“Even the United Nations asked Russia about my case”-a fairly typical part of the process since asylum seekers need to prove that they are in danger at home.ĭespite the trauma, Chizhevsky is one of the lucky ones. “Everyone says that my case is not very difficult because it has been so well documented,” Chizhevsky says over coffee at Busboys and Poets on 14 th Street in Northwest D.C. Nikolai Baev, an LGBT activist, in Moscow a few days after he was detained by police. government does not release the reasons people seek asylum, but asylum seekers like Chizhevsky say the spike is at least in part a result of the crackdown on the LGBT community. asylum applications from Russians rose 15 percent overall in 2014, when there were 969 new cases. He was one of many Russian gays and lesbians to make that trek. Chizhevsky decided to try to make a life here and to seek political asylum in the United States.
#FIRST GAY PRIDE PARADE IN RUSSIA SOFTWARE#
In July 2014, a little more than six months after the attack, Chizhevsky arrived in New York.Ī self-educated software developer, Chizhevsky made his way to Washington, D.C., where he discovered an LGBT community that was out and open and living without fear. I am thinking more about the opportunities ahead and the future I want to build” in the United States. “I feel that I have gotten used to it over the past year. “Sometimes I don’t know how I feel about it,” Chizhevsky says about the trauma of that day.
Like more and more gays and lesbians over the last two years, Chizhevsky had had enough of Russia, a place where his sexual orientation alone seemed to make him an enemy of the state. A community that was just beginning to organize found itself under assault, the target of a deep-seated Russian homophobia that had now been embedded in law.Īnd for Chizhevsky, although he thought about staying in his native land, the price of being gay in Russia was ultimately just too high. In a country that increasingly punishes the “other” and where violence against select groups and individuals is often tolerated-and even encouraged-by the state, there’s become no greater target than being LGBT.
#FIRST GAY PRIDE PARADE IN RUSSIA SERIES#
On the local and national level, a series of so-called anti-gay propaganda laws were passed that made it illegal to discuss LGBT themes with minors or to distribute such information to them, even if it dealt with health issues. Russia has not just been left behind, but has become demonstrably worse and more dangerous, according to more than two dozen individuals we spoke with in five Russian cities over six weeks of reporting. In most of the West, gay rights has seen startling breakthroughs in the last decade. He became an unsolved statistic-just one of a growing number in Russia’s LGBT community who’ve been attacked or harassed in what has become an unprecedented crackdown. One of the small balls stayed behind my eye.” The police ran a rather lackluster investigation and no one was ever arrested. They yelled, ‘Where will you run, faggot?’ and one hit me several times with a baseball bat.
“I saw two guys next to the door wearing masks,” Chizhevsky recalls. The next day, on November 3, the tea party was more crowded than usual. The old town had a hectic feeling that weekend as the 10 th Annual March Against Hatred took place in the city’s gracious main streets. It wasn’t a political event, and Chizhevsky wasn’t much for protests. “It was a place to socialize, drink some tea and play some games,” Chizhevsky says. That violence hit Dmitry Chizhevsky in November 2013 when he attended a weekly meeting for the LGBT community and friends called the Rainbow Tea Party in Saint Petersburg. It was the first official sign that the Russian authorities would resist the LGBT movement-a resistance that has grown and become increasingly violent as LGBT activism has grown over the last decade. Only a few months later, Russia saw its first regional anti-gay law passed in Ryazan, 200 miles east of Moscow.