Church, was that homosexuality was a sign of corruption, decadence and immorality. Russian author Alexander Amfiteatrov's novel titled People of the 1890s (1910), reflected this prejudice with two gay characters: a masculine lesbian attorney and a decadent gay poet. Leo Tolstoy's Resurrection introduces a Russian artist, convicted for having sex with his students, but given a lenient sentence; and a Russian activist for gay rights as examples of the widespread corruption and immorality in Tsarist Russia. In general, the experience of the Russian Empire shows that Russians were often more humane and tolerant of homosexuality than other Europeans. Development of homophobia began later, with the October Revolution and the establishment of Bolshevik power. One of the founders of the Kadets party, Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov, had written a research paper on the legal status of homosexuality in Russia, published by early gay rights advocate Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld in Berlin. In addition to the legal research, the paper argued that the anti-gay criminal law should be repealed, making him the first Russian politician to publicly express support for gay rights. ==Soviet Union==

LGBT history after the October Revolution: 1917–1933 The Soviet government of the Russian Soviet Republic (RSFSR) decriminalised homosexuality in December 1917, following the October Revolution and the discarding of the Legal Code of Tsarist Russia. The legalisation of homosexuality was confirmed in the RSFSR Penal Code of 1922, and following its redrafting in 1926. According to Dan Healey, archival material that became widely available following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 "demonstrates a principled intent to decriminalize the act between consenting adults, expressed from the earliest efforts to write a socialist criminal code in 1918 to the eventual adoption of legislation in 1922." The legalisation of private, adult and consensual homosexual relations only applied to the Russian SFSR and the Ukrainian SSR. Homosexuality or sodomy remained a crime in the Azerbaijan SSR (officially criminalised in 1923) as well as in the Transcaucasian and Central Asian Soviet Republics throughout the 1920s. Similar criminal laws were enacted in the Uzbek SSR in 1926 and in the Turkmen SSR the following year. Despite decriminalising homosexuality in 1917, wider Soviet social policy on the matter of wider homosexual rights and the treatment of homosexual people in the 1920s was often mixed. Official Soviet policy in both the RSFSR and the wider USSR in the 1920s on homosexuality fluctuated between toleration and support, attempts at legal equality and social rights for homosexual people, to open examples of state hostility against homosexuals and state attempts to classify homosexuality as "a mental disorder to be cured". In the Communist Party itself during this period of the 1920s, such divergences of opinion and policy on Soviet treatment of homosexuality was also common, ranging from positive, to negative, to ambivalent over views about homosexuals and homosexual rights. to homosexual emancipation "as part of the [sexual] revolution" and attempted such reforms for homosexual rights in the area of civil and medical areas. According to Wayne R. Dynes, some sections of the Bolsheviks of the 1920s actively considered homosexuality a "[social] illness to be cured" or an example of "bourgeois degeneracy" while other Bolsheviks believed it should be legally/socially tolerated and legally/socially respected in the new socialist society. The Bolsheviks also rescinded Tsarist legal bans on homosexual civil and political rights, especially in the area of state employment. In 1918, Georgy Chicherin, a homosexual man who kept his homosexuality hidden, was appointed as People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs of the RSFSR. In 1923, Chicherin was also appointed People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs of the USSR, a position he held until 1930. In the early 1920s, the Soviet government and scientific community took a great deal of interest in sexual research, sexual emancipation and homosexual emancipation. In January 1923, the Soviet Union sent delegates from the Commissariat of Health led by Commissar of Health Semashko to the German Institute for Sexual Research as well as to some international conferences on human sexuality between 1921 and 1930, where they expressed support for the legalisation of adult, private and consensual homosexual relations and the improvement of homosexual rights in all nations. In this climate, Commissar Semashko reduced his support for homosexual rights and Dr. Batkis and other sexual researchers repudiated (in 1928) their own earlier scientific reports of homosexuality as a natural human sexuality. This followed earlier Soviet tendencies in sections of the medical and health communities, even in the early 1920s, to classify homosexuality, if not as a crime, then as an example of mental or physical illness. Earlier examples of this type of hardening Soviet attitude towards homosexuality include the 1923 report from the People's Commissariat for Health entitled The Sexual Life of Contemporary Youth, authored by Izrail Gel'man, which stated: "Science has now established, with precision that excludes all doubt, that homosexuality is not ill will or crime but sickness. The world of a female or male homosexual is perverted, it is alien to the normal sexual attraction that exists in a normal person". The official stance from the late 1920s could be summarised in an article of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia of 1930 written by medical expert Sereisky (based on a report written in the 1920s): Soviet legislation does not recognise so-called crimes against morality. Our laws proceed from the principle of protection of society and therefore countenance punishment only in those instances when juveniles and minors are the objects of homosexual interest :—Sereisky, Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 1930, p. 593 LGBT history under Stalin: 1933–1953 In 1933, the Soviet government under Stalin recriminalised sex between men. On 7 March 1934, Article 121 was added to the criminal code for the entire Soviet Union that expressly prohibited only male homosexuality, with up to five years of hard labour in prison. There were no criminal statutes regarding sex between women. During the Soviet era, Western observers believed that between 800 and 1,000 men were imprisoned each year under Article 121. , who confessed to homosexuality before his execution Some historians have noted that it was during this time that Soviet propaganda began to depict homosexuality as a sign of fascism and that Article 121 may have a simple political tool to use against dissidents, irrespective of their true sexual orientation and to solidify Soviet opposition to Nazi Germany, who had broken its treaty with the USSR. In a famous article in Pravda on 23 May 1934, Maxim Gorky said: "There is already a sarcastic saying: Destroy homosexuality and fascism will disappear." In 1993, declassified Soviet documents revealed that Stalin had personally demanded the introduction of an anti-gay law, in response to a report from deputy secret police chief Genrikh Yagoda, who had conducted a raid on the residence of hundreds of homosexuals in Moscow and Leningrad in August 1933, about "Pederast activists" engaging in orgies and espionage activities. Beyond expressed fears of a vast "counterrevolutionary fascist homosexual conspiracy", there were several high-profile arrests of Russian men accused of being pederasts. In 1933, 130 men "were accused of being 'pederasts' – adult males who have sex with boys. Since no records of men having sex with boys at that time are available, it is possible this term was used broadly and crudely to label homosexuality". Stalin did not reply to the letter, but ordered it to be archived, and added a note describing Whyte as "An idiot and a degenerate." A few years later in 1936, Justice Commissar Nikolai Krylenko publicly stated that the anti-gay criminal law was correctly aimed at the decadent and effete old ruling classes, thus further linking homosexuality to a right-wing conspiracy, i.e. Tsarist aristocracy and German fascists. At a secret trial on 14 May 1938, Yakovleva was convicted of sabotage, terrorism and membership in a "Trotskyite-fascist diversionary terrorist organization", and was sentenced to 20 years in prison. She was held in solitary confinement at Oryol Prison, where she was executed on 11 September 1941 in the Medvedev Forest massacre, together with 156 other inmates. The Medvedev Forest massacre came less than three months after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, and 26 days before Nazi troops invaded Oryol. On 4 February 1940, Yezhov was shot in the basement of a small NKVD station on Varsonofevskii Lane (Varsonofyevskiy pereulok) in Moscow. The basement had a wall made of logs and a sloping floor so that it could be hosed down after executions, and had been built according to Yezhov's own specifications near the Lubyanka. The main NKVD execution chamber in the basement of the Lubyanka was deliberately avoided to ensure total secrecy. LGBT history post-Stalin: 1953–1991 When Stalin came to power, homosexuality became a topic unfit for public depiction, defense or discussion. Homosexual or bisexual Soviet citizens who wanted a position within the Communist Party were expected to marry a person of the opposite sex, regardless of their actual sexual orientation. A notable example was the Russian film director Sergei Eisenstein, who despite his homosexuality managed to survive by leading a double life, having affairs with men while married to a woman, producing films that were politically pleasing to Stalin. After Stalin died in 1953, he was replaced by Nikita Khrushchev, who proceeded to liberalize the Stalin era laws regarding marriage, divorce and abortion, but the anti-gay criminal law remained. The Khrushchev government believed that absent of a criminal law against homosexuality, the sex between men that occurred in the prison environment would spread into the general population as they released many Stalin-era prisoners. Whereas the Stalin government conflated homosexuality with pedophilia, the Khrushchev government conflated homosexuality with the situational, sometimes forced, sex acts between male prisoners. Although the topic of homosexuality was practically unmentionable, some references to homosexuality could be found in Soviet sex education manuals for young people and their parents. These manuals were published from the early 1950s to the early 1960s in the hope of restricting the sexual activity of Soviet people and to raise their awareness of venereal diseases. These manuals mentioned homosexuality to prevent Soviet children and youth from engaging in it. The first Khrushchev-era sex education manual to mention homosexuality was The Youth Becomes a Man (1960) and described homosexuals as child molesters: "...homosexuals are aroused by and satisfy themselves with adolescents and youngsters, even though the latter have a normal interest towards girls. Homosexuals go all out to gain the affection of the youngsters' society; they buy sweets and cigarettes for youngsters, tickets to the cinema, give them money, help to do home assignments and generally pretend that they unselfishly love youngsters. However, after such preparation, they sooner or later proceed to act. Do not let them touch you! Do not be shy about reporting them to your parents or educators, do not hesitate to report such attempts aimed at you or other young men! Both parents and educators will willingly help: homosexuality is a punishable crime, homosexuals are perfectly aware of that: that is why it is not difficult to get rid of them..". LGBT history under Brezhnev In 1958, the Interior Ministry sent a secret memo to law enforcement ordering them to step up enforcement of the anti-gay criminal law. Yet during the late 1950s and early 1960s, Aline Mosby, a foreign reporter in Russia at the time, attributed to the more liberal attitude of the Khrushchev government to the fact that she did see some gay couples in public and that it was not uncommon to see men waiting outside of certain theaters looking for dates with male performers. In the late 1950s some Soviet jurists attempted to decriminalise consensual sodomy. On 23 July 1959 a committee of Soviet jurists convened to discuss and propose changes to the new RSFSR republican criminal code. Two members of the committee proposed to eliminate the law penalising consensual sodomy, yet their proposal was not supported by other members of the committee. Discussions between Soviet legal scholars on the value of the anti-sodomy law continued under Brezhnev. Those legal scholars, who believed that consensual homosexuality should not be a crime, argued that it was a disease, which had to be dealt with by medical knowledge. They also contended that homosexuality was a congenital condition and therefore gay people were not guilty of being different from others. Finally, these scholars argued that investigating sodomy cases, where both partners had consensual sex, was not only pointless, but technically difficult. Other legal scholars, mainly those who worked for the Interior Ministry educational institutions, opposed the idea of decriminalising consensual homosexuality. They criticised their pro-decriminalisation colleagues and argued that such propositions were ill-timed and dangerous, since homosexuality could easily spread if not controlled by the law. Likewise, they believed that homosexuality was inconsistent with the Communist Morality. Thousands of people were imprisoned for homosexuality and government censorship of homosexuality and gay rights did not begin to slowly relax until the early 1970s, allowing for brief statements. Kozlovsky was permitted to include a brief interior monologue about homosexuality in Moscow to the End of the Line (1973). Perhaps the first public endorsement of gay rights since Stalin was a brief statement, critical of Article 121 and calling for its repeal, made in the Textbook of Soviet Criminal Law (1973). Despite sodomy being a punishable crime, the practitioners of new sexological science ("sexopathology"), which emerged in the 1960s, argued that homosexuality should be treated with psychotherapy. They provided such treatment to homosexual men in the privacy of their consultation rooms and went to great lengths to preserve their patients' anonymity. Some of these doctors even went as far as to suggest that the sodomy law should be abolished altogether so that homosexuals could resort to medical help without fear of prosecution. Their calls, however, fell on deaf ears. In 1960s and 1970s the emerging sexopathology (up to this point concerned with sexual orientation and intersex conditions) encountered its first trans patients seeking sex reassignment surgeries. In 1960s Moscow psychiatrist met a patient from Tashkent named Rakhim, who desired a sex change to female, while having no intersex conditions. Rakhim was the first patient of Institute of Endocrinology to receive a diagnosis of transsexualism. Belkin didn't permit surgery on his transsexual patients, fearing making irreversible mistakes, but it is known that by 1974 Rakhim had undergone a vaginoplasty and an official name change outside of Moscow. In 1968 another Soviet doctor, Latvian surgeon met a suicidal patient named Inna, looking for a sex change to male. After obtaining verbal consent from Minister of Health of the Latvian SSR , Kalnbērzs performed nine operations on the patient, now named Innokenty, over the span of 1970–1972. After that, USSR Minister of Health Boris Petrovsky threatened Kalnbērzs with a criminal process and a Gulag sentence, citing Article 108 of the Soviet Criminal Code (premeditated infliction of serious bodily injury). Kalnbērzs was spared this by Kaņeps, but central USSR authorities decided that sex reassignment surgeries were mutilations and unfit to Soviet ideology, silencing Kalnbērzs and regional Ministries of Health from talking and writing about them and carrying them. Despite the order, Kalnbērzs performed several more similar operations. In 1980, the USSR adopted the ICD 9. In 1983, the Scientific Center for Social and Forensic Psychiatry published a separate edition of the fifth section of the ICD-9 (“Mental disorders”), adapted in accordance with "the theoretical principles of Soviet science". From that moment on, the diagnosis of "transsexualism" officially appeared in Soviet medicine, however, first instructions for managing patients with such a diagnosis appeared only in 1991, when Aron Belkin and A. S. Karpov published “Transsexualism. Guidelines for gender reassignment”. It was not until later in the glasnost period that public discussion was permitted about re-legalizing private, consensual adult homosexual relations. A poll conducted in 1989 reported that homosexuals were the most hated group in Russian society and that 30 percent of those polled felt that homosexuals should be liquidated. In 1989–1990, the Moscow gay rights organization «Ассоциация сексуальных меньшинств» ("Association of Sexual Minorities") led by Evgenia Debryanskaya was permitted to exist, with Roman Kalinin given permission to publish a gay newspaper, Tema. In 1993, after the collapse of the USSR, Article 121 was finally removed from the RSFSR Penal Code. The highest estimate is 250,000 convictions, but LGBT rights groups in the Russian Federation tend to estimate 60,000 convictions. The first official information was released only in 1988, but it is believed to be about 1,000 convicted a year. According to official data, the number of men convicted under Article 121 had been steadily decreasing during the glasnost period. In 1987, 831 men were sentenced under Article 121; in 1989, 539; in 1990, 497; and in 1991, 462. ==Russian Federation==

LGBT history under Yeltsin: 1991–1999 signed a law decriminalizing homosexual acts in Russia The International Gay and Lesbian Symposium and Film Festival took place in Moscow and Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg) from 23 July to 2 August 1991. On 27 May 1993, homosexual acts between consenting males were legalised. However, there have been reports that by 13 August 1993 "not all persons serving sentences under the old legislation have been released from jail" and there have been "cases of homosexuals being re-sentenced and kept in jail, cases of imprisoned homosexuals who cannot be located and of missing files". The reform was largely the result of pressure from the Council of Europe. In 1996, a Russian LGBT human rights organization called Triangle was formed, with several new LGBT themed publications and local organizations arising in light of the fall of the Soviet Union. Finally, Valery Kulikov, the Major-General of the Medical Service, announced: In May 2005, LGBT human rights project Gayrussia.ru was founded by Nikolai Alekseev to fight discriminations on the basis of sexual orientation and raise awareness of LGBT issues in Russia. In July 2005, Alekseev launched the Moscow Pride initiative which has been organized every year since May 2006. As of July 2009, Gayrussia.ru is a transnational organization promoting LGBT rights in Russia and Belarus. In 2006, Grand Mufti Talgat Tadzhuddin was quoted as saying about Moscow Pride marchers: "If they come out on to the streets anyway they should be flogged. Any normal person would do that – Muslims and Orthodox Christians alike". Similar comments were made by one of Russia's Chief Rabbis, Berl Lazar, who joined Tadzhuddin in condemning the march, saying that it "would be a blow for morality". Russian LGBT network was founded in May 2006. As of July 2009, this was the first and only interregional LGBT organization in Russia. In late April and early May 2006, protesters blockaded some popular gay clubs in Moscow. After initial complaints that police had failed to intervene, later blockade attempts were met with arrests. In May 2006, a gay rights forum was held in Moscow. An accompanying march was banned by the mayor in a decision upheld by the courts. Some activists, head of them Nikolai Alekseev, tried to march despite the ban and attempted to lay flowers at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. This march is known as the first Moscow Pride. This act and the presence of non-Russian activists aroused a nationalist reaction in addition to a religious condemnation of homosexuality, leading to the presence of both nationalist groups and Orthodox protesters threatening the gay activists. Anti-march protesters beat the marchers and about 50 marchers and 20 protesters were arrested when riot police moved in to break up the conflict. The documentary ''Moscow Pride '06'' featured the events that took place from 25 to 27 May that year in Moscow. It contains a vivid testimony of the first attempt to stage a gay pride march in Russia as well as the festival organized around it. Also in May 2006, the Ryazan Region became the first region in Russia to ban "propaganda of homosexuality" in an amendment to local Article 3.10, entitled, "public acts aimed at the propaganda of homosexualism (sodomy and lesbianism) among minors." was held in Moscow again and for the second year running degenerated into violent clashes with anti-gay protestors. For the second time, police failed to protect gay rights activists. Italian MP Marco Cappato was kicked by an anti-gay activist and then detained when he demanded police protection. British gay rights veteran Peter Tatchell and Russian gay leader Nikolai Alekseev were detained as well. The march is documented in the 2008 film East/West - Sex & Politics. On 1 June 2008, Moscow Pride again attempted to hold a gay parade. Some 13 Orthodox opposers were held by police for violent actions against protesters. In February 2009 at the final press conference in Moscow, the Russian LGBT Network and the Moscow Helsinki Group published a paper titled "The Situation of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender People in Russian Federation". This is the first complex study of the legal situation of LGBT people in the history of Russia. The 100-page paper contained the analysis of relevant Russian laws and also assembles and generalizes specific instances of infringement of rights and discrimination. at the Slavic Pride festival on 16 May 2009—two anti-riot police stopped Alekseev and his partner, a transgender activist from Belarus On 8 May, Russian Duma rejected a bill criminalizing gay "propaganda" in Russia (with only 90 votes in favor against 226 minimum required). This bill was initiated in 2007 by a Fair Russia party member and suggested depriving those who "openly demonstrated a homosexual way of life and a homosexual orientation" of the right to hold posts in educational establishments or in the army for a term from 2 to 5 years. According to Interfax, the parliamentarians decided that gay "propaganda" was not dangerous for society and thus could not be punished under the criminal code. Nikolai Alekseev, Chief organizer of the Moscow Pride, commented that with parliament rejecting this bill, it is likely that the Constitutional Court of Russia follows Moscow Pride's request to cancel a similar law that is in force in the Ryazan Region. On 17 May, for the International Day Against Homophobia Russian LGBT network organized the Rainbow Flash Mob in Saint Petersburg; this event brought together from 100 to 250 people by various estimations and the organizers consider it to be the most large-scale action in the whole history of Russia dedicated to the problem of LGBT rights. The action in smaller scales has also passed in more than 30 cities of Russia. In 2010, Russia was fined by the European Court of Human Rights under allegations by Nikolay Alexeyev that cities were discriminating against gays by refusing to approve pride parades. Although they claimed a risk of violence, the court ruled that their decision "effectively approved of and supported groups who had called for [their] disruption". He considered the ruling to be a "crippling blow to Russian homophobia on all accounts". In 2011, the Arkhangelsk Oblast and Kostroma Oblast legislatures followed the Ryazan Region, passing laws banning "propaganda of homosexuality." In March 2012, the St. Petersburg Duma also passed a law prohibiting "public acts aimed at the propaganda of sodomy, lesbianism, bisexuality, and transgenderism among minors." Also in 2011, Moscow's mayor Sergey Sobyanin blocked Nikolay Alexeyev's request for permission to organize Moscow Pride in the city for the next 100 years. In August 2012, contravening the previous European Court of Human Rights ruling, Moscow upheld Sobyanin's ruling, citing the possibility of public disorder. In March 2012, an attempt to organize a Pride House at the 2014 Winter Olympics was struck down by the Ministry of Justice, which refused to approve the registration of the NGO set up to run it on the basis of the Pride House inciting "propaganda of non-traditional sexual orientation which can undermine the security of the Russian society and the state, provoke social-religious hatred, which is the feature of the extremist character of the activity". 2013–present In June 2013, Russia passed a federal law banning the distribution of "propaganda of non-traditional sexual relationships" to minors. Article 6.21 of the Code of the Russian Federation on Administrative Offenses was approved by the State Duma in a 436–0 vote prior to being signed in by Vladimir Putin. Putin's justifications for it are to promote "traditional Russian values" in opposition of Western state liberalism in regards to homosexuality, "protect the children" and to boost Russia's falling birthrate. Much of the support for the "propaganda" law comes from the Russian Orthodox Church and other conservative groups. This support is so intense that the only Parliament member to abstain was one Ilya Ponomarev, who has history of supporting pro-LGBT protests. Vitaly Milonov, a heavily conservative Russian Orthodox politician who was and is one of the main driving forces behind Russian anti-LGBT legislation, claimed that "only a man and a woman can be a family" and that the "propaganda" covered by the law is "dangerous" as "children are very vulnerable to manipulation" and could be led to believe that "only homosexuals experience true feelings". Article 6.21 of the Code of the Russian Federation on Administrative Offenses deems the following as a punishable offense: "Propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations among minors, manifested in the distribution of information aimed at forming non-traditional sexual orientations, the attraction of non-traditional sexual relations, distorted conceptions of the social equality of traditional and non-traditional sexual relations among minors, or imposing information on non-traditional sexual relations which evoke interest in these kinds of relations". Such strict enforcement has been heavily criticized due to Article 6.21's vague wording as prior its officiation the law's wording was changed from addressing "homosexual propaganda" to "propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations", which is nebulous enough to leave the definition up to police and courts to interpret when detaining LGBT activists. It has also been noted that the wording essentially equates homosexuality with paedophelia as the latter also falls under the "nontraditional sexual relations" category. and Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev has said that he "[believes] that only a negligible part of the Russian population is actually concerned about [the new law]". Following Article 6.21's passage, there has been an increase in violence and harassment towards LGBT individuals in Russia. People have been subject to smear campaigns from homophobic civilians and administrative fines, some even had to resign from their jobs to lessen the load. Two vigilante groups in particular have been conducting extensive anti-LGBT campaigns, infringing the privacy of thousands of Russian youth: Occupy Gerontophilia, which targets gay teenagers; and Occupy Paedophilia, which focuses on gay adults (equating homosexuality with pedophilia all the while). These groups often operate by "ambushing" LGBT adults and youth by contacting them online and attempt to convince them to come to allegedly gay-friendly meetings. Once the victims arrive, they are viciously harassed and humiliated on-camera. Occupy Gerontophilia posted dozens of videos to the social network VKontakte before it was shut down for infringing the privacy of minors—but not before the organizations page got 170,000 subscribers. Despite the severe situation, Russian law "[does] not outlaw discrimination based on sexual orientation", leaving millions of people without any kind of widespread protection. The sole public support and safe space for LGBT youth is a group called Deti-404 (Children-404), founded by LGBT activist Lena Klimova, which has active pages on Facebook and VKontakte. On Deti-404, LGBT youth can share and discuss their experiences in their country's hostile environment. However, the group has already faced bureaucratic violence from the Russian government. On 31 January 2014, Klimova was charged for the "promotion of nontraditional sexual relations to minors" under the new law, potentially facing a fine of up to 100,000 rubles ($2,800). The case against Klimova was eventually dismissed due to "absence of an administrative offence", but Christian conservative politician Vitaly Milonov, who was the one to originally urge the case, has stated his intention to appeal. Since before Article 6.21's passage, the number of Russian asylum seekers has been dramatically increasing and since the law's passage that number has increased still more. It has been speculated that the greater number of asylum seekers is due to the aforementioned rise in anti-LGBT harassment and violence. Even in 2012, in the time leading up to Article 6.21's passage the advocacy group Immigration Equality stated that had it won more gay and lesbian asylum cases for Russians than from any other country other than Jamaica in the previous two years. By 2013, the United States had received 837 new asylum applications from Russian nationals and in 2014 this number rose to 969 new applications. According to Immigration Equality, the majority of the inquiries come from young (under the age of 30) Russians who fear being harassed, beaten, or even killed by homophobic groups like Occupy Paedophilia. Spectrum Human Rights, a Virginia-based advocacy group, has received double the amount of enquiries from the Russian LGBT community since last year. As the situation has worsened, protests from the LGBT community have continued despite the fact that President Putin has passed a law outlawing repeated street protests. Notably, the Russian LGBT Network has "53 events to spread information about LGBT rights and problems, 144 events for the members of LGBT community, [and] 33 street actions and 21 advocacy events" on record for 2014. However, participants in pro-LGBT events have faced heavy opposition. In October 2013, a pro-LGBT rally meant to observe National Coming Out Day in Saint Petersburg consisting of roughly 15 people had been accosted and harassed by about 200 conservative and religious protestors. The situation escalated to violence after one of the religious protesters tore a rainbow flag out of a woman's hands—at which point the police, which remained passive up to this point, arrested 67 people on both sides. State persecution of and harsh tactics against the LGBT community increased in 2022 during the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In July 2023 President Putin banning gender affirming surgeries, after the act unanimously passed both houses of parliament. In November 2023, a Russian court designated what it called "the international LGBT public movement" as an "extremist organization", which would ban its activities across Russia. ==See also==