Banned in 48 hours. How Russia targeted advocacy and arts, treating all LGBTQ+ mentions as the work of an “extremist organisation”—in just 2 days

On February 2, the Ministry of Justice has moved to dismantle the country’s last remaining major advocacy platforms. Lawsuits were filed to designate the “Russian LGBT Network (LGBT Set’)” and the St Petersburg-based group “Coming Out (Vykhod)” as “extremist organisations”. These cases are set to be heard in closed sessions, with authorities citing “secret” nature of case files as the justification. 

A similar suit was filed against “Irida”, a smaller initiative based in Samara in southern Russia. Its leader, Artyom Fokin, a 33-year-old operator at the state oil giant Rosneft, is already facing criminal charges for organising an “extremist community” and violating “foreign agent” regulations.

Today, senior managers at Russia’s largest streaming platforms (Kinopoisk, Ivi, Wink, and Beeline TV) received fines ranging from $2,600 to $3250 over “Galgos”, a Spanish family saga likened to “Succession”, which featured a wedding scene between two women. The series has since been erased from all Russian platforms.

The purge continues in the book-publishing world, with the now-defunct publisher No Kidding Press receiving on February 2 a retroactive fine of $10,000 for “The Fruit of Knowledge”, a comic by Swedish author Liv Strömquist. In an earlier raid, prosecutors seized Strömquist’s book and other queer-themed titles from the shelves of Falanster, an iconic independent bookshop in Moscow.

On the same day, Rim Khazibekov, an administrative director at the Cambridge International School, a private school in St Petersburg, was fined $1,300. His offence was an Instagram post from 2018, seven years prior, in which he expressed shock at a conference presentation on gender diversity—he is a self-described “adept of traditional family values”. Despite this, the court ruled the post constituted “LGBT propaganda”.

Evgeny Pisemsky, founder of the website “Guys+ (Parni+)”, now faces three new administrative protocols, we learned yesterday. Pisemsky, who has previously been fined under “foreign agent” laws for posts on VK social network, runs one of the few remaining platforms covering the LGBTQ+ community.

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In November 2023, Russia’s Supreme Court declared the “International LGBT social movement” to be an “extremist organisation”. As this “movement” does not really exist, the ruling granted authorities freedom to prosecute any ritual, symbol, or group associated with queer rights with no regard for consistency of enforcement.

Consequently, the display of a rainbow flag or drawing of a rainbow can now result in administrative arrest or criminal charges. This vague legal landscape has empowered vigilantes who coordinate with counter-extremism police to track people across social media.