UK Guardian: Gay activists beaten and arrested in Russia

[Alexei Kokin]

I have stumbled across the blog of a young man who took part in the anti-gay protests, got arrested by the police, and was threatened with assault charges by an investigator (äîçíàâàòåëü), who offered a lenient sentence in exchange for a confession. Earlier, Peter Tatchell, the gay rights activist who got beaten, failed to identify him as the assaulter. It turned out that two riot policemen had filed reports implicating the young man. (No, he is NOT the assailant in the Guardian photograph.) I would recommend reading the blog, http://peter-lemenkov.livejournal.com, for more details. Ironically, Petr Lemenkov (the protester) was driven to the precinct in the same van as Tatchell, who tried to have a conversation with him. It is the police that seems to have played the ugliest part in the story.
   
  I am not sure if Lemenkov, a programmer by trade, can be called a Nazi or a Neo-Nazi but he makes strong claims on his other blog (which you can find via yandex.ru) that sound unpleasantly anti-immigrant, anti-minority and sometimes racist (though not extraordinarily so when compared to a host of Russian bloggers). He comes through as a sort of a "white nationalist," all in all. He is also decidedly anti-Putin, though his criticism seems largely ethnonationalistic -- in his view, Putin's policies lead to the dying out, degeneration and marginalization of ethnic Russians, while empowing aggressive minorities. Note however that outside of LiveJournal with its anti-"hate speech" censorship, many Russians tend to write in a deliberately offensive, hyperbolically un-PC style, which should be considered more of a literary device than a political statement.
   
  By his own admission, Lemenkov is strongly against gay parades; he is indifferent to homosexuality as far as it is restricted to private space.
   
  My two cents.
   
  Alexei Kokin
  http://therussiandilettante.blogspot.com
  
Andrey Shcherbenok <avs2120 at COLUMBIA.EDU> wrote:
  I believe a certain reservation is needed here.

What this Guardian article fails to take into account is that there is a
fundamental difference in Russia between being gay (and socialize as gay)
and having a gay pride parade in the center of Moscow. Just as the described
events took place in Moscow, in St. Petersburg there was a festival of
lesbian lyric poetry, widely advertised in popular magazines like "Time
Out", and there was not a single problem with it (of course, Guardian is not
going to report on that -- that does not support their idiosyncratic
doctrine of Russia as prison). A lot of Russian public figures, especially
in pop culture, are openly gay as well. What the violent anti-gay groups,
whom the Guardian for some reason likes to indiscriminately call neo-Nazis
(most of them were actually religious groups) object to is what they
consider public display of obscenity and propaganda of homosexuality, not
the fact of somebody being gay. One may consider that not quite enlightened
position from the point of view of the cultures that are prepared to
celebrate any identity as long as it is not really subversive, but it is
still a far cry from calling Russia a scary place for somebody who is gay. 

Which, of course, does not excuse the police.

Andrey Shcherbenok

-----Original Message-----
From: SEELANGS: Slavic & East European Languages and Literatures list
[mailto:SEELANGS at BAMA.UA.EDU] On Behalf Of w martin
Sent: Monday, May 28, 2007 6:42 PM
To: SEELANGS at BAMA.UA.EDU
Subject: [SEELANGS] UK Guardian: Gay activists beaten and arrested in Russia

Apologies for the topical nature of this posting, but this may
well be of concern to academics in Russia and has not been
reported so far in major US newspapers: 


Gay activists beaten and arrested in Russia

. Police watch as neo-Nazis attack protesters
. MEPs among 30 detained by police as aggressors go free

http://www.guardian.co.uk/russia/article/0,,2089413,00.html

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