Russian security forces swept into a party on Saturday night in the city of Tula, 100 miles south of Moscow, and dragged “feminine-looking” men out into the snow and beat them, according to Russian human rights organization OVD-Info.
Nine attendees were taken into police custody during the raid and charged with spreading LGBTQ+ propaganda.
Activists worry that things will only get worse as Russian President Vladimir Putin centers anti-queer persecution in his re-election campaign.
The party at the Typography club wasn’t advertised as a “gay” gathering, but the description by promoters of a night of “love, openness and sexuality” was enough to attract authorities and get the event shut down.
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In video posted by Russian media, a plainclothes officer wearing a mask throws a partygoer to the ground in the snow and punches and kicks him. A second man in military dress and a helmet watches.
“The security forces forced the party participants to lie on the floor,” OVD-Info wrote in a statement. “Those present were photographed, beaten, and threatened with being forced into the war in Ukraine.”
Police then selected nine of the “most feminine-looking” men from the event, who were taken to a local police station, booked and charged with spreading LGBTQ+ propaganda.
One partygoer told Russian opposition media that he was forced to sing the official Tula region anthem.
“They grabbed me by the hair and asked who I was,” he said. “‘This is a Hero City! Sing the anthem!’ Thank God, I know the Tula anthem because I grew up here.”
The Saturday night raid was just the latest crackdown on LGBTQ+ people by President Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian government.
Last week, two women were taken into custody after video they posted on social media revealed them kissing in a pizzeria not far from one of Putin’s palaces in the city of Krasnodar in southwest Russia. In addition to paying a fine equaling over $3000, the women, 19 and 25, were forced to repudiate LGBTQ+ behavior in a videotaped public apology.
Recently another woman was arrested and charged after she and her companion were accosted at a restaurant by an angry mob complaining about her rainbow-styled earrings and her companion’s Ukraine flag lapel pin. She, too, was charged with spreading LGBTQ+ propaganda.
In December, a crackdown in Moscow saw police raid a nightclub, a male sauna, and an LGBTQ+-inclusive bar in the Russian capital, with officers checking and photographing patrons’ IDs. In Yekaterinburg, Russia’s fourth-largest city, a video distributed by local news outlet Ura.ru revealed riot police storming a dance club and ordering patrons out.
A Russian rapper spent 15 days in jail for the LGBTQ+ crime of wearing only a sock at a party.
These and other actions and arrests — among many likely not documented — are made possible by twin levers of power, including laws banning dissent enacted since Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and a growing number of laws targeting LGBTQ+ people and behavior, from 2013 legislation outlawing “gay propaganda” directed at minors to a recent Russian Supreme Court ruling at the urging of Putin’s Ministry of Justice declaring the so-called “international LGBT rights movement” a terrorist organization.
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