After the identity crisis brought about the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, it was an attempt to redefine what it meant to be Russian: conservative, religious, and family oriented. A new lexicon of “traditional family values” began to creep into the statements of senior Russian officials and state television. But by 2013, the Kremlin needed a new target. Putin’s first two terms in office were defined by a brutal counterterrorism campaign in Chechnya and a bump in living standards.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s-behind the crowds of protesters huddled in sub-zero temperatures. Electoral fraud drove more than 100,000 people out onto the streets of Moscow, but Putin thought he saw a Western hand-specifically then-U.S. Putin’s return saw the largest street protests in Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Putin started pumping gas down the coal mine when he came back to the presidency after switching seats with former Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev for a term. He portrayed the war as a struggle between those seeking to reject Western values and gay pride parades held as, in his words, “loyalty test” to Western governments. Patriarch Kirill, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, made the connection explicit in a sermon in March, shortly after the war began. “It’s been part of his rhetoric and, more broadly, the rhetoric of the Kremlin and the Russian regime … to explicitly connect geopolitics to gender politics and to the resistance to LGBT rights,” said Emil Edenborg, associate professor of gender studies at Stockholm University.
It was a familiar rendition of Putin ’s bingo card of geopolitical resentments-and then he transitioned to the issue of gay and transgender rights. He ticked off grievances against the West, starting in the 17th century, accusing the Western world of creating a “ neocolonial system” with a view of destroying Russia. George’s Hall of the Grand Kremlin Palace last Friday, Russian President Vladimir Putin delivered a speech announcing the annexation of four Ukrainian territories that was bilious even by his own standards.
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Standing before a room full of top Russian officials in the ornate St. Scapegoated in the state media and portrayed as agents of Western influence, Russia’s queer community was the canary in the coal mine of the wider offensive against the West that was to follow when Putin returned to the presidency in 2012. It may have seemed like an unexpected diversion, but in Putin’s mind, the war in Ukraine and his country’s decadelong assault on LGBTQ rights are two sides of the same coin. “Do we want them to be taught that instead of men and women, there are supposedly some other genders and to be offered sex-change surgeries?” “Do we want children from elementary school to be imposed with things that lead to degradation and extinction?” Putin asked. It was a familiar rendition of Putin’s bingo card of geopolitical resentments-and then he transitioned to the issue of gay and transgender rights.
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