Russia’s crackdown on ‘gay propaganda’

This year has seen a record number of ‘LGBT propaganda’ cases filed in Russia. What does the new law mean and who does it target?

Last fall, Russian authorities amended the “LGBT propaganda” law, expanding its scope and increasing the penalty. This year, Russian judges have ruled on five times as many propaganda cases compared to the last ten years.

Streaming services, social media feeds, online marketplaces, bloggers, and transgender sex workers have all been charged with “advertising non-traditional relationships”. Novaya Gazeta Europe has analysed all cases since 2013 — here, we discuss how Russian authorities are, in practice, criminalising LGBT relationships.

What happened

In late November 2022, the State Duma passed a new legislative package banning “LGBT propaganda, pedophilia, and sex change”. A total of 390 Duma representatives co-authored the bill, which Putin signed into law on 5 December, forbidding the inclusion of “LGBT themes” in music, literature, newspaper articles, internet pages, and video games.

Publishers and streaming services immediately expressed concern about the vast scope of the new legislation, which could affect hundreds of movies, TV shows, and books. One of the bill’s authors, deputy Alexander Khinshtein, repeatedly tried to assuage their fears, clarifying that the law does not ban the depiction of “LGBT relationships as a phenomenon” but rather the “positive message that these relationships are okay”. Yet many of the companies’ fears have turned out to be well-founded.

What’s affected

The new law has led to a surge in LGBT propaganda cases. In the two months from April to June 2023, 33 cases were filed for content “displaying” LGBT relationships. Such displays include images — found in films, TV shows, or YouTube videos — of same-sex couples, transgender people, or men dressed in women’s clothing.

At the end of December, Russia’s official censor — The Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media — sent a letter to all online streaming services with a list of films and shows it recommended they remove. Among these were the films Brokeback Mountain and Call Me By Your Name and the TV show The Sex Life of College Girls. The platforms complied with the request and took down the blacklisted films.

So far, twelve online streaming services have been brought to court for violation of the new law. Among the allegedly illegal content are the 2001 comedy film Blow Dry and the 2019 thriller Life Like, both of which depict “two characters of the same gender kissing in a sexual context”.

History of the propaganda law

A statute banning “LGBT propaganda” was first passed in 2013. That law prohibited only “propaganda” specifically targeted at minors; the penalty was capped at 5,000 rubles for individual citizens (€118 in 2013) and 1 million rubles (€23,700) for corporations. But before December 2022, these fines were rarely levied — likely because of the legislation’s vague wording. Since the law did not clearly define “propaganda”, judges often disagreed on whether a situation fit the legal description.

The December amendment, which expanded the prohibition from “among minors” to all ages, still did not specify what constitutes propaganda, but courts are now dealing out guilty verdicts — and levying the fines — far more frequently. Igor Kochetkov, human rights activist and founder of the Russian LGBT network, said that the attitude toward the law seems to have changed recently. “The courts and law enforcement officers have [clearly] been given the go-ahead to enforce the state’s ideology,” he said. Maxim Olenichev, a lawyer who often defends LGBT people, also said that after the December amendment, law enforcement officers were “instructed” to initiate more propaganda cases.

And some past cases — where previously defendants were found not guilty — have even been re-filed since the law was toughened, now yielding different outcomes.

In January 2022, Wildberries, Russia’s largest online retailer, was charged with “LGBT propaganda” on the basis of several items — a rainbow flag, a book about lesbians, an “Erotica” calendar — for sale on the platform.

Wildberries was found not guilty because experts could not prove that these items asserted the desirability or “social equivalence” of LGBT relationships with “traditional sexual relations”.

A year later, in January 2023, a new case was filed against the marketplace for the same items. This time, the court found Wildberries guilty and dealt the platform a 1 million ruble fine.

Differences between the new and old laws

The new law proscribes “LGBT propaganda” aimed at people of all ages, not just minors, and the maximum penalty, especially for individual citizens, has been hiked substantially. Under the new law, individual citizens can be charged up to 400,000 rubles (€4,814) for “LGBT propaganda”, and corporations can be charged up to 5 million rubles (€60,180 based on average exchange rates for the past six months).

At least half of all cases brought to court since the amendment passed have yielded a guilty verdict. Since December, judges have issued fines of 4 million rubles, 1 million rubles, and 200,000 rubles (€48,144, €12,036, and €2,407, respectively) to four corporations. (Individuals have also been fined, but data on these cases is not available to the public.)

Courts also appear to be arriving at verdicts more quickly than they previously did. Although judges can appoint external examiners to determine the presence or absence of “propaganda”, this practice is becoming increasingly uncommon. In 2023, judges have called for examinations only twice.

New applications

Streaming services and online marketplaces are not the only entities targeted by the new law. Now that content intended for adults can also be deemed illegal “propaganda”, several transgender sex workers have been brought to court for their online profiles. Between December 2022 and February 2023, four sex workers in Moscow were fined for online profiles that “created an attractive image of a nontraditional relationship”.

And foreign citizens found violating the law face even harsher punishments. In April, a court in Tatarstan sentenced Chinese student Xu Haoyang to seven days in jail, followed by expulsion from the country, for erotic videos of himself and his male partner on his YouTube channel, “HAOYANG & GELA”, which has 64.9 thousand subscribers.

Other convicted foreign citizens have also faced arrest — for an average of three and a half days — and expulsion.

The new law has also led to increased online censorship. Since December of last year, the censorship agency has blocked 306 pages containing “LGBT propaganda.” 216 of these, however, lead to a website called “Sex Change And Gay Sex Is Cool,” which is a website set up to “troll the authorities”, according to human rights defenders.

Fear-mongering

The future looks even bleaker. Draft legislation awaiting approval from the Ministry of Justice, which will likely be signed into law in September, provides more detail on what constitutes “LGBT propaganda”.

According to the revised definition, propaganda includes any content that advertises “the rejection of traditional sexual relationships and preferences”, portrays LGBT relationships as “permissible”, or displays any kind of “approval” for “people who deny their natural gender”.

Olenichev and Kochetkov see other unspoken motives behind the law.

The real point, Olenichev said, is to distract, shifting the public’s attention away from Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Kochetkov believes the law’s true foundations are psychological rather than practical. “There are thousands of profiles of sex workers online [that would be considered propaganda],” Kochetkov said. “It would be impossible to indict everyone; it’s random who gets charged.” Ideological laws like these are not meant “for direct application”, he said; instead, they are intended to “turn on people’s self-censorship, to make people afraid”.

In the 2017 Bayev and Others vs Russia case, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Russian LGBT law is discriminatory, citing the ambiguity of the “LGBT propaganda” law. The Russian authorities refused to comply with the court’s findings.