The Forbidden March

Small groups gathered anyway — at Manezhnaya Square by the Kremlin, on Tverskaya Street, at the Yuri Dolgoruky monument across from the Mayor's office. Several dozen people. Some with international supporters. Some with cameras. All aware of what they'd been told by the city: this is not permitted, this will not be tolerated, this constitutes a threat to public order.

They were attacked.

Nationalist groups were waiting — neo-Nazis, skinheads, Orthodox extremists. Rocks. Eggs. Fists. Participants were pelted, beaten, kicked. Two people who were merely suspected of being gay were surrounded and given a severe beating. The police were also there. They allowed the assaults to continue before intervening. When they did intervene, they reportedly forced LGBT demonstrators closer to their attackers. Then they arrested people — including the injured, including those speaking to media.

Mayor Yuri Luzhkov had been building to this for months. He'd called the parade "direct propaganda for immorality." He'd said sexual orientation differences "should not be exhibited for all to see." His deputy had suggested future legislation could "limit the rights or freedoms" of LGBTQ Muscovites. Internal city government documents showed a coordinated campaign to prevent public LGBTQ gatherings in the capital through media pressure and bureaucratic suppression.

The city government didn't attack anyone on May 27th. It didn't need to.

This is worth understanding as a mechanism, not just a moral failure. It works like this: the government declares that a group's public visibility constitutes a provocation. The provocation is used to justify the ban. The ban signals to extralegal actors — the nationalists, the skinheads, the men already radicalized and looking for official sanction — that this group has been marked. The violence follows. The violence is then cited as evidence that the ban was prudent, that the threat was real, that the authorities were right to be concerned.

The logic is circular, and it's designed to be. The state creates the conditions for violence and then points to the violence as proof those conditions were necessary.

What makes the mechanism so durable is deniability. Luzhkov gave radio interviews and held press conferences. He spoke in the language of community values and public order. The gap between his rhetoric and what happened on Tverskaya Street that afternoon is precisely the gap the mechanism requires. Too direct, and it becomes state violence. Just indirect enough, and it becomes the unfortunate but predictable behavior of private citizens that the authorities, regrettably, couldn't fully prevent.

That same day, Russia assumed the six-month presidency of the Council of Europe. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov pledged the chairmanship would emphasize "openness."

The people who gathered that day — knowing the march was banned, knowing what might happen — were doing what every protest does when the state has already declared the subject closed: making the private public, at cost, because the cost of staying private is higher.

They got beaten for it. Some were arrested alongside their attackers.

The state's performance of openness continued without interruption.

The mechanism hasn't changed much. When a government decides that a group's visibility is itself a provocation, what follows — the violence, the arrests, the regrettable incidents — isn't a breakdown of order. It's the system operating exactly as intended.

The question to ask isn't why the authorities didn't stop it. The question is who they were performing order for.

i · sources

• Pride and Violence: A Chronicle of the Events of May 27, 2006 in Moscow — Human Rights Watch, 2006-06-01
• Prelude: The Banning of the Gay Pride Parade — Human Rights Watch, 2006
• Moscow's First Gay Pride Parade Disrupted by Police and Hecklers — The Washington Post, 2006-05-28