An Underground Report on What It Is Like to Live in Putin's Russia If You Are Gay

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Inside the Iron Closet: What It's Like to Be Gay in Putin's Russia

What the two men in this photograph are doing is now illegal in Russia. Amidst an alarming—and frequently violent— government crackdown, being out, or simply supporting gays and lesbians, can now get you thrown in jail, beaten up, or worse. Reporter Jeff Sharlet embeds with the new enemies of the state and reports on life in the Russian underground

BY JEFF SHARLET - Photographs by YURI KOZYREV - February 2014

Sunday nights in St. Petersburg are Rainbow Tea Party time. If you're young and queer and hopeful, it's the happiest way to end a weekend. An actual tea party. There are also cookies and—at LaSky, the HIV-awareness center that often hosts the event—more brightly colored giant beanbags than chairs, plus a lot of posters of hunky bare-chested men with floppy hair. There are many, many rainbows, on stickers and pins and brochures, and a rainbow curtain covering a strange little door in the corner.
The door leads to a club called Bunker, which is really a maze, twisting through the rest of the building's vast basement. It's dark; you have to feel your way through. The men who go to Bunker—many or maybe most of them "straight" men, married men, says the bartender—are looking for bodies, not faces. They don't want to see or be seen, only to touch and to be touched in a place where nobody knows them.
Those are the choices: light or dark, tea or poppers, a well-lit game of charades or a grope in the dungeon. Sweet or sordid, it doesn't matter: In Russia now—in the throes of a fever stoked by the Kremlin—both must be hidden. They are not hidden well enough.
One evening in November—the city center like a bowl of pastel candies, Orthodox onion-domes rising above it like spun sugar—two strangers found their way to LaSky. They walked down a long street between a busy road and a canal until they came to an arch in a building. They went through the arch and down a dark alley before they arrived at an unlit empty parking lot, blacktop crumbling. Here they may have stopped to put on their masks. They crossed the lot toward a stand of scrub trees and weeds and took a left down a narrow path, then down an even darker set of uneven stairs to an unmarked steel door. The strangers stood at the threshold.
It was Rainbow Tea Party night. A woman named Anna asked who was there. "We're looking for our friend!" replied one of the strangers. They shoved past her. In the hall, a man named Dmitry Chizhevsky was looking for his jacket. Behind him was a girl I'll call Rose, a few weeks shy of her eighteenth birthday. Rose glanced toward the door: two men wearing ski masks. "Then," she says, "they started shooting." Chizhevsky: "The first bullet came into my eye. The first, the very first." Rose: "I had a thought in my head—maybe I should do something, maybe I should scream." Chizhevsky: "I can remember more closely what was audio." Pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, he recalls hearing. Five, he thinks. He says he remembers the sound of the bullet hitting his eye.
Dmitry went down, and Rose ran, and Dmitry crawled. The men followed, kicking. One of them had a bat, "a baseball bat, yes," says Dmitry. They were screaming. "Faggot, faggot, faggot." The bat came down. And then the faggots in the other room charged the men with the gun and the bat and the masks, and the men ran away. Dmitry and Anna, who'd been shot in the back, inspected their wounds. An air gun, they determined. Thank God.
They say you can shoot an eye out with an air gun, but that's not exactly what happened. The pellet, a round metal ball, lodged behind Dmitry's eye.
"They tried with a magnet to take it out," says Dmitry. "But, uh, they failed."
What did they try next?
"A hook."
The doctors told him he was lucky; a little farther, it would have entered his brain. All he'd lose would be his vision.