Homophobia: the conspiracy theory behind Russian fascism
On 5 December Vladimir Putin decided it was worth his while to take a break from his disastrous invasion of Ukraine and find the time to enact a homophobic law. By the new tsar’s decree, it is now an offence for Russians to promote or “praise” LGBTQ+ relationships, or suggest that they are “normal”.
The law covers the entire population of the Russian Federation: not just teachers in charge of children. Booksellers reacted by pulling “decadent” novels from their shelves. Lesbians in St Petersburg spoke of their “mere existence” becoming a crime.
That Putin regards homophobia as a means of rallying a credulous population during a failing war is the best evidence I have seen of his imitation of the tyrannies of the 20th century. Only by making sexuality his main scapegoat does he show a glimmer of originality.
Both the Nazis and the communists killed gay men. But they were not at the root of their conspiracy theories, which remained focused on Jews in the case of Germany and the bourgeoisie in the case of the Soviet Union. After Stalin criminalised sodomy in 1934, communists denounced it as a “bourgeois degeneracy”. (The bourgeoisie came first.)
Although operating on far deeper prejudices, Heinrich Himmler, the most homophobic of the Nazis, justified mass murder in concentration camps by saying that gay men prevented Germany becoming “a nation of numerous children qualified to be a global power and master of the world.”
The Putin regime's sole claim to originality is that it has elevated homophobia and made it central to the conspiracy theory behind Russian fascism.
LGBTQ+ people have taken the place that Jews held in German Nazism. As with anti-Jewish prejudice, Putin’s conspiracy theory works from above and from below. On the streets, the police don’t investigate assaults or murders. They condone the attacks of the neo-Nazis and football hooligans the regime has incorporated as an auxiliary force.
Yet as the Russian state pushes them to the margins of society, it fantasises that isolated and fearful LGBTQ+ people have a supernatural power.
The Putinist ideology holds that their queer agenda controls the West, just as fascists held that a Jewish agenda controlled Western finance, media and government.
Putin made my case for me in a vainglorious speech , in which he announced that he was annexing four Ukrainian provinces. (Vainglorious because his retreating armies were in no position to annex anything.)
As he spoke in the Kremlin on 30 September, he built up a conspiracy theory layer by layer.
Ukraine was not an independent country, Putin began , but a puppet state whose “real masters” lay in the “dictatorship of the Western elites”.
These elites were engaged in a “complete denial of humanity [and] the overthrow of faith and traditional values.” They wanted nothing less than “outright satanism.” I should explain that Russian Orthodox Christianity, that most servile of religions, grants Putin the belssing of divine support. Oppose him and you oppose the state religion and “faith,” and therefore you are a satanist at war with God.
As you will have guessed, the satanism of the West manifests itself in its sexual diversity. Putin would not allow “here, in our country, in Russia, instead of 'mum' and 'dad', to have 'parent No. 1', 'parent No. 2', 'No. 3'? Have they gone completely insane? Do we really want ... it drilled into children in our schools ... that there are supposedly genders besides women and men.”
Scholars are reluctant in the extreme to apply the label “fascist” to Russia or any other modern autocracy. It does not fit into the narrow academic mode.
Russia in the 2020s is not the same as Germany in the 1930s. Putinism was not an insurrectionary force when it took power, they rightly argue, and his regime is not the product of a revolutionary ideology.
But Hitler’s Germany was not the same as Mussolini’s Italy, and yet we have no difficulty in describing both as “fascist”. In the case of modern Russia, if “fascist” is forbidden, I cannot think of another word to describe it. The similarities with 20th century fascism abound.
Let me count the ways. As in the past, the rejection of liberalism becomes a justification for oppression. The loss of the Soviet empire, compounded by the additional humiliation of the economic collapse of the 1990s, brought a desire for revenge akin to the German right’s desire to avenge the humiliation of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles.
As in Italy and Germany, we have seen a flourishing of “irredentism” – the doctrine that a nation has a right to occupy “lost” territories, The Ukraine war is the direct result of the Russian imperialist conviction that Ukrainians are de facto Russians, even when they fight to the death to prove that they are not.
And then there is the hypermasculine cult of Putin and the older cult of death that glorifies in sending young men to die in wars, or in the butchering of civilians in genocidal military campaigns.
Russia’s war crimes and the descent of the Putin regime into dictatorship are producing a perceptible shift in opinion. Academic niceties are no longer standing in the way of seeing the world as it is.
This week I was lucky enough to receive an advance copy of Z Generation by the academic specialist on Russian propaganda Ian Garner. (Out in the Spring from Hurst) Garner has no difficulty in subtitling his work “Into the heart of Russia’s fascist youth.”
Through interviews and life stories, Garner shows how extraordinary levels of hate permeate a large section of the under-30s, who came of age under Putin’s tutelage.
Their xenophobic youth culture embraces the state’s stab-in-the-back myth that Russians must avenge themselves on the nefarious Western powers that sabotaged the Soviet Union. It revels in a macho militarist idoleogy, in which the hatred of “perversion” is to the fore.
Putin’s latest repressive laws are the culmination of years of coercion and state-sponsored provocation. In 2010, the mayor of Moscow Yury Luzhkov, said that to allow a gay pride parade would be “a satanic act” (that word again), and branded homosexuality “a social plague”.
Garner writes that for the regime “attacking the homosexual could reinforce an ill-defined sense of national wholeness. Only the ‘traditional family’ could incubate the growing generation of better, straight, masculine, and patriotic Russians.”
It wasn’t just the prejudices of Orthodox Christianity Putin appealed to. In Putin’s mind, Russian men willing to fight and die must be straight men, and only straight Russian women could produce the sons willing to join them.
Russia is not the place to repeat Gore Vidal’s argument that, in the ancient world, “pairs of dedicated lovers (Thebes' Sacred Legion, the Spartan buddy system) would fight more vigorously than reluctant draftees.” (Although looking at the dismal performance of Russian draftees in combat, you might suspect that Vidal had a point.)
State-controlled media have amplified the message that LGBTQ+ people are carriers of Western diseases for years
In 2012, TV journalist Dmitry Kiselyov told an appreciative audience that “imposing fines on gays for homosexual propaganda to minors is insufficient. They should be prohibited from donating blood, sperm and, in the case of a road accident, their hearts should be either buried or burned as unsuitable for the prolongation of life.”
The quasi-religious concoction of nationalism, war, martyrdom, and rebirth being poured down the throats of Russia’s young today won’t die with Putin
On the Russian equivalent of the Jerry Springer Show homosexuals headed the list of degenerates that included cheaters, alcoholics, liberals, the West, satanists (again), practitioners of black magic, parasites, atheists, and men who skip military service.
To pin the blame only on the regime is to console yourself with the thought that homophobia is a top-down phenomenon. But on Telegram channels and social media it has a life of its own, turning ordinary young people into uber-patriotic and hyper-homophobic enemies of liberalism.
Maybe the rumours about Putin’s ill health are true and he won’t live for long. Perhaps with luck, and Ukrainian valour, the Russian army will collapse. But Garner’s ominous conclusion remains convincing, “The quasi-religious concoction of nationalism, war, martyrdom, and rebirth being poured down the throats of Russia’s young today will leave its mark.” It won’t die with Putin.
On the whole Western governments have ignored the hate, as so many ignored or downplayed anti-Jewish hate in the Nazi era. I fear they are frightened of defending marginalised victims, just as Western governments feared defending Jews.
Perhaps there is even a "prudent argument for staying silent. Foreign ministries might have concluded that speaking out would only make matters worse for persecuted Russians by confirming the conspiracy theory that they are a Western fifth column.
If that were ever once true, it is not true now. Whatever happens to Putin, the West and Russia’s beleaguered minorities will be facing a fascistic movement for years to come. Solidarity demands offers of asylum, and a promise that, if it is ever in our power, we will bring the persecutors to justice.
In 2013 my friend and colleague Jamie Kirchick took on Russian homophobia in a delicious confrontation on the RT network. I don’t believe the propagandists on Putin’s pet TV station have ever had such a dressing down.
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Many thanks,
Nick