Paul
Goble
Staunton, October 16 – The Russian
left remains divided over LGBT rights, with some of its members viewing gay
rights as a natural part of their agenda and opposition to them as a prejudice but
others seeing it as either a distraction from other social-economic problems or
even an attempt of the authorities to divide and weaken socialist groups.
For the last several years, Aleksey
Bachinsky writes on the Kasparov.ru site, Russian groups on the left of the
political spectrum have been debating how to deal with LGBT groups, but now “thanks
to the homophobic campaign of the government,” this issue has become a central
one for these groups (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=525B9FE28B0B8).
Many Russian LGBT activists,
including those in the Rainbow Association, have sought to take part in
demonstrations and to join coordinating groups of the left. For example, Pavel
Samburov of the Association has become a member of the Forum of Left Forces
even as his membership has marched in various protests.
But the left groups are now split, Bachinsky
says, between those who think that the LGBT efforts in this regard as a government-organized
provocation to those who are happy to welcome “a new group of toilers whose
class consciousness has awakened.”
Groups like Autonomous Action, Left
Socialist Action, and the Committee for a Workers’ International believe that
within society, there is “a multitude of hierarchies of oppression,” not just
an economic one, and that it is the proper “task of those on the left to fight
with each of these.
Others, like ROT-Front, Other
Russia, and some of the Inter-Regional Union of Communists, say that gay rights
are a bourgeois issue and should not be the focus of the left. And still a third group of parties remain
very much divided on how to react to LGBT efforts to join their ranks.
The Forum of Left Forces, which has
served as an umbrella group for the left for the last three years, has been the
site of conflicts between these opinions, with some of its membership totally
opposed to having rainbow flags at demonstrations and others more than willing
to accept them.
The theme has become so sensitive
that increasingly participating left organizations have dealt with it by not
talking about it, Bachinsky continues, fearful that any discussion will weaken
the left given the rising tide of homophobia in Russia and the efforts of the
Russian government to further marginalize protest.
Among those who argue for avoiding public arguments about this is
Aleksandr Batov, first secretary of the Moscow cell of ROT-Front. He says that the issue of LGBT rights is much
like that of Pussy Riot which “split Russian society.”
In the usual telling, he continues, “either
you are for Pussy Riot and for Western values … or you are for the Russian
Orthodox Church, for conservatism, for the traditional family, for Cossacks
with beards and so on. Quite a few
people in [Russia] are not ready to accept either of these alternatives,” even
when they are presented as an “either-or” proposition.
Igor Yasin, an LGBT activist on the
Committee for a Workers’ International, sees the situation differently. He says
that the authorities have benefited from this split in the left but that they
did not have to create it. The left, he
says, must “not simple engage in a struggle for LGBT rights but in one against any
forms of xenophobia, against anything hich divides us [including] nationalism
and sexism.”
When people on the left say that
LGBT activists and demands are the problem, Yasin says, Yasin says that he
responds that it isn’t the LGBT community that is “dividing the movement but
prejudices.”
Nikita Arkin, an
activist with the Left Socialist Action group, says that “each period brings
its own questions” and that “one must not say that the issue of LGBT rights is
not a matter of principle because it was not considered to be by the most
important theoreticians of the past.” The world changes and the left must
change with it.
To those of his comrades who say
that the left must avoid any discussion of LGBT rights because “the people don’t
understand,” Arkin says that many on the left “exaggerate the problem.” Indeed,
he says, “one could say that it is not necessary to speak out against
anti-Semitism and nationalism” for the same reason.
In fact, he says, at the everyday
level in Russia today, “nationalist prejudices are even stronger than
homophobic ones, but that doesn’t mean that we should not speak out against
them.”
Nonetheless, those who feel as Arkin
does face an uphill fight. Mikhail Pulin
of Other Russia, for example, says the left should avoid the LGBT issue because
“the LGBT community is not a political organization in any respect” and those
on the left should oppose “a mixin of politics and non-politics.”
Most LGBT activists don’t agree with
this assessment. Samburov, for example, argues that “the LGBT community of
course also has social problems, and we are involved with them. But the most significant problems of the
LGBTs in contemporary Russia, the ones lying right on the surface of things are
political … We will solve these by political methods in union with other
political organizations which are prepared to support us.”
These intramural fights within and
among groups that many see as marginal are, Bachinsky concludes, “only the tip
of the iceberg of those contradictions which must be addressed in order to act
as a united front,” something the left has found it hard to do and that the
Kremlin has been only too eager to prevent.
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