Gender, Place & Culture
A Journal of Feminist Geography
ISSN: 0966-369X (Print) 1360-0524 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cgpc20
The LGBT specter in Russia: refusing queerness,
claiming ‘Whiteness’
Jennifer Suchland
To cite this article: Jennifer Suchland (2018) The LGBT specter in Russia: refusing
queerness, claiming ‘Whiteness’, Gender, Place & Culture, 25:7, 1073-1088, DOI:
10.1080/0966369X.2018.1456408
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2018.1456408
Published online: 25 Apr 2018.
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GENDER, PLACE & CULTURE, 2018
VOL. 25, NO. 7, 1073–1088
https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2018.1456408
The LGBT specter in Russia: refusing queerness, claiming
‘Whiteness’
Jennifer Suchland
Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies & Slavic and East European Languages and
Cultures, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA
ABSTRACT
In Europe ‘homoemancipation’ has played a significant role in
legitimating anti-multiculturalism and broader Islamophobia.
Similarly, political homophobia in Russia plays a significant
role in (re)defining the contested meaning of the nation after
the demise of the Soviet empire. While acknowledging the
repressive and violent impact of contemporary anti-LGBT
legislation and public discourse on LGBT people, this essay
analyzes how the discursive refusal to affirm non-normative
sexuality is constitutive of an ethno-national project in postSoviet Russia. This analysis goes beyond the Cold War binary of
east/west that oversimplifies Russian political homophobia as
in opposition to Europe. By doing so, it is argued that Russia is
not just an illiberal state, but entangled in Eurocentric projects
that define national (racialized) boundaries through sexual
politics. Consequently, challenging political homophobia
in Russia requires attending to intersectional strategies and
approaches to sexual politics. An intersectional approach to
solidarity will situate sexual rights within national and global
ethno-national, racialized, and colonial projects.
CONTACT Jennifer Suchland
suchland.15@osu.edu
© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
ARTICLE HISTORY
Received 16 May 2017
Accepted 3 January 2018
KEYWORDS
Ethnonationalism;
Eurocentrism; political
homophobia; racialization;
Russia
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J. SUCHLAND
Introduction
Symbolizing the powerful connection between sexuality and the nation, in 2015
the United Russia political party unfurled a heterosexual pride flag to mark the
annual Day of Family, Love and Fidelity. While pronatalism is not new (or unique)
to Russia, recent events such as the passage of ‘homosexual propaganda’ laws put
the country in the global spotlight as intolerant and repressive of LGBT people. In
contrast to the expansion of LGBT rights in Europe and the United States, such as
marriage rights and anti-discrimination laws, Russian policies not only promote
heterosexuality but actively suppress LGBT existence. Russian political figures adamantly denounce what is derisively called ‘Gayropa’ – a moniker for Europe as the
place where LGBT rights are affirmed. Indeed, raising the rainbow flag, a symbol
of LGBT pride, can result in police arrest in Russia. Activists have defiantly wrapped
Russian president Vladimir Putin in the multicolor bands of the rainbow flag in
visual admonishments of his regimes repressive laws.
Seemingly, these dueling heterosexual and LGBT pride flags evidence radical
differences between Russian and western approaches to sexual rights. Yet, these
differences reflect only a partial grasp of the stakes of sexual rights and sexuality.
Critical theorizations of postsocialism as well as sexuality suggest that we must
go beyond the narrow (and often erroneous) sexual ‘Cold War’ lens that so often
dominate political discourse. One vital and necessary missing dimension of the
dueling flags idea is how they also symbolize how sexuality continues to be integral
to defining national agendas – national agendas that are invested in (and tied to)
ethno-cultural boundaries. Thus, the regulation of sexuality in either repressive or
emancipatory modes should not be assessed in isolation from their ethno-cultural,
racial and (neo) colonial investments.
It is also clear that Russia is not just in opposition to the EU or US political contexts, but has common and even coalitional political practices. For instance, the
group La Manif Pour Tous, who promoted heterosexual pride to counter marriage
equality legislation in France, used an identical image on their flag (the supposed
inspiration for the Russian version). Similarly, the flag has a striking resemblance
to one used by the Pro-Family Resource Center, a U.S. Christian fundamentalist
group. Despite the fact that Russia fashions itself as opposed to ‘Gayropa’, there
is a web of transnational connections between conservative groups across the
so-called Gayropa/Russia divide (Levintova 2014; Montgomery 2016; Rivkin-Fish
and Hartblay 2014).
As the above examples suggest, Russia is not an outlier to the west and could
be cast as a global leader in promoting conservative views. Yet, to understand
why Russia positions itself as opposed to ‘Gayropa’ and why the state promotes
an anti-LGBT agenda, requires an examination of how the regulation of sexuality
is constitutive of defining the nation in sexual and ethno-cultural terms. For example, many argue that ‘homoemancipation’ projects (those aimed at affirming LGBT
existence) in Europe play a significant role in legitimating anti-multiculturalism
GENDER, PLACE & CULTURE
1075
and broader Islamophobia (Jivraj and de Jong 2011; Mepschen, Duyvendak, and
Uitermark 2014). Similarly, scholars and activists criticize practices in the United
States that acknowledge LGBT rights but through the terms of racialized and colonialist nationalism (Puar 2013). This essay questions the seeming inverse at play
in Russia by asking what are the ethno-cultural and colonial registers of political
homophobia (Weiss and Bosia 2013). While acknowledging the repressive and
violent impact of contemporary anti-LGBT legislation and public discourse on LGBT
people, I scrutinize how the discursive refusal to affirm non-normative sexuality is
constitutive of an ethno-national project in post-Soviet Russia. This analysis lends
nuance to the sexual ‘Cold War’ divide that has dominated political discourse and
which disregards the insights of critical postsocialist theory and queer theory. In
this essay, I specifically address how political homophobia in the context of heteronationalism conveys ethnicized as well as sexual meanings in Russian national
discourses. As evidenced in intersectional approaches to sexual politics in the U.S.
and Europe, the terms of political homophobia and heteronationalism reveal an
investment in defining/protecting a national population. In the context of Russia
this means that a distinctly Russian population has symbolic meanings tied to
both a heteronormative and ethnically ‘white’ population. Political homophobia,
or heteronationalism, cast as a Russian project of exceptionalism to Gayropa, is a
discourse that entangles Russia with Eurocentrism (namely, as ‘white’ Christians)
but also as its critic (i.e., against LGBT rights). The refusing of queerness, as with
the ban on so-called ‘gay propaganda’, is an artifact of heteronationalism – a project invested in an ethno-national idea that is articulated through a European/
Christian episteme. Thus, political homophobia in Russia should not be only viewed
as opposed to the west or as illiberal. I suggest that political homophobia and
heteronationalism are not just measures of illiberalism in Russia, but symptoms of
a post-Soviet imperial project that is not opposed to Eurocentrism but entangled
with it.
There are many implications to this claim, one being the impact on activist and
political efforts to counter this political homophobia when it is viewed as more
than an illiberal project to which liberal rights are the remedy. To consider this,
I will reflect some at the end of the article on attempts to generate global LGBT
solidarity leading up to the 2014 Sochi Olympics. As a first step in that direction,
in the next section I situate Russian political homophobia within the context of
critical postsocialism and queer theory – fields that trouble the facile binary of east/
west and engage intersectionality and thus have revealed the ethno-national and
racialized dimensions of sexual politics.
Situating Russian Political Homophobia in Eurocentrism
The current resonance of political homophobia in Russia can be situated in a history
of criminalizing and pathologizing homosexuality and gender deviance (Essig 1999;
Healey 2002). And, in many regards, Russia is rather typical as the criminalization
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of sodomy and the pathologizing of homosexuality has been integral to the way
many states have envisioned and normalized their populations (Canaday 2009;
Foucault [1978] 1990; Reddy 2011). For example, in Soviet Russia homosexuality
(sodomy) was criminalized in 1933 and as a result, Soviet prisons were filled with
men found guilty of homosexuality (which was decriminalized in 1993). In the
United States, the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic manual listed
homosexuality as a sociopathic personality disturbance until 1973 and sodomy was
not federally decriminalized until the Supreme Court’s Lawrence v. Texas decision
in 2003. Likewise, in 1972 people in Sweden called in ‘sick’ with homosexuality to
protest the classification of homosexuality as an illness in Swedish law which was
finally overturned in 1979 (and the first European country to do so).
Returning to these common histories of criminalizing and pathologizing homosexuality recalls the fact that the current recognition/rights for LGBT people in
Europe and the U.S. are the result of fierce political struggles. These struggles are
also embedded in shifting national and economic contexts that are always simultaneously marked by gender, race, ethnicity and religion. Speaking of the Dutch
experience, Paul Mepschen and Jan Duyvendak argue that, as LGBT issues moved
from the margin to the center of public discourse, the normalization of homosexuality has coincided with a cultural turn in regulating citizenship. The ‘culturalization
of citizenship’ describes the increased resonance of culture and secular morality in
defining citizenship and ‘constitutes a deeply ingrained cultural essentialism that
simplifies the social space by symbolically dividing society into distinct, internally
homogenous cultural entities’ (Mepschen and Duyvendak 2012). But claims to
culture are of course also racialized and often invested in biopolitics. Mepschen
and Duyvendak call out the Dutch cultural claims to tolerance and secularism –
ideas used to mark ethnic and non-secular others in the Netherlands as ill-suited
to integrate into Dutch society. For example, using videos of same-sex affection
as a ‘litmus test’ for the tolerance of new-comers, Dutch LGBT rights thus creates
traction for Islamophobia. LGBT rights are used to filter out ethnic and racialized
others who do not culturally fit, a practice that Fatima El-Tayeb calls ‘homophile
Islamophobia’ (El-Tayeb 2012).
The connection between ‘homoemancipation’ and anti-multiculturalism is one
made by many scholars and activists in Europe and in the United States and is a vital
intervention to current understandings of sexual politics. Eric Fassin clarifies that,
in contrast to the United States where the ‘sexual clash of civilizations’ legitimates
military operations (see also Atanasoski 2013), in Europe it restricts immigration
and regulates borders (Fassin 2010). In Europe, this has an impact on immigrants
and refugees but also ‘minoritarian Europeans’, a term that El-Tayeb uses to give
name to Europeans of color who are constantly cast as immigrants despite the
fact many have not known any other home (El-Tayeb 2011; see also Garner 2007;
Wekker 2016).
Russia’s current political homophobia project should also be understood as
part of a ‘culturalization of citizenhip’ but this requires considering post-Soviet
GENDER, PLACE & CULTURE
1077
Russia as entangled in rather than opposed to Eurocentrism. I employ Ella Shohat
and Robert Stam’s concept of Eurocentrism, which is not a reference to a geographic or political location, but an epistemic position. As they explain, ‘Eurocentric
thinking attributes to the ‘West’ an almost providential sense of historical destiny.
Eurocentrism, like Renaissance perspectives painting, envisions the world from a
single privileged point’ (Shohat and Stam 1994, 2). While European powers relied
on Eurocentrism as a discursive rationale for colonialism, a Eurocentric epistemology is often unmarked or embedded, making it also distinct from colonialist discourse (Ibid). While tsarist Russia did not join in the European struggle to colonize
Africa or the ‘new world’, it nonetheless was caught in a Eurocentric episteme –
even, as Susan Buck-Morss explains, the Bolshevik experiment ‘was vitally attached
to the Western, modernizing project, from which it cannot be extricated without
causing the project itself to fall to pieces’ (Buck-Morss 2000, 68). Madina Tlostanova
argues that Russian empire, in imperial or Soviet forms, should be understood as
an ‘imperial difference’ (rather than colonial difference) to European imperialism
(Tlostanova 2015). Consequently, the east/west lens that continues to position
Russia as opposed to the west fails to reckon with the fact that Russian political
practices can also be cast within the western episteme.
This entanglement in Eurocentrism is not a new one, dating back many centuries as internal debates to the Russian national question posed ‘westernization’
against Slavophilism and ‘Eurasian’ perspectives sought to distinguish Russia from
Europe (Tolz 2015; Warren 2013). A contemporary example of this entanglement
is vividly illustrated in the comments of Dmitriy Rogozin, former Chairman of
Rodina (the Motherland Party) and Deputy Prime Minister under President Putin.
Explaining Russia’s position on LGBT rights, Rogozin claimed, ‘Russia is the authentic Europe, without the domination of gays, without pederast marriages, without
false punk culture, without flunkeyism towards America. We are true Europeans, we
have always survived, we have proven our Europeanness in ways against both the
Crusaders and the Mongols – each and every time’ (quoted in Zakharov 2015, 174).
This quote is illustrative of the discursive life of imperial difference in Russia today.
Underlying Rogozin’s statement is an unspoken reference to Russian Orthodoxy
which has filled much of the symbolic void left by Soviet political culture which
emphasized multi-culturalism, anti-colonialism, and equality. Rogozin’s comments
reflect the political (and symbolic) power of Russian Orthodoxy as well as articulate
a longstanding discourse in Russia that presents it as morally superior to Europe.
Yet, in posing Russian (Orthodox) culture as the ‘authentic’ Europe, Rogozin reveals
an embedded Eurocentrism. That is, the importance of having defended itself
from both Crusaders and Mongols, is that Russia can then be situated within the
racialized episteme of Eurocentrism, even as a difference within it. And it is this
difference that is wielded today, by those like Rogozin and others, that will conquer
the queers now attempting to defeat Europeness.
In the statement that Russia is the authentic Europe, there is both a claim to
Europeanness and Russianness. And, it is this claim to Russianness in declarations
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of political homophobia that I suggest is central to the ‘culturalization of citizenhip’.
In this way, Rogozin’s comments rely upon an ethno-cultural understanding of
Russian (Russkie) – as having opposed outside influence. Rogozin’s comments about
Russia’s successful triumph over Mongols and Crusaders relate to a re-telling of
Russian imperial difference that is likewise tied to current admonishments of Soviet
multiculturalism (Hutchings and Tolz 2012). Soviet multiculturalism, known through
the discourse of a ‘friendship of peoples’ (druzhba narodov) linked ethno-national
groups in a proletarian brotherhood but in practice served to create and support
‘natural’ ethnic differences and hierarchies with ethnic Russians positioned as the
exemplary category (Martin 2001; Sahadeo 2016; Ualiyeva and Edgar 2014). Even
with the great attention the Soviet Union gave to anti-racist propaganda, there was
a lack of attention to race and racism as a social problem inside the USSR, including
the implicit superiority granted to the ethno-cultural category Russkie (Baldwin
2002; Zakharov 2015, 37). The afterlife of the friendship of peoples is held in the
civic category of Russian (rossiskie), but as in Soviet times, there is slippage and
possible conflation of the meaning/difference of this civic category with the ethnic
category Russian (russkie). There is considerable silence about the racialization of
russkie and the way that is signifies the (ethno) state (Rossiiskaia Federatsiia).
This silence on racialization is not unlike that described by scholars working
on race in other European contexts (Lentin 2008; Salem and Thompson 2016).
For example, Salem and Thompson argue that ‘because racism is so often identified as US-centered, European forms of racism remain uncovered and unchecked,
allowing European states and actors to unknowingly deflect attention from local
racist practices’ (3). The turn away from Soviet multiculturalism and the cultural
prominence of Russian Orthodoxy has intensified the racialization of the category Russian (Russkie) as white as well as the ethnicization of non-ethnic Russians.
Indeed, in his work on race and racism in Russia, Nikolay Zakharov argues that
‘Russia appears determined to become as ‘white’ as possible’ (Zakharov 2015, 5).
The idea that Russian (russkie) denotes a white racial category is not new, as
tsarist Russia engaged in practices of orientalism familiar to European imperial
racial categorizations (Tlostanova 2008; Tolz 2014). However, new political economies give context to new racializing discourses. It is well known, for instance, that
people from Central Asia (to which the Russian economy is quite dependent even
during the Soviet period) are racialized and negatively regarded despite the fact
that they were once within the yoke of the Soviet people (narod). Derogatory terms
such as ‘chernye’ (black) or ‘chukchi’ (non-Russian) mark differences of skin, hair and
other phenotypical markings. Similar to what El-Tayeb and others describe in the
context of Western Europe, in Russia people marked as ‘non-Russian’ are often seen
as external to the nation and as always migrants (Zakharov 2015, 113; Zanca 2013).
The process of ‘migrantization’ is concomitant with the Eurocentric ethno-cultural
symbols such as those hailed in Dmitriy Rogozin’s claim to Russia’s ‘Europeanness’.
While tsarist and Soviet Russia did not deploy the term race per se, the biological
categorizations of ethnicity created hierarchies of people in relation to Russian
GENDER, PLACE & CULTURE
1079
(Law 2012). The underlying racialized meanings of ethnic difference once hidden
by the proletarian egalitarianism of ‘friendship of peoples’ is starkly visible in how
people once marked as ‘friends’ are now ‘migrants’.
It is with this contextualization of Russia as both entangled in Eurocentrism
and as similarly invested in the ‘culturalization of citizenship’ that has heightened
anti-mulitculturalism through sexual politics, that I now turn to the laws that have
cast Russia as opposed to the west. In the next section I analyze the language
used to claim that Russia is exceptional to the sexually liberal west. Here I am most
interested in the ethno-cultural stakes of these claims.
Refusing Queerness – Heteronationalism for ‘White’ Russia
In 2013, the Russian Duma passed federal legislation regulating ‘propaganda
regarding nontraditional sexual relations’. The series of amendments know widely
as Russia’s ‘gay propaganda’ law altered existing law on the protection of children
and added a new statute to the Code of Administrative Offences on the ‘Promotion
of Non-Traditional Sexual Relations among Minors’. With this new statute, it is an
offense to participate in the dissemination of information to minors that encourages the formation of ‘unconventional sexual attitudes’ or ‘distorted ideas about
the social equivalence of traditional and non-traditional sexual relations’, promotes
the ‘attractiveness of non-traditional sexual relations’ or causes ‘interest in such
relationships’.
There was immediate outcry to the law from those who feared an increase in
intimidation and violence against LGBT people (especially youth), including the
tacit consent for vigilante gay bashing groups. This concern for youth prompted
Elena Klimova to create the online social network Deti 404 (Children 404). The
group was accused of promoting homosexuality in 2014 and in 2015 Klimova was
charged. The ban also further stymied freedom of the press, as journalists working
in Russia and foreign media were scrutinized for crossing the boundaries of acceptable speech. The federal ban is a clear indication of Russia’s flagrant disregard of the
European Convention on Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil
and Political Rights, to which it is a party, though similar legislation was passed in
Hungry, Lithuania, Moldova and Ukraine. The UN Human rights committee also
found that legislation that bans ‘propaganda’ about LGBT people and relationships
violates freedom of speech and non-discrimination.
While the legislation broadly impacts the media, the circulation of public information, the social climate, and the personal lives of those who identify as gay and
lesbian, the prohibition of gay pride parades was also a primary target. The banning
of gay pride marches and parades in Russia received global media attention with
a spotlight on Nikolai Alekseyev, a gay rights activist and lawyer. Moscow city
officials barred all three attempts (2006–2008) that Alekseyev and other activists
made to organize a March. In 2006, then Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov declared
that ‘the government of the capital city will not allow a gay parade to be held in
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any form, whether openly or disguised [as a human rights demonstration], and
any attempts to hold any unauthorized action will be severely repressed’ (Interfax
2006, quoted in ECHR decision). Luzhkov also stated that a ban on such parades
is necessary so as not ‘to stir up society, which is ill-disposed to such occurrences
of life’ (Interfax 2006, quoted in ECHR decision).
In 2009 the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) reviewed the case put
forward by Alekseyev who claimed a violation of Article 11 (peaceful assembly)
of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights. At the first level
of legal argumentation, Russian city officials argued (per Russian Federal Law on
Assemblies) that permission was denied ‘on the grounds of public order, the prevention of riots, and the protection of health, morals, and the rights and freedoms of others’ (ECHR decision). The officials maintained that potential ‘breaches
of public order and violence against the participants’ were inevitable because the
majority of the population is against homosexuality. Luzhkov repeats this view in
an interview when he stated ‘99% of the population of Moscow supports the ban’
(ECHR decision). Further, Luzhkov claimed, ‘That’s the way morals work. If somebody deviates from the normal principles [in accordance with which] sexual and
gender life is organized, this should not be demonstrated in public’ (ECHR decision).
Central to the state’s defense in the ECHR case was the idea that it (the state) had a
duty to protect the moral majority (my term) which it claimed is naturally against
public displays of non-normative sexuality.
The Russian government claimed its right to protect this moral majority by
invoking the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. This covenant
guarantees the respect for and protection of religious and moral beliefs and the
right to bring up children in accordance to them. Russian officials claimed that
banning gay pride parades is integral to Russia’s cultural exceptionalism within the
Council of Europe. Highlighting this exceptionalism, on several occasions Russian
officials at the local level and at the ECHR juxtapose the acceptability of gay pride
parades in ‘the west’ to a Russian way that resents ‘any overt manifestation of
homosexuality’ (ECHR decision, 62). Like the Rogozin quote discussed earlier, the
state’s defense in the ECHR case cast Russia as inside but different from Europe by
wielding heteronormativity as Russia’s exceptionalism to Europe and in turn as a
defining characteristic of the nation.
Luzhkov’s claim that 99% of Moscow residents support the ban is more than
statistical bravado. It is by claiming a concern for the population qua nation that
political homophobia has traction as a cultural argument. Luzhkov’s use of statistics
is linked to political and cultural discourses that focus intensely on the size and
quality of the population. While concerns about demography are long-standing,
they have shifting resonances in the post-Soviet context as they can code for marking ethnic differences. As already mentioned, this is evident in the assertion that
the category Russian constitutes a ‘white’ European ethnic group while non-Russians are ‘minoritized’ within the context of new migration flows. It is also the case
that ‘the population’ as an index of the nation circulates in popular discussions of
GENDER, PLACE & CULTURE
1081
‘rasologia’ (the study of race) and ideas about the ‘genetic material’ of the category
Russian (Zakharov 2015).
It is important to connect current concerns for depopulation to previous discussions of post-war demographic loss. The massive impact of post-war demographic realities continues to have deep cultural resonance – even more so as the
Great Patriot War serves as a gravitational force in contemporary political culture.
Some of the older resonances are reproduced in current concerns about sex ratios,
birth rates, and life expectancy. These concerns continued through post-Soviet
population decline which can be attributed to economic transformations and the
retraction of Soviet standards of support. While low fertility is common in the
majority world, a high mortality rate in Russia has compounded depopulation.
This is starkly illustrated by the fact that the population decrease between 1991
and 2000 was more severe than during the civil war period (1917–1920) when the
population lost 2.7 million people (Shlapentokh 2005, 951).
As is widely known, the impact on mortality rates were particularly acute for
men. In 2003 male life expectancy was 58.8 and overall expectancy was 65.1,
lower than China and Uzbekistan (Shlapentokh 2005, 952). It seems that 2013 was
a turning point for Russian population statistics as it was the first year of natural
population growth since the Soviet Union ceased in 1991 (Moscow Times 2014).
This turning point, according to some, was due to the adoption of pronatalist
policies in 2007 (Moscow Times 2014). Indeed, much of the reasoning for pronatalist policies is in fact the fear that Russia is literally disappearing. In this context
of fear, both migrants and homosexuality are seeming threats to the survival of
the Russian nation. Yet, the facts of population decline or sex ratios have a life
beyond being mere figures of data – facts grow into common knowledge and
can out-live their referent.
For example, the death toll of WWII brought a severe decline in the male population. This loss lives on as common knowledge about sex ratios (i.e., more women
than men) and likewise in gender norms. For example, common knowledge about
post-war male population decline lives on in the belief that women need to seek
out and appreciate the sexual attention of men. This gender norm (heteronormativity) in turn can illuminate why there is weak cultural support for recognizing
sexual harassment. Lacking male attention in Russia, women eschew western ‘politically correct’ behavior and indeed ‘like to be sexually harassed’ (Suchland 2008).
In this way, the ‘heterosexual pride’ flag described at the start of the essay can
be read as an artifact of a lingering cultural fear about a diminishing population
for which a counter-pride or heteronationalism is needed to thwart the effects
of non-reproductive sex. Like any flag, the heteronationalism flag is a symbolic
container that signifies membership to a national citizenry. This membership is
explicitly heterosexualized in the image but also implicitly references an ethno-national unit when considered as part of the state’s population concerns. For what
else is a heteronationalist flag than a call for the reproduction of the ethno-state?
Given that the flag was unfurled on the day the state recognizes a national holiday
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for procreation, it is clear that the symbolic focus is on the reproduction of the
ethno-national body.
This connection was made quite clearly in President Putin’s speech to the
Federal Assembly in 2006 in which he addressed the problem of depopulation.
In the speech Putin laid out his vision for reversing depopulation. After lengthy
comments about how the country should maintain 7% economic growth, he asks,
‘The economic and social development issues our country faces today are closely
interlinked to one simple question: who are we doing this all for’? (Putin 2006).
Indeed, this is the question – who specifically does the state want to reproduce
and have flourish? The ethno-national and gendered elements of Putin’s answer
to this rhetorical question are revealed in his comments on migration and pronatalist policies.
As previously mentioned, Russia relies heavily on labor migration to supplement
the labor force. In this context, labor migration from the Central Asian republics
and the loss of work/class status for workers in Russia have roused racialized forms
of identification and resentment. This resentment towards labor migrants, despite
their economic value, has galvanized exclusionary and racialized understandings
of the Russian nation. Putin’s remarks about migration as a depopulation strategy
display this understanding, albeit in a somewhat subtle way. Putin states:
Regarding migration policy, our priority remains to attract our compatriots from abroad.
In this regard we need to encourage skilled migration to our country, encourage educated and law-abiding people to come to Russia. People coming to our country must
treat our culture and national traditions with respect. (Putin 2006)
The term ‘compatriots’ references an ethnic Russian diaspora created by the collapse of the USSR (also known as a russkie mir or Russian world). The state symbolically desires this ethnic Russian diaspora that includes (presumably) well-educated
and skilled migrants (the same who contributed the ‘brain drain’ of the 1990s). Yet,
the majority of migrant labor actually supplying the unskilled and service sectors
in the Russian economy are coming from former Soviet republics (Di Bartolomeo,
Makaryan, and Weinar 2014). Wielding the notion of ‘our’ compatriots, Putin signals
a racialized distinction between ethnic Russian compatriots and a migrant (nonwhite) other. This distinction is deepened when he makes a subtle shift from the
term ‘compatriots’ to assert that ‘people’ coming to Russia should abide by ‘our’ culture and national traditions. Knowing well that migration will not resolve Russia’s
depopulation problem but that it is central to economic growth, Putin hails the
Russian diaspora to define the nation (‘our country’) and then disciplines ‘people’
who are coming to Russia to abide by the rules. The juxtaposition of ‘compatriots’
and ‘people’ in this context performs the racialization of migration and is another
illustration of the culturalization of citizenship.
Furthermore, in the shift from his discussion of migration to the need to increase
the birthrate, Putin implies which mothers are encouraged to have more children.
Today, ethnic Russians constitute a majority of the population (roughly 80%) but
birth rates are lowest in that group. By contrast, birth rates have steadily increased
GENDER, PLACE & CULTURE
1083
in the Muslim majority North Caucasian Federal District (NCFD). Some experts predict that between 2020 and 2030, the North Caucasus region will experience a baby
boom (Makhametov 2015). In addition, non-Russian Muslims who are migrating
to Russia are increasing in population as compared to ethnic Russians and Russian
born Muslims. These underlying demographic trends, coupled with the racialized
terms Putin engages in his speech, suggest that the government’s commitment
to raising the birth rate is motivated by fears about the ethnic composition of the
population as well.
The ethno-national and sexual terms of the depopulation discourse come
together in Putin’s final strategy to increase the birth rate. The centerpiece of the
program is a maternity capital payment for mothers who give birth to a second child.
This entitles a mother to a stipend (indexed to annual inflation) when the child turns
three years old. The money is not given in cash, but as a voucher that can be used
only for investing in education, pension savings or for housing. The maternity capital
fits in with a history of the state regulation of fertility in Russia. Today’s maternal capital is different, however, as it does not serve as a social provisioning of the welfare
state (Rivkin-Fish 2013). The capital does not affect the day-to-day well-being of a
family, but an investment in the future. As such, the maternity capital illustrates a
neoliberal strategy of the state that works in conjunction with the refusal of queerness and the racialized politics of the ethno-state. Political homophobia, thus, is
situated in this complex intersection of heteronationalism and ethno-nationalism.
The Sochi Olympics and the Limitations of LGBT Rights Solidarity
With this intersectional understanding of political homophobia, it is important
to revisit the Cold War binary of liberalism versus illiberalism – particularly as we
imagine Russia’s cultural claim to heteronormativity as an ethno-national project
entangled in an episteme that is invested in the anti-multiculturalism of European
homoemancipation (Figure 1). As such, I suggest it is important to imagine tactics
Figure 1. London LGBT Solidarity Boycott of Sochi Olympics (Photo Credit AP/DPA).
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that counter repression but that do not also obfuscate the neocolonial and ethno-national stakes of sexual politics (Khalina 2014; Rao 2012). I want to speak
specifically of LGBT rights advocates outside of Russia and how our actions should
then also consider the ethno-cultural stakes of LGBT rights in Russia. The recent
disclosure of ‘gay prisons’ in Chechnya only heightens the need for an intersectional
approach as it can intervene in the oversimplification of sexual oppression and
the remedy of liberal rights.
In devising strategies of resistance and critique, I do not want to lose sight of
the transnational connections between far-right groups (as with the French and
Russian use of the ‘straight pride’ flag) and how such connections blur the ‘civilizational’ boundaries that are claimed by both Russian elites and the ‘gay conditionality’ of western financial aid. While transnational solidarity with activists in Russia is
an important antidote to political homophobia, it is also not a simple solution. For,
on what basis is that solidary and for the purpose of which goals? This question
has gained in complexity and urgency as the refusal of queerness has created new
circuits of migration. And, as is well known, representing homophobia in stark
civilizational terms is what opens-up access to visas and refugee status (Luibhéid
2002). While the reports of torture and ‘gay prisons’ should be reproached and elicit
our horror, the question remains how solidarity and opposition to such horrible
acts are none-the-less constrained by racism and Islamophobia in both Russia and
in different locations of (dis)relocation. How can solidarity come into formation
while being attentive to the past and ongoing colonial encounter between the
Russian state and the Caucus region – a relationship that is also refracted through
the U.S.-led ‘war on terror’ (Tlostanova 2011; see also Rexhepi (2017) on LGBT rights
and humanitarian interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo)?
In particular, how or should calls for LGBT rights be advocated for as a remedy to repressive sexual politics given the intersection of heteronationalism and
ethno-nationalism? Certainly, the ‘gay conditionality’ placed on western aid does
not mitigate against practices of criminalized migration and anti-multicultural
nationalism in Europe or Russia. Nor do such restrictions reckon with the legacies of
colonial-imposed sodomy laws that, as Rahul Rao argues, mar British involvement
in LGBT rights in Africa today.
While ‘gay conditionality’ is not directly applied to Russia, a form of that kind of
thinking (and solidarity) was invoked in the global campaign to discipline Russia
leading-up to the winter Olympics in Sochi. The outcry against Russia’s recently
passed gay propaganda laws, for example, precipitated a call to boycott the games.
Intended to pressure and marginalize Russia, different actors first pushed for a
withdrawal from the games and then to have the corporate sponsors pull-out
their support. Unsurprisingly the boycott turned into a rainbow consumer-corporatist response, with sponsors prominently supporting gay athletes and rainbow
imagery (which also happens to be that of the Olympics).
There was also a push by the group All Out to put an emphasis on Principle Six
(the anti-discrimination provision in the Olympic Charter) and of course t-shirts were
GENDER, PLACE & CULTURE
1085
made. The first calls for a boycott turned into a corporate and Olympic focused political campaign for ‘LGBT’ rights. It is unclear what impact this had on LGBT rights in
Russia – leading Masha Gessen (a prominent Russian journalist in diaspora because
of her sexuality) to state that these acts of solidarity were a failure (Gessen 2014).
However, I suggest that even the more radical call to boycott the games was
an insufficient act of solidarity. In conjunction with concerns for LGBT rights, there
was practically no notice of the historical and current place of Sochi in Russian
imperial projects, and that in particular, Circassian activists have demanded for
years that the extermination and forced removal of different Circassian groups in
the nineteenth century be recognized as genocide. Nor, for example, was the comment by Anatoly Pakhamov (the mayor of Sochi) that ‘there are no gays in Sochi’
linked to the prominence of ethno-nationalism in the Krasnodar Krai (the federal
district in which Sochi is a part) – and how this discursive disappearing of gays is
linked to the biopolitics of anti-gender agendas across the region and in Russia.
Finally, in calls to boycott the games in solidarity with LGBT Russians, there was no
connection made to the fact that the Sochi Olympics would be made possible by
the exploitation of migrant labor, primarily from Central Asia, and that this labor is
vital to Russia’s economy (Zhemukhov 2014). Making these connections is not so
much a stretch, but have been largely avoided in dominant academic and popular
discussions of sexual politics in Russia.
I concur with Masha Gessen that there was a failure of solidarity politics, but not
just because LGBT rights did not triumph, but because many failed to see Sochi
as a site of both refusing queerness, and claiming whiteness. In moving towards
a critical solidarity, an intersectional approach is both vital and necessary.
Acknowledgements
I gratefully acknowledge the feedback I received on this project when I presented early
drafts, including from the students and faculty at the University of Utrecht Gender Studies
Programme and from the Central European University Department of Gender Studies. I also
received important feedback, advice and encouragement from my colleagues Katja Kahlina
and Piro Rexhepi. Many thanks to the journal editors and reviewers as well the special issue
editors.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Jennifer Suchland is an interdisciplinary scholar, trained in political & feminist theory and
area studies and now jointly appointed in Slavic and East European Languages & Cultures
and Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies at Ohio State University. Her work engages the
study of rights, law and political discourses as they culturally and geopolitically circulate. In
her book, Economies of Violence: Transnational Feminism, Postsocialism, and the Politics of Sex
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Trafficking (Duke University Press, 2015), she presents a genealogy of global human trafficking
discourse in and through the end of the Cold War. She currently is researching questions of
race and coloniality in Russia as well as is engaged in projects concerned with critical human
rights and posthumanism, including work on ‘modern day slavery.’
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