Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

Russia has no shortage of defiant decadence. Pravda, always a government organ, spews nightclub propaganda: “According to Forbes, Moscow has more billionaires than any other city in the world, so you can imagine the level of opulence you’ll be able to experience firsthand in some of the nightclubs. This makes the destination a great place for a guys’ getaway or the perfect location for the most epic stag parties.” Disdain for social norms is only strengthened as those norms become more rigid. At twenty-four, Avdotja Alexandrova created a modeling agency called Lumpen, which features women with scratched faces, unkempt hair, and puffy eyes, on grounds that an “emotionally inexpressive face, no matter how regular or symmetrical the features, cannot be beautiful.” Sergey Kostromin, who founded a zine called Utopia, said, “Everyone is in search of their own private utopia: satisfactory emotions that might be faked with the help of consumerist society.” Another zine, Russia Without Us, was founded by Andrey Urodov as “a magazine for teens who miss the times they never had the chance to live in.” It’s a nostalgia rag for the Yeltsin days. Asked to characterize the scene, one Moscow food critic said, “Every Moscow restaurant is a theme restaurant. The theme is that you’re not in Moscow.”

Pop music continues to be censored. Andrei Makarevich, called “the Paul McCartney of Russia,” found his concerts closed down after he performed for children in eastern Ukraine. Moscow’s best-known rapper, Noize MC, accepted a flag from a fan at a concert in Ukraine. “I sang in Ukrainian, and someone gave me a Ukrainian flag,” Noize said. “And in Ukraine, it was totally fine.” Weeks later, his shows started to be canceled; sometimes, bomb squads showed up claiming fictive dangers. Almost all of his performances during a tour of Siberia were blocked; authorities visited his hotels and physically stopped him from playing at alternative venues.

The anti-gay-propaganda law has resulted in innumerable vigilante attacks on gay people. Groups lure gay men and teenagers by professing to want a date, then beat their victims and force them to perform humiliating acts such as drinking the urine of their assailants. These episodes are recorded and posted; hundreds appeared online in 2015. Many victims sustain bone fractures and facial injuries; some develop anxiety and depression; others are so frightened that they become homebound. Gay people are assaulted on the streets, in the subway, at nightclubs, or during job interviews. The Russian government has refused to prosecute these acts as hate crimes.

Yelena Klimova has been forced to pay enormous fines for trying to build an online resource for gay teenagers. In the spring of 2015, she published an album called Beautiful People and What They Say to Me, in which she shows the profile photos of people who have threatened her on social media. A smiling woman holding a bouquet wrote, “Go and fucking kill yourself before they come for you”; a man whose winsome profile pic shows him with a baby goat wrote, “Gunning you down, you little bitch, is just the beginning of what you deserve.” The gay activist and poet Dmitry Kuzmin wrote, “Russia lacks the concept of respect for another person simply because he or she is another person, a unique, independent individual. It is therefore useless to say here: ‘I’m gay and I have rights.’ ” Kuzmin said that escalating homophobia makes gay people into unwilling radicals. “As long as the image of the enemy is being concocted out of gays, I must make all my public statements exclusively as a gay man on the battlefield in this war that has been imposed upon me against my will.”

The countercultural status the Orthodox Church enjoyed in Soviet times (though the church even then was complicit with the KGB) has vanished entirely; it now openly enforces Putin’s agenda. In 1991, only a third of Russians described themselves as church members; in 2015, more than three-quarters do. At the same time, nearly a quarter believe that religion does more harm than good, and a third of church members say they do not believe in God. Few attend services. The leader of the church, Patriarch Kirill, described Putin’s leadership as “a miracle” and said of the opposition that “liberalism will lead to legal collapse and then the Apocalypse.” Patriarch Kirill is rumored to have a personal fortune of some $4 billion and flaunts a $30,000 watch and a penthouse in Moscow. He rents out the Cathedral of Christ the Savior for commercial functions.