The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

In the spring the Levada Center tried to take a measure of public opinion toward LGBT people. Seventy-three percent of respondents said that they wholeheartedly supported the law. The figure was shocking—for more than two decades the Homo Sovieticus surveys had shown the level of aggression toward "sexual minorities" gradually subsiding. What did this 73 percent mean, and what did people think they were supporting? It occurred to Gudkov that his staff did not know what they were measuring. He asked them to take another look at the questions they had been asking. Every phrase used in the survey had been beaten to death on television, and

including these phrases in questions predetermined the answers. Gudkov asked the young sociologists to redesign and re-administer the survey. They tried. They brought in advisers—LGBT activists they knew. They got stuck.

There were only so many ways to say "gay." The Homo Sovieticus survey had traditionally used the phrase "sexual minorities," but the advisers were adamantly opposed to it: they thought the term was demeaning. Perhaps more to the point, it dated back to a time before gays became a topic of political conversation in Russia, had fallen out of use, and probably was not the best term to measure current attitudes. "LGBT" would be incomprehensible to most Russians. "Nontraditional sexual orientation" was the term the state used, so it would inevitably frame the question and the answer. By equating "homosexual" with "pedophile" and proposing to burn gay hearts, television had appropriated those terms for the propaganda campaign as well. "Queer" was even more obscure than "LGBT." They could think of no other way to ask the questions: the Kremlin had hijacked the language.

on may 9, 2013, Lyosha turned twenty-eight. He cooked dinner for seven or eight friends that evening at his apartment—he had been living alone for over a year now. Ilya was working the late-night shift; he left after the dinner, to return in the wee hours.

That morning Putin shouted "Glory to Russia!" Eleven thousand troops marched through Red Square and across television screens, followed by at least three kinds of armored vehicles and tanks, five kinds of missile launchers, and sixty-eight different helicopters and airplanes.¹⁵ The city of Volgograd also held a parade. Earlier in the year, the local legislature had voted to use the city's old name during

the festivities, so that day it was Stalingrad.¹⁶

All over Russia, there were fireworks that night. The people of Volgograd/Stalingrad watched them from the city's Volga embankment. When the fireworks ended, a little after ten, a twenty- three-year-old named Vlad Tornovoy and his friends left the embankment to start the long trek home to the working-class outskirts. It was after midnight when Tornovoy was drinking beer with two friends on a bench in a playground in their neighborhood. Then his friends killed him. First they beat him and kicked him, then, while he was lying on the ground, they pushed a half-liter empty beer bottle up his anus. Then another. The third bottle went in only halfway. Then they kicked him some more, and one of the bottles popped out of his body. They threw a flattened-out discarded cardboard box on him and set it on fire, but the fire went out quickly. Then one of them picked up a forty-pound boulder and threw it at Tornovoy's head five or six times. Tornovoy died. Then his friends went home and went to sleep.

The killers were arrested the next morning. They explained that they had killed Tornovoy because he was gay. Television reported that the killers said his homosexuality "offended their sense of patriotism." Other news media got hold of a video in which an investigator was interrogating one of the suspects.

detective: Why did you do it? suspect: Why? Because he is a homo. detective: Is that the only reason? SUSPECT: Yes.

It turned out that there was an eyewitness, a man who happened on the scene, sat down on the bench, and watched the murder happen. "I don't feel guilty," he told a reporter. "But I do still feel kind of queasy inside. . . . They killed him, you know, because he was gay." The eyewitness faced no charges.¹⁷

Ilya came to Lyosha's apartment from work in the early hours of the morning, wished him a happy birthday again, and went to bed. Lyosha got up, sat down at the computer, and read about the murder of Vlad Tornovoy. It had been a year since the televised anti-gay campaign began, and many people made the connection. A barrage of posts on social networks asked Mizulina, the backer of the "propaganda" bill, if this was what she wanted.