The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

When Pastukhov faced trial, Perm newspaper headlines were: "Perm Has Been Overtaken by the Gay Lobby"; "Faggots Think They Are Above the Law"; and "Administration Had Better Straighten Its Orientation." What little evidence was presented at the trial was circumstantial, and Pastukhov's accuser was never identified. Pastukhov was sentenced to six years' imprisonment.⁴ Lyosha struggled with the Pastukhov story in his thesis. On the one hand, the trial was a travesty. On the other, Lyosha was convinced that Pastukhov was guilty of just these sorts of crimes. Then there was the problem of the media coverage, which equated pedophilia and sexual violence with homosexuality. Later, Lyosha learned how to separate these facts and ideas from one another. The Russian courts listened to the prosecutor and accepted thin evidence, bad evidence, or no evidence at all, but this did not mean that everyone they sentenced was innocent—it just meant that no one, including the guilty, ever got a fair trial. In this case, the fact that charges against Pastukhov involved same-sex contact was what had excited the media: similar violence perpetrated against girls and young women was more likely to be seen as a normal attribute of power. For example, a Pskov bank owner and politician, Igor Provkin, was accused of rape by several different young women over the course of six years. He finally faced charges after he lured a young woman into his car in central Moscow and raped her right there. He confessed and was given a suspended sentence of four years. The case drew scant media attention.

⁵

By 2008, the year after Lyosha defended his thesis, the pedophile menace was becoming a commonplace of public rhetoric. Dugin called for Russian men to kill pedophiles on sight. In St. Petersburg, a retired boxer, Alexander Kuznetsov, faced charges for killing a nineteen-year-old man whom he said he had caught trying to rape his eight-year-old stepson. No evidence of the attempted rape was ever produced, but the boxer—who, despite a long arrest record, was not placed in pretrial detention—became an instant celebrity. "It is hard for him to walk down the street in Petersburg," reported Izvestia.

"People stop him to shake his hand and ask for an autograph."⁶ Dugin told journalists that he supported Kuznetsov. "He stood up for his child," he said. "I believe that all Russians, all normal people should act in that exact way. If you see a crime like this happening, you should intervene. And if there is a way to kill the lowlife, then it is necessary to kill and then sort it out later. That's the only way we can change public opinion, the only way to get lawmakers to respond."

⁷ The headline of the article in which Dugin was quoted was, "What Is to Be Done with Pedophiles: The Death Penalty or Castration?" Such were apparently the terms of the proposed debate—and the debate was framed in a way familiar from the Soviet era, when "concerned members of society" demanded restrictive measures against particular groups or individuals (such as members of the worldwide Zionist conspiracy, or the writer Boris Pasternak) and the state apparatus obliged.

Kuznetsov served just over a year behind bars.⁸

By the time he was released in 2010, the debate was raging. A group of parliament members filed a bill that would increase penalties for sexual crimes against children. The bill was so hastily drafted that different passages specified different new penalties for the same crimes.⁹ This delayed the bill, prompting the chairwoman of the parliamentary Committee on the Family, Yelena Mizulina, to accuse United Russia of harboring a "pedophile lobby." Mizulina herself was a member of A Just Russia, the latest party created by the Kremlin to imitate a

populist electoral alternative. United Russia countered that the latest political pedophilia scandal had concerned a Just Russia member (this was the case of a parliament member's assistant in the city of Volgograd who managed to escape from police who were arresting him). Whichever party was speaking—and whichever party it was blaming—a consensus emerged in parliament: they had in their ranks a "pedophile lobby" that was sabotaging the protection of children. A parliament member from the Communist Party lamented that many of her colleagues had been ensnared by a "secret powerful pervert organization."¹⁰

The pedophilia accusation became a potent weapon of political warfare. While parliament members were hurling accusations at one another, political scientist Andreas Umland discovered that Russian and Ukrainian media were reporting that he had been charged with sex offenses against children. The reports were full of details about Umland's legal troubles, all of them imaginary. Umland traced the original report to a Russian online news agency, which, in turn, could be traced to IP addresses used by Dugin and his Eurasian Movement.¹¹