In his early 20s, Mikhail* (not his real name), a gay man from the city of Ufa in Russia, was doing what he loved: drag performances.
“I was going on tour, to competitions; I met new artists and planned that drag would be the grandfather to my life,” he told Al Jazeera.
At this point, Mikhail said, he lived his life openly and had not experienced much overt hostility from the day-to-day public. But in the last few years, things began to change.
“Concerns arose in the club industry,” he said. “Restrictions were placed on the numbers of Ukrainian performers, a ban was placed on mentioning topics related to LGBT. In everyday life, there was simply eternal anxiety.”
The final straw came when police targeted the venue Mikhail worked in for a raid.
“I was caught up in raids more than once, but my last raid was the roughest and most terrible,” he recalled.
“Afterwards followed two interrogations lasting eight or nine hours each, applying psychological pressure on me non-stop. After that, I was forced to leave the country in order to preserve my freedom.”
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Russia is not only waging war on Ukraine but also on what it sees as enemies within. The persecution of LGBTQ individuals, organisations and communities has intensified in the past few years as the Kremlin seeks to uphold “traditional values”.
The monitoring programme coordinator of the Russian LGBTQ organisation Sphere, who asked to remain anonymous, told Al Jazeera that prior to 2022, the majority of abuses targeted at LGBTQ individuals, “concerned everyday and institutional discrimination, rather than direct repression”.
Since amendments to the ban on “gay propaganda” in 2022, followed by the ban on gender transition and designation of the “international LGBT movement” as an “extremist organisation” in 2023, now at least two-thirds of abuses take place at the hands of the authorities.
The erstwhile USSR was one of the first countries in the world to decriminalise homosexuality in 1917, repealing tsarist-era laws which themselves were scarcely enforced. But by the 1930s, under Joseph Stalin, homosexuality became seen as a threat to the fabric of Soviet society and in 1934, “sodomy” was punishable by three to five years of imprisonment.
Later, it became seen as a mental illness and both gays and lesbians were forcibly confined to asylums. Only in 1993, after communism’s collapse, was the ban lifted again.
A new wave of persecution began in the 2010s with laws to prevent “gay propaganda”, ostensibly to protect children.
President Vladimir Putin’s government has portrayed the movement for LGBTQ rights as a foreign agenda to undermine Russia’s traditional family values.
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“The Russian authorities do not distinguish between paedophilia and ‘non-traditional’ orientations, which is clearly evident from the published statistics of the Judicial Department of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation for 2023, where statistics for all three articles of 6.21 are presented in one line,” Noel Shaida, head of Sphere’s communications department, explained.
In late 2023, Russia’s Supreme Court ruled the “international LGBT movement” as an “extremist organisation”. Of course, no such formal entity exists, but this vagueness creates a very broad range of targets.
“Employees of any organisation [helping LGBTQ] risk being accused of participating in or organising extremist activity – which implies unfair politically motivated criminal prosecution, potentially with double-digit prison terms as a result,” said Sphere’s monitoring coordinator.
“For this reason, many initiatives announced the cessation of work in the country. Some organisations took employees out of Russia in order to continue working. There are not many queer initiatives left within the country that aren’t forced to operate underground.”
In November last year, police in Moscow raided a series of bars and establishments across the city believed to cater to a queer clientele.
“According to our data, there were at least 43 of them across the country from November 2023 to January 2025,” said the Sphere representative.
“The results vary: from criminal prosecution of establishment owners for ‘organising and participating in an extremist organisation’ to the same protocols and fines for propaganda. Often, raids do not formally lead to further persecution, but the establishments where they take place quickly change their format of work and actively demonstrate loyalty to the government’s policies, or simply close down.”
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The Sphere monitor added that attendees are sometimes handed summons to a military registration office, meaning they could be drafted to fight in Ukraine.
“The published footage often shows that visitors to the establishments are forced to lie naked on the cold floor during the raid, which usually lasts several hours,” they continued.
“Violence can be used, among other things, to convince intractable visitors to comply with illegal police demands: to give access to the contents of a mobile phone or to answer questions of interest to the police. For example, in one of the establishments, people were forced to squat until their friend gave the police the password to their phone. In this case, we are talking about torture.”
In addition, law enforcement agencies regularly raid gay parties and entrap individuals using dating apps, arresting them on charges such as narcotics or “gay propaganda”, which could mean displaying Gay Pride symbols or speaking positively about same-sex relationships.
The crackdown targets queer activity in the public sphere and private lives.
In December, Andrei Kotov, director of the Men Travel agency in Moscow, was arrested on charges of organising “extremist activities” and was later found dead in his cell in what authorities deemed a “suicide”.
The independent Russian news site Meduza, now operating in exile from Latvia, recently reported that authorities seem to be compiling the data gathered from the raids on gay parties – such as fingerprints and DNA samples – as well as the medical records of transgender individuals to create a database of LGBTQ individuals.
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The purpose of such a database is unclear, but the Russian police already have such a database of drug addicts, which is allegedly used to identify targets for entrapment or planting evidence when corrupt officers need to reach their quotas.
“The collected data could be used to initiate a major criminal case on charges of extremism against the non-existent ‘International LGBT-movement’, which has cells in dozens of regions of Russia,” said Irina, Sphere’s head of advocacy.
“It could also be used as a tool of intimidation, creating an atmosphere of constant fear among queer people; a tool of persecution; and recruiting LGBT+ people as ‘voluntary’ informants, offering them removal from the database in exchange for cooperation.”
Because of the ongoing pressure, many are trying to flee Russia.
“To be a non-traditional family or orientation in Russia, it can be dangerous for freedom and life in general,” said Anastasia Burakova, human rights lawyer and founder of Kovcheg (the Ark), an organisation which helps Russian emigrants.
“We have temporary emergency accommodation in countries like Serbia, Turkey, and sometimes we are asked to provide this emergency accommodation for LGBTQ people. For now, we see that there are a lot of requests for such people who are under persecution.”
Nevertheless, Sphere is optimistic about the future.
“Despite all the obstacles that the state puts in front of us, we sincerely believe that there is a future for the LGBT+ community in Russia, at a minimum, and at a maximum, there will be acceptance, no discrimination, and so on,” stated Noel Shaida.
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“After all, political regimes are not eternal, officials are not immortal. And even if it seems that the future is hopeless, we believe and try to demonstrate with all our activities that no state bans can cancel us.”
But Mikhail is gloomier, at least in the short term.
“People won’t be able to express themselves, they will try to monitor their behaviour to blend in with the norms that the state now dictates,” he remarked.
“As sad as it may be, I think the suicide statistics will increase.”
