Afterword

‘Official homophobia has made Russia queerer – not straighter’. I wrote that line in 2017, more in hope than certainty at the time (Healey 2017, 209). But having studied the Kremlin and official Russia’s homophobia, and its popular resonance, I had a strong hunch that Russia’s queer genie had escaped from the bottle. In 2013 President Putin, aided by a chorus of opportunistic authoritarian-minded politicians and chinovniki like Elena Mizulina, Vitaly Milonov, and Dmitry Kiselev, seems to have persuaded Russia that the biggest threat to the nation was ‘non-traditional sexual relations’. The state launched a phoney culture war against queers to discredit the democratic opposition movement that had rocked Russia in 2011–2012 with street protests against stolen elections. Anti-Kremlin democrats were supposedly allied with pro-European feminists and LGBTQ activists, who of course were really ‘paedophiles’ keen on stealing Russian children. High time it was for a ‘gay propaganda’ law to protect Russia’s youngsters from sympathetic information about what it means to be lesbian, gay, bisexual or trans. It is remarkable how Russian political persecution of minorities returns to the powerful myth of the child violator: exactly a century earlier the Jew-hating Nicholas II and his camarilla of anti-Semites rigged up the fraudulent show-trial of Mendel Beilis, accused of Jewish ‘ritual’ child murder. At least in 1913 the educated public expressed outrage and resistance to this naked nationalist obscurantism (Rogger 1966, 615–29; Samuel 1966; Gessen 2017). ¹