As things go, the former Soviet Union is quite a homophobic
place. Over eighty-eight per
cent of Russians approve of the law banning ‘homosexual propaganda’,
including any assertion that homosexuality might not be deviant or morally
reprehensible behaviour. In other, even
more conservative Soviet Republics, hostility against the LGBT community is
even more dramatic. In relatively ‘democratic’
Georgia, one attempt to hold a Gay Pride’ parade, in May this year, was thwarted by a
furious mob egged on by extremist Orthodox clerics. According to recent surveys, ninety-six
per cent of Armenians believe homosexuality cannot be justified; and seventy-four
per cent of Ukrainians believe homosexuality should ‘not be accepted by
society’. These are disheartening figures; and they
provide politicians with dubious democratic legitimacy – like Vladimir Putin –
with welcome ways of restoring some form of moral authority, by using a
popularly marginalised group as a lightning rod.
In the first decade following the fall of the Soviet Union,
newly independent Russia went through a major identity crisis. Paradoxically, because they had been part of
the Romanov Empire and the Soviet Union, the Russians themselves had, over
centuries, failed to develop a distinct national identity separate from their
subsequent empires. Was Russia a
nation-state? Was it a multi-national federation? Did it primarily belong to the ethnic
Russians (‘Russkiye’) or was it the land of its citizens (‘Rossiyanii’)? In any case, most Russians agreed it would
still have to be a Great Power; but, if it was, what kind of Great Power would
it have to be? A ‘normal’ one, indistinguishable from its Western counterparts? Or the leader of an independent
civilizational pole in a world otherwise dominated by the West?
After the uncertainty of the 1990s, and a brief flirtation
with the West following 9-11, Vladimir Putin’s government has increasingly answered
these questions by defining Russia against
the West, both politically and culturally; Moscow’s homophobic streak must be
seen within this context, of (re)defining the parameters of political
community, of who’s in and who’s out. The
apologists of Putin’s authoritarianism routinely put Russia at the head of a
separate civilizational pole, neither Western nor entirely Eastern, a
‘sovereignly democratic’ great power whose identity is based on a curious mix
of Tsarist imperial pride – including the restoration of a particularly corrupt,
politically subservient and socially retrograde version of Russian Orthodoxy
– and the large-scale rehabilitation of Soviet authoritarianism. Homophobia fits perfectly into both of these
elements, as part of an actively promoted Russian self-view as the lone
standard-bearer of a curious mix of Orthodox mysticism and lost Soviet might
against foreign, Western moral decadence: both these inspirations were relentless
persecutors of homosexuality.
This self-view goes much further than, simply, an obsession
with sexual orientation; it also entails a fundamentally unequal view of
Russia’s relations with the near abroad.
If Moscow indeed stands apart from the West as a Great Power, it
requires an exclusive zone of influence, where it can act as this alternative
‘pole’, and perform its pre-destined leadership role. Thus, while the ‘Eurasian Union’ is outwardly
presented as the Russian-led alternative to the European Union, with an
entirely economic rationale, the broader
societal narratives surrounding it are at times suffused with references to a
shared Soviet/Russian cultural past and ‘common values’; that Russia, as a
rule, stood and still stands at the core and at the top of these narratives
goes without question.
This imperial line of argument leaves little space for
self-critique; gone are the days when the Tsars’ genocidal campaigns against
Caucasian tribes, or Stalin’s crimes against the Chechens, Crimean Tatars and
Meskhetian Turks, were discussed and contextualised as shameful episodes of an
imperial past, as they often were in the early 90s. Any elements within civil society that might
actually generate critical introspection are cornered through restrictive
funding laws that, in themselves, imply the hostility and foreignness of
the West. Instead, that age-old
corollary of empire – racism – has firmly established itself in Putin’s Russia,
targeting, as elsewhere, the sub-alterns of the olden days - in this case, ‘dark people’ from the Caucasus
and Central Asia migrating to the former metropole in search of precarious menial work.
Homophobia and racism end up constructing a political community that
seeks to legitimise power on two levels: the domestic and the
international. Their mechanics of
inclusion and exclusion imply, among others, a rejection of gay rights at home,
and a rehabilitation of the country’s imperial past abroad - two sides of the
same coin. Internally, separating Russia
from the pernicious, decadent liberalism of the West feeds into those
narratives that justify autocracy as inevitable because of sovereign Russia’s
cultural incompatibility with Western notions of democracy. Externally, separating the former Soviet
Union from the wider world creates an autonomous geographic space in which
Russia can reign supreme. Not by
accident do both these aspects chime exactly with Putin’s view of his, and
Russia’s, role in the world.
Conservative and nationalist forces in the near abroad similarly
combine homophobia and racism to justify unequal relations with a variety of groups,
even without Russia’s imperial element.
From the Ukraine
to the Caucasus,
any concessions to LGBT, women’s or minority rights are presented by mainly pro-Russian forces as a dark conspiracy to loosen their own ties with an
idealised traditional past, revalidated in particularly raw, uncritical form
following the fall of the Soviet Union and the failure of its internationalist,
universalist political project. As in
Russia, these traditionalists are often associated with local oligarchies and petty
potentates, providing a nationalist cultural shield for authoritarianism-as-non-Western-specificity; they also feed on the traditional Russian narratives of 'samobytnost' ('ethno-national authenticity') that emerged in the 19th century, spread throughout the nations of the empire, and revived following the fall of the Soviet Union.
Some –
including Stephen Fry – have called for symbolic punitive gestures, like a
wholesale boycott of the upcoming Sochi Olympics. But instead of looking at Russia’s and the
former Soviet Union’s troublesome attitudes towards minorities as a short-term
aberration that could be solved through one single event, an understanding how
these attitudes are entangled with local – and broader regional – relationships
of power reveals the complexities inherent in resolving them. And that will require a much longer-term,
concerted effort aimed at opening up and democratising the former Soviet space
as a whole. Homophobic and racist
attitudes in Russia – and the near abroad – are the product of a complex
entanglement of discourse and power, and will only be resolved if one takes a
broad, intersectional view of the country’s – and the region’s – more general democratic
deficit.
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