Russian security forces have raided gay clubs and bars across Moscow less than 48 hours after the country’s top court banned what it called the “global LGBTQ+ movement” as an extremist organization.
Russia is so fucked. People who identified as not-religious has been constantly falling from since 1991 from 60% to 20%. Orthodox Christianity from 30% to 70%
Yeah I wonder what would happen to the people with the loss of communist ideology and letting liberalism run rampant in your country (which still hasn’t been purged and are going strong!). The 90s was such a horror show that it’s going to take generations to heal this trauma.
Given the general trend, at least in the West, of increasing numbers of non-religious people, it's kinda fascinatingly disturbing to see the opposite occurring. Really shows how these things are actually governed by measurable social and economic factors and can't be explained by mere vibes-based explanations like "Well, as society is becoming more rational and scientific..." One wonders if we'll see a resurgence in religiosity in the West as conditions deteriorate.
What the fuck. Don't get me wrong the Russian empire was awful about LGBT (no surprises there) until lenin came along and decriminalized it (but iirc there wasn't much if any proactive/institutional work to secure rights, it just wasn't a priority and I can't really blame them). Then came stalin and specifically fucked it up (many such cases).
and legislatively everything kept being fucked (despite the best efforts of civil society) right up to the fall of the Soviet Union. Even after the fall, we only decriminalized it to appease the capitalists when we joined the council of Europe in 1993.
So yeah in terms of rights, capitalism/the 90s was the best thing that happened to the Russian LGBT community in recent history. And even then there it wasn't applied retroactively, people who were previously sentenced stayed imprisoned. However culturally there was definitely a shift in perception. The peak was probably sending a couple (not really) lesbians to perform in Eurovision 2003 (to date iirc they're still the most popular Russian band among foreigners).
And going into the 2000s the government grew more and more allergic of civil society / activism of literally any kind including LGBT rights. That's when the whole 'foreign agent' thing started too. Until they just outlawed activism/'propaganda' in 2013. The only saving grace is the shitty patchwork enforcement. But if the government does decide to get on your case, you're fucked. Culturally however I don't think young people who use the internet are much more homophobic than on average in eastern europe (lol). The state sponsored TV watching boomers (who hold power in the government) are another story tho, it's as bad as fox news watchers in the west.
what else would you expect it to be, the main pro war audience is the Russian equivalent of fox news boomers that get their politics from state sponsored television. It's a schizo mishmash of stalin worship (for the wrong reasons) and imperial/white guard ideology.
This paper is a bit old (2014) and more recent data says that thw trend is reversed. Here is a more recent analysis of a few different studies/surveys saying young people are overall less religious now than they were 15 years ago http://rrsociology.ru/journal/article/2170/
Not to say Russia isn't fucked but the root cause isn't orthodox Christianity lol
Which is funny because he was so adamant about national sovereignty, he should have purged the liberals when given the opportunity last year. But he’s too afraid to pull the trigger.
Also, if you are Russian LGBT you need to leave the country NOW. Germany is taking in asylums so there’s a way out.
I saw a headline from terf island that went "Russian FORCES raid gay bars" and it's like, this is awful enough, why do you even feel the need to embellish like the army are the ones storming the place? To differentiate it in the minds of your readers from the kind of omnipresent police brutality that has become a staple of life in the US and UK?
Yes terrorize the queers that's really going to help your domestic issues.what's more is it puts a target on your queer military and government members from within. It makes them vulnerable to blackmail and subjects them to internal discord and disaplinary action threatening rediness and cohesion. The US Military has decades of these studies. Saying the only really problem is your continued harassment of them and the "politics".
Russian Orthodox Church's death grip on their politics can go get
puts a target on your queer military and government members from within. It makes them vulnerable to blackmail and subjects them to internal discord and disaplinary action threatening rediness and cohesion.
The Stasi, the intelligence agency of the nation Putin was stationed in and I assume had worked with, figured this shit out in the 80's. They even made up a goofy term for it, "the political misuse of homosexuals." They then realized the solution was to literally urge the SED to find “resolution[s] to homosexuals’ humanitarian problems,” which resulted in the government doing a complete 180 on queer rights.
Stalin did re-criminalize homosexuality after the Civil War due to extreme loss of population at the time.
Today, LGBT+ movement is seen as foreign/Western propaganda weaponized to destroy the national culture of their country. We see some of this too in China where boomers really think LGBT+ movement is a Western imperialist tool to divide the Chinese population (a lot of them did have support from Western NGOs, not going to lie about it), so I don’t think this is a strictly religious thing.
Russia also faces significant demographic issues where they’re going to fall off the cliff if the situation is not reversed by 2030. The brainwormed boomers really bought into the idea that being gay is a result of being exposed to propaganda and you can somehow reverse that if you mitigate this exposure lol.
Stalin did re-criminalize homosexuality after the Civil War due to extreme loss of population at the time.
I have seen no documents that support that claim. One can try and make the claim that in the lead-up and during the Great Patriotic War the Stalin administration recognized the great desperate state they were going to be in / were in, and understood there was a need to marshal all levels of Soviet society leading to the decision to end the prosecution of all religions to the point of encouraging state collaboration in order to further motivate the proletariat to fight against the fascist genocidal invaders, and one can cite the Imams of the many Stan countries who called the War against nazi Germany a jihad or the Orthodox patriarch who wrote
"We want to be Orthodox and at the same time recognize the Soviet Union as our civil motherland, whose joys and successes are our joys and successes and whose failures are our failures. Any blow directed at the Union, be it a war, a boycott, some kind of social disaster, or just a murder from around the corner, like the Warsaw one, is recognized by us as a blow directed at us."
While there are no documents as far as I'm aware declare the softening towards religion and implementation of policies favored by the social conservatives that make up the religious factions as a means of strengthening the Soviet Union to fight harder during the Great Patriotic War exists, I would say that this period of history is one where you could draw correlations to causations as the most likely reason it occured.
From what I've heard, US conservative groups like Focus on the Famiy were doing a lot of fucking around in the area leading up to dissolution and into the '90s. Any truth to that?
in russia it has historically been very similar to the rest of europe. heavy suppression of homosexual activity (criminalization of sodomy, especially in the army) in the imperial era but with a queer underground that existed in traditionally masculine spaces and brothels. the tsarist code of law was abolished after the revolution, and with it the anti-sodomy law, but unfortunately the medical/psychiatric structure of the RSFSR and the USSR as a whole was plagued by conservative views that pathologized queerness. this queerphobia in the psychiatric system lead to it being abused for finding extralegal means to repress homosexual behaviors in the 20s. this kind of changed with the first five year plan and trans people were given a little more legal leeway but in kind of a strange spot. trans people were often allowed to exist and transition legally, and in one case a trans woman was permitted by a local people's court in kazan to obtain a female name and documents stating she was a female. though it was seen more with the lens of "there's something psychologically wrong with these people, but letting them change their gender will treat some of that psychological pain". if you're interested in more about this, homosexual desire in revolutionary russia has a lot of historical information thats been translated from original documents, just be wary of the looming liberal ideology that the author sprinkles in there. just stick to the historical information in there and make your own conclusions.