LGBT Pride in Petersburg: Thirty Activists Detained

Yevgenia Litvinova
Facebook
August 4, 2018

A LGBT pride event was scheduled today, but the authorities refused to permit it, and it was decided we should limit ourselves to solo pickets on Palace Square. The protest was scheduled for 12:34 p.m. It looks pretty (1,2,3,4), but the time is horribly early for me.

But I remembered the words of Alexei Sergeyev and forced myself to get up.

“I hope solidarity is not an empty phrase for you. Maybe we have been together at architectural preservation marches and the Marches for Peace. Or we came out to support the striking truckers and women’s reproductive rights, protested against the destruction of confiscated produce, against corruption, against torture by the FSB, and mourned the murdered Boris Nemtsov. Maybe this is your first picket holding a flag or card. Or you are coming just to support us, to be with us. All of it matters. Every person counts.”

Alexei and I wound up on the same bus. We were running a bit late.

On Palace Square, we saw crowds of patriotically minded Petersburgers. Many had dressed in camouflage and adorned themselves with St. George’s Ribbons. It transpirted that today was a party for Harley-Davidson motorcycles and their owners.

Palace Square was completely cordoned off and chockablock with cops.

I got held up, and when I got to the square, Alexei Sergeyev had already been detained. Then Alek Naza (Alexei Nazarov) was detained: he had no placard, only a rainbow flag. Before that 28 more people had been detained. That is a total of 30 people detained for trying to hold solo pickets [which, according to Russian law, can be held without permission and without notifying authorities in advance]. There are minors among them. Some have been taken to the 74th Police Precinct (in particular, Alexander Khmelyov), while a third group is still being held in a paddy wagon, as far as I know.

Information from witnesses: “Six of the people detained on Palace Square were dropped off at the 69th Police Precinct at 30/3 Marshal Zhukov Avenue, including Yuri Gavrikov, Alexei Sergeyev, and Tanya (Era) Sichkaryova. One of the detainees is an underaged girl. We have refused to be fingerprinted and photographed.”

I was taking pictures with Yelena Grigorieva’s camera. I don’t have those photos yet. I’m using ones that have already been published on group pages and the social media pages of the protesters.

Translated by the Russian Reader

UPDATE. Please do not credit the accounts of this incident published by Gay Star News, Gay Tourism, and True Media. I sent the following letter to them a few minutes ago.

Your websites published a very sketchy summary of a post I published on my blog The Russian Reader earlier this evening.

Namely, you characterized the source of my post, Yevgenia Litvinova, as a “LGBTI activist.” She is no such thing. She is a well-known opposition journalist and pro-democracy (anti-Putin) activist, whose organization, Democratic Russia, feels it important to show solidarity with the LGBTI movement in Petersburg.

Please correct or delete this baseless speculation on your part or I’ll expose your bad journalistic practices on social media and my blog.

My blog is a copyleft website, but no one has the right to rip what I translate and write out of context—a context I know well because I’ve lived in Petersburg for 25 years—and fit it into a fake context that makes more sense to your readers, who, apparently, cannot imagine a non-LGBTI person would or could show solidarity with the LGBTI movement.

Fleecing Foreigners Makes Us Happy, but Gays Make Us Sad

Happiness Coffee and Pastry Shop Chain Introduces Surcharge for Foreigners
Paperpaper.ru
August 23, 2016

There is an additional fee for groups of foreigners at the Happiness (Schastie) coffee and pastry shop on St. Isaac’s Square in Petersburg. A Paperpaper.ru editor discovered this while visiting the establishment. A surcharge of ten percent is added to the final bill.

The reasons for the surcharge are not spelled out either in the menu or on the bill. As the establishment’s manager explained to Paperpaper.ru, the surcharged was introduced at the “director’s personal orders.” Besides, the manager assured us that a line explaining the practice would soon appear in the menu.

The surcharge was confirmed by phone calls to the Happiness outlets on St. Isaac’s Square and Rubinstein Street.

The chain’s management informed Paperpaper.ru that the surcharge was indeed enforced in all of its outlets, but only vis-a-vis groups consisting wholly of foreigners. The rule has been in effect since November 2015. According to the chain’s rules, waiters warn customers that a ten-percent service charge will appear on their bill. Management also confirmed to Paperpaper.ru that the rule would be spelled out in the menu.

Article 62.3 of the Russian Federal Constitution states, “Foreign nationals and stateless persons shall enjoy in the Russian Federation the rights and bear the obligations of citizens of the Russian Federation, except for cases envisaged by federal law or international agreement of the Russian Federation.”

In addition, Article 19 of the Constitution guarantees “equality of rights and freedoms of human and citizen, regardless of sex, race, nationality, language, origin, property and official status, place of residence, religion, convictions, membership of public associations, and also of other circumstances.”

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central

Message on the home page of the Central Barbershop website: “The services in our barbershops are provided in strict keeping with in-house standards of service [sic], operating procedures, and service [sic]. You can be refused a service if it does not according with the company in-house standards. It is prohibited in the barbershop to bring or imbibe alcoholic beverages, for the female sex to be present, [and] for member of a non-traditional orientation [sic[ to be on the premises.” Curiously, all this discrimination is absent from the English-language version of the same page, which only blandly states, “Men’s barber services are performed in accordance with European and American requirements.”

Petersburg Barbershop Refuses to Serve Homosexuals
Paperpaper.ru
September 6, 2016

The Petersburg barbershop chain Central Barbershop has refused to serve homosexuals, according to its website. Women are also forbidden from being in its barbershops.

“The issue concerns me, since there are lots of gays and lesbians around. I had a bad experience of interacting with this group of people, and I would not like to see them in my salons. It is terrible they are everywere. But this is not homophobia, because homosexualists [sic] have their own places, and they can go there,” said Mikhail Korets, founder of the barbershop chain.

According to Korets, his employees will politely refuse to serve gays, citing a lack of time or available barbers. He compared this kind of refusal with the work of security guards at nightclubs, which do not let people into their establishments by saying there is no room.

According to Yuri Gavrikov, head of local LGBT organization Equality (Ravnopravie), the Petersburg barbershop chain is involved in discriminating against people. He compared the chain’s decision with racial discrimination in the US during the 20th century.

Translated by the Russian Reader. Thanks to Comrade VZ for the heads-up on the English-language website of the fascist barbers.

Paratroopers Day: LGBT Protest on Palace Square in Petersburg

LGBT Activists Protest on Palace Square on Paratroopers Day
David Frenkel
Special to The Russian Reader
August 5, 2015

Local LGBT activists bearing flags and posters took to Saint Petersburg’s Palace Square on Sunday, August 2, Russian Paratroopers Day, to defend their rights.

In August 2013 and 2014, young local LGBT activist Kirill Kalugin held solo protests on Palace Square on Paratroopers Day, but he left Russia in late November 2014, applying for political asylum in Germany.

This year, LGBT activists tried to get permission for an event but were turned down three times by city officials.

Yuri Gavrikov, leader of the local LGBT organization Ravnopravie (“Equal Rights”) thus decided to go to Palace Square alone with an LGBT flag. He was arrested in the morning, however, for “swearing in public” as he was riding his bicycle toward the city center.

Nevertheless, several of his comrades came to Palace Square sporting flags and posters, and demanding Gavrikov’s release.

The first to take to the square was activist Olga Panova. She unfurled the LGBT rainbow flag before being arrested by the police a few minutes later.

Panova managed to pass the flag to another activist, Valery Ugarov, who was immediately arrested as well.

Policemen claimed the arrests had been made at the “behest of citizens,” although at the time, around two o’clock in the afternoon, only a few paratroopers were still left on Palace Square celebrating their holiday. They paid no attention to the LGBT activists.

Journalists from state media outlets approached the paratroopers and asked them their opinion of the protest, making no secret of their own disgust and dubbing the activists “drunk.” The paratroopers, however, merely dubbed the protest a “provocation” and avoided engaging in any violence towards the activists.

The next activist to take to the square with the flag was Mikhail Gerasimov from the Alliance of Heterosexuals and LGBT for Equal Rights. Police also detained him.

Police initially charged all the detained activists with “promoting homosexuality among minors,” but later dropped the charges for lack of evidence, claiming that a child who had been strolling through the square with his mother had taken no interest in the flag’s “meaning.”

Police released all the activists later in the day.

As Gerasimov was being arrested, activists Alexei Nazarov and Alexei Sergeyev emerged from the crowd holding posters that read, respectively, “Free Yuri Gavrikov,” “Three ‘rejections’ from the Smolny [Petersburg city hall]: lawlessness and discrimination of Russian citizens,” and “‘Let us fight to free the world, to do away with national barriers, to do away with greed, with hate and intolerance.’ Charlie Chaplin.” (The last is a quotation from the Jewish Barber’s speech in Chaplin’s 1940 film The Great Dictator.)

A few men wearing the trademark baby-blue berets and navy blue-and-white striped sleeveless t-shirts of the Russian paratroopers and casual clothing suddenly rushed Nazarov and Sergeyev, grabbing their posters and ripping them up.

The LGBT activists kept producing new posters, and the would-be paratroopers ultimately tore up five posters.

Police ignored the assaults on the activists, even laughing as they tried to defend themselves.

No one from either party to the scuffle was arrested.

All photos by and courtesy of David Frenkel

Homophobic Fascist Hoedown in Russia’s “Cultural Capital”

Gay Pride Event in St. Petersburg. Field of Mars, 29 June 2013

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Gay Star News
All participants in St Petersburg gay pride arrested for marching
LGBT activists in Russia confirm that police have arrested about 60 participants in today’s gay pride parade for violating the country’s anti-gay laws, while some were beaten and suffered injuries
29 June 2013 | By Jean Paul Zapata, Dan Littauer

All the participants in today’s St Petersburg gay pride parade have been arrested and are being detained in police vans.

Some participants were badly beaten by anti-gay protestors.

Nikolai Alekseev, one of Russia’s most prominent LGBT activists who was arrested last month for organizing a gay rights march, confirmed with GSN that around 60 fellow activists and pro-gay supporters are now in police custody.

Several people also were badly beaten by anti-gay protestors who attacked the partcipants, with some suffering injuries.

Alekseev, who was not arrested since he was standing outside the fenced area of St Petersburg pride, managed to tell GSN that participants were detained for breaching Russia’s ‘gay propaganda’ bill that passed Russia’s upper house in parliament to days ago.

Five Russian gay couples, who yesterday in a historical legal move applied for marriage licenses, were also taking part in today’s march and are now under police custody. The chair of St. Petersburg Pride and Equality organization Yury Gavrikov and his partner Maksim were one of the couples arrested.

Dimitry Chunosov, who along with his partner partcipated in yesterday’s application for marriage license, was reported to have been beaten up by the anti-gate protestors.

Gavrikov, who knew he was likely to face arrest for organizing today’s gay pride march, could face double penalties as an LGBT individual and leader of an LGBT organization who breached the local and federal Russia’s gay gag laws.

Both laws have been passed in order to ‘protect minors’ from so called ‘homosexual propaganda’ by punishing offenders with fines and jail sentences.

The Petersburg law bans the ‘propaganda’ among minors of homosexuality, bisexuality and transsexuality, and makes the offense – which has never clearly been defined by lawmakers – punishable by a fine of 5,000 rubles (US$157) for individuals, 50,000 rubles (US$1,570) for officials and 250,000-500,000 rubles (US$7,854-US$15,710) for companies.

According to the Federal law, any media or gay rights organization could be fined up to one million rubles ($30.8k, €23.2k) and shut down for 90 days, individuals could be fined up to 100,000 rubles ($3k, €2.3k) and foreigners could be fined the same amount, held in jail for 15 days and deported.

Sources in St Petersburg indicate that the individuals arrested today may be detained for up to two days.

Watch a video of St Petersburg Pride (in Russian):

Thanks to Roman for the heads-up on the first two videos.