The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

"If you accuse crime fighters of creating more crime, then we will never be able to defeat crime," she told journalists, responding to the social media storm. "That's just dumb."¹⁸ In other words, Tornovoy was killed because he had been flaunting his sexuality—exactly the thing she was trying to ban. She pledged that she would get the law passed in the next few weeks. Now Lyosha believed it.

the parliament voted for the ban in its second and third readings on June 11, 2013. A few dozen activists staged a protest at the entrance to parliament and were beaten by counterprotesters while police looked on. Eventually the police pushed the LGBT protesters onto paddy wagons and drove them to a precinct. The counterprotesters stayed and beat up two young gay men who had been left behind.

Masha was late for the protest: she had overslept. When she got there, she saw the paddy wagons pulling out. She walked to the nearest police precinct—she had spent time there before, so she knew the location and the drill: bring water for the detainees, who might be stuck in an unventilated room for many hours. She saw two plainclothes cops walking out with a man she recognized. He was the thug who had broken a protester's nose back in January. The men turned the corner. She followed them. She was not sure what she was going to do, but she had to do something.

One of the men stopped abruptly and turned around. He was tall and athletic. Then Masha must have passed out. She came to on the ground, on the sidewalk around the corner from the police station. The men were gone. Her abdomen hurt like something huge and hard had been slammed into it. It was a sunny summer afternoon in the very center of Moscow; office workers were coming back from their lunch breaks. Someone called an ambulance.

At the Sklifasovsky trauma center Masha could not produce a urine sample. She could not pee. The doctors were nice about it: they inserted a catheter. After the X-rays and ultrasounds they said there was no permanent damage and in a day or two she would pee for herself again.

two days after the law passed, the parliamentary committees on the family and on foreign relations held a joint session attended by five foreign guests. Brian S. Brown, head of the National Organization for Marriage, formed a few years earlier to pass legislation against same- sex marriage in California, and French National Front activist Aymeric Chauprade were among them. The foreigners had come to praise the Russians and urge them to use their momentum to go further. Said Chauprade:

You must understand that patriots of countries the world over, those committed to protecting the independence of their nations and the foundations of our civilization, are looking to Moscow. It is with great hope that they are looking to Russia, which has taken a stand against the legalization, the public legalization of homosexuality, against the interference of nihilistic nongovernmental organizations which are manipulated by American secret services, and against the adoption of children by homosexual couples.

Ladies and gentlemen, members of parliament, Russia has

become the hope of the entire world

Long live the European Christian civilization! Long live Russia!

Long live France!¹⁹

Gays had become Public Enemy Number One: foreign agents, the foot soldiers of a looming American takeover, a threat to the foundational values of the European civilization. One hardly had to mention pedophilia anymore to communicate that gays were dangerous. The fight against them, on the other hand, positioned Russia as the European civilization's bastion of hope.

The joint committee resolved to pass legislation that would ban adoption by same-sex couples or single people from countries where same-sex marriage was legal. They stressed that even this measure would be insufficient, because there was no foolproof way to ensure that Russian children adopted by heterosexual foreigners would never be re-adopted by homosexuals. After the meeting, Mizulina told

journalists that she would also devise a way to have biological children removed from same-sex families.²⁰

The adoption ban was passed just a week after the ban on "propaganda"—in time to become law before the parliament went on summer break. Both bills passed unanimously. A bill to enable the removal of biological children was introduced as soon as the parliament went back into session in September.²¹

That year Putin hosted his tenth annual Valdai Club, a weekend junket at which he made his case on a topic of choice to a select group of foreign Russia experts. This year he spoke about Russian sovereignty and national identity: