I guess I expected this. Today, the op-ed page of the New York Times brings us an op ed piece by Masha Gessen, who has been among our best sources on the persecution of gay men and lesbians in Russia, about some people who are waiting in New York for asylum. It's called Salon of the Exiled. A lesbian and three gay male couples, all of them waiting. We learn about one couple in detail, and, interestingly, the reason they had to get out of Russia was NOT because they were gay. No, Putin's police have other ways to frame you and to imprison you if you're doing something they don't approve of.
This is, in fact, not a new case. What's new is that the men involved got out of Russia when they could, and they're here now.
We begin in MAY of last year, when, according to the website Caucasian Knot,
Nikolai Yarst and Philip Vasilenko, members of the filming crew of the Russian Public Television, have been detained today in Sochi. Agents of the UVD (Interior Department) took away from their car a parcel with some gray-green substance, presumably, narcotic drug.
Yarst claimed the package
was planted by the police.
Why would the police do this? Leaving aside the obvious point that they could, Gessen explains that Yarst and Vasilenko were working on a sensitive story:
The story that got them in real trouble concerned the bizarre kidnapping of a young girl from a wealthy Sochi family by the boyfriend of her deceased mother. Even though Mr. Yarst and Mr. Vasilenko had exposed the kidnapping — in which local authorities were apparently complacent — in a series of reports, the child had not been returned to her blood relatives. And so in May of last year they started working on a new story. They were on their way to interview investigators in the case when they were arrested.
So protecting their own. This is how you silence an inquiry. Connected people have certain powers in a corrupt society and journalists that come too close should remember that.
Yarst was placed under house arrest in June 2013 and released in December, just in time for the Olympics. The charges were dropped in early March 2014. But after all the foreigners had left, Yarst got word March 16 that his case had been reopened. But since he was in Moscow, not in Sochi, he and Mr. Vasilenko decided it was time to get out of Russia, which they did with the help of Yarst's ex-wife, who had also been harassed by the local police in conjunction with Yarst's drug charge. Detectives were pressuring Vasilenko to testify against Yarst, and it looked like the detectives were also trying to trump up a child-abuse scandal in addition to the drug charge. The ex-wife and the child also left Sochi to escape the harassment.
As Gessen observes:
Half an hour into our conversation at the restaurant I realized the two men and I had more in common than our profession and our status as recent exiles from Russia. I asked them if they were open about being a couple. After a moment’s hesitation, they decided to come out publicly for the first time — in this article. Back in Russia, they had not discussed their relationship with anyone but their closest friends; like many gay Russians, they had felt perfectly comfortable in their social bubble.
Until the social bubble begins to close in on you, of course. I can't fault this because why should you have to leave the country you love, the country you feel at home in. But when you think of all the gay people who stayed in the port cities in which they had been discharged by the armed forces after World War II it's difficult not to see this as something similar.
And we learn that there's a growing community of this sort at least in New York City:
They made contact with human rights groups that will help them apply for asylum. Other than that, they say, they do not know a soul here. I assured them that that would change soon. I live not far from their short-term residence hotel. A lesbian film editor from Moscow, who is also seeking asylum, lives even closer. There are a few more new asylum seekers just across the East River: a Moscow television journalist who lost his job when he came out and his husband; a photographer from Murmansk and his husband. The first step toward wiping that look of disoriented horror off one’s face is realizing one is in good company.
There's help too. This probably isn't a new site for some of you, but it is for me.
Immigration Equality has been fighting for the rights of LGBT immigrants since 1994 (when it was founded as the Lesbian and Gay Immigration Rights Task Force), and they're in the forefront of the Russian LGBT asylum fight as well. Buzzfeed
has picked some of this up too, with a story about an activist in Moscow and Nizhny Novgorod who was outed after an anti-government tweet and is here now. I have a feeling that this is going to become an American issue soon, and we're going to want to mobilize to help our Russian brothers and sisters.
I'm in the process of proctoring a midterm exam now, but I won't really be able to do much responding to comments for another two hours. I wish this were over, but as long as it isn't, I'm not even vaguely done with this issue.