The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

He went home. The next morning he learned that about two hundred people had been detained and that Navalny was going to be released. What had happened was legally impossible: there was nothing in the law that enabled the prosecutor to ask for a sentence to be suspended after the sentence had been announced, in the absence of an appeal from the defense. On the face of it, the protesters had won. But it did not feel like it. It felt horrible that morning, like there was no future.³¹

nineteen

LYOSHA: JUNE 11, 2013

in august 2012, Lyosha got a call from a university administrator informing him that he needed to obtain a police clearance to be allowed to continue teaching. Everyone was getting these calls, including a friend of a friend who worked in the toy section of a department store. Such were the new rules, the administrator explained, nothing personal.

The Russian labor code had always forbidden convicted felons to teach. It had just never before occurred to local authorities to extend the rules to people who sold toys or taught at the university level. Now a few things had changed: the country was on the lookout for the "pedophile lobby"; in the spring of 2012 the parliament had passed a law adding convictions for "crimes against the state" to the list of reasons to ban someone from teaching; and everyone had become an enforcer.¹

Lyosha went and got himself certified as never having been convicted of violent, sexual, or political offenses.

In August he was feeling all right. A ban on "propaganda of homosexuality" had passed in St. Petersburg in November 2011,² but he thought that maybe it would not pass at the federal level. It was not the first such city law in Russia, after all. Still, this was the country's second-largest city, and it was Putin's city. Also, the law had a particularly prominent advocate there, a local legislature member, Vitaly Milonov. As a scholar, Lyosha could not stop watching Milonov. As a gay man, he felt sickened and terrified by him in a way he had never experienced before. Flamboyant and at times effeminate, Milonov read as gay—though, obviously, not to his current audience. Lyosha knew that the world had seen this before. Milonov introduced the St. Petersburg law, which prescribed fines for "propaganda" from roughly $100 to about $1,500, by saying that "the wave of popularity of sexual deviations has a negative impact on our children." His fellow legislators did not simply support him: they immediately wanted to go further. "Children who have been crippled by pedophiles jump out of windows, they commit suicide," said another legislator during the discussion of the bill. "Pedophilia is a threat to a child's life. That sort of propaganda should be punished by at least twenty years in prison." Other legislators picked up from there, making Milonov look like a moderate.³

Once the law was passed, Milonov tried to get Madonna fined for alleged propaganda during her August 2012 St. Petersburg concert.⁴ Other legislators wanted to ban a chain of drugstores called Rainbow and a popular brand of cheese with a rainbow on the package.

⁵ Milonov kept raising the stakes. He teamed up with an organization called Parental Control and went hunting—his word—for pedophiles. It was the old entrapment technique: "hunters" posing as teenage boys met men on social networks and scheduled a date, to which they showed up accompanied by television reporters. The mark was made to confirm, on camera, that he had written the messages to the fictional minor, whereupon he was delivered to a police station and written up on "propaganda" charges.⁶ Under the new law there was no need to demonstrate that the messages were sexual in nature: as innocuous a message as "It gets better—you can be gay and happy" was plainly a violation. For his next legislative initiative, Milonov wanted to introduce a mandatory psychological test for teachers to weed out the pedophiles—a reasonable enough idea, now that psychiatrists across the county were learning to diagnose "pedophilic sexual orientation."⁷

The ban on "propaganda of homosexuality" was introduced at the federal level in March 2012. Yelena Mizulina, head of the parliamentary Committee on the Family, took up the mantle—and now she, too, finally shot to national fame, edging out Milonov. This would be her project, an amendment to the Law for the Protection of

Children from Information.⁸ The parliamentary office of legal review seemed dubious about the bill, though: it noted that Russian law did not provide a clear definition of the word "homosexuality."⁹ Lyosha thought that maybe this was an elegant legalistic way of scuttling the bill. But then Mizulina fired back with a long letter:

Propaganda of homosexuality is widespread in Russia today: there are gay parades, demonstrations, and television and radio programs in support of same-sex unions that are broadcast on all channels in the daytime.