Monday, November 18, 2013

A Matter of Principle



Nadezhda Tolokonnikova’s “A Matter of Principle,” reproduced in my own English translation here, is a powerful statement from a Russian political prisoner of the moral obligation to resist tyranny.[1] It was published in August 2013 in The New Times, and read aloud in Moscow last week as part of the Andrei Sakharov Memorial Center’s “Readings in solidarity with Mikhail Khodarkovsky.” It deserves the widest possible audience.



“A Matter of Principle”

By Nadezhda Tolikonnikova


And it is also necessary to risk the heavens,
Perhaps recklessly.
Perhaps this time they will not crucify us
And then say: disintegration.
Be solitary, like the finger! …
As the whip to the bull
Is the cross to eternal gods.

Joseph Brodsky[2]


Today the art of sacrifice has been devalued. We are losing the ability to admire the art in others and to foster it in ourselves.  And for good reason. Everything meaningful in the history of humanity was born because someone was willing to sacrifice herself – for the sake of ideas, for the sake of a cause, for the sake of another. Great art, great political ideas, great religion, and ultimately great love emerge in that moment when someone is found who is not afraid to sacrifice himself.

The historical success of the Christian world view is instructive in its insistence that it is not enough to sacrifice lambs, doves, calves, or any property; you must sacrifice yourself. You would do well to contemplate the great anti-Oedipal, anti-Philistine pathos of the famous passage: “If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26).  This passage speaks of the possibility of victory in the great ideological confrontation that is being carried out on a historic scale among competing world views and covenants. And the next time you refuse to publicly defend your principles (say, by participating in a demonstration, though of course the list of ways to defend your beliefs and rights is not limited to participating in one demonstration) by saying that “I might get fired from my job,”  “I have children to think of,” “We're off to the cottage,” imagine that you have made this reply to Jesus Christ. And just think whether you are so far separated ideologically from Vladimir Putin, who is willing to destroy Article 31 of the Russian Constitution[3], if only to clear the way for those who are rushing to the cottage, into the warm arms of the de-ideologized, depoliticized Oedipal triangle. “The world will fail should I drink tea? I say ‘let it fail,’ so I always drink tea” (so says the underground paradoxist Dostoevsky, and everyone else for whom domestic comfort is more important than meaning and truth, and who still does not understand the pleasure that comes from the comfort of thought).

Every time you stand by your principles you take a certain risk. In general, the only trustworthy indicators to demonstrate that you have principles, and not just conformist internalized imitations of them, will be the flicks to the nose and the cuffs to the head that fate will suddenly begin to deal you. Life experiences, as they tell us in the prison colonies, will “strengthen you.” But that’s normal, it’s even good, because it’s a sign that they are reading what you’ve written, that your statements were admissible.

In the early 1920s the young Socialist Revolutionary Katya Olitskaia understood this mechanism perfectly and complained that she was, perhaps, unworthy of imprisonment because not every politician has earned this honor. It would appear that she was employing logic born of the logic of the one who once said: “Blessed are ye, when men shall hate you, and when they shall separate you from their company, and shall reproach you” (Luke 6:22). Negative reactions will always go hand in hand with genuine principles. If for principles you just pat people on the head and kiss them on the forehead – these are not principles, but a mask of conformity. If you post comments on Navalny’s “Putin-the-Bandit” blog, this is not adherence to principles, but a display of socially approved behavior (in our society). Go to a meeting of the [All Russian People’s Front] and say the same things there![4] Why not? The Apostle Paul also was not greeted with kindness when he preached, for he was regularly attacked with sticks and stones. And when Siddhartha Gautama left his parents’ palace to become the Buddha, did they not say of him that he simply didn’t know when he had a good thing? Why didn’t he stay where he was? He had everything, and changing his own life would not change anything else.

Life would be a little better if people really adhered to Kant’s categorical imperative: “Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal moral principle.”[5] Kant emphasizes that this is a categorical and not a hypothetical imperative. A hypothetical imperative is based on a certain condition: “if …, then…,” i.e., “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” If you don’t want to be lied to, then don’t lie. A hypothetical imperative is based on a particular interest, and because of that it is too pragmatic. If you don’t want to be lied to, then don’t lie. But what if I were a cheat, say, and a robber, so that telling a lie was so useful to me that I was prepared to accept the consequences arising from the fact that I had lied?
Political changes come about where there exists a critical mass of people of principle. Only such people will be able to formulate and defend an alternative dominant value system. This is precisely because the argument “why should I attend a demonstration when nothing will change” is self-deceptive. Each person who decides to become principled is priceless. And being principled by resisting injustice and falsehood in the little things will lead to being principled in the most important things. “Whatever you do may seem insignificant to you, but it is most important that you do it.” This is Gandhi.   

My path and my choice are to sacrifice my life to make it clear that another world is possible. One in which creativity, a passion for understanding, moral and intellectual exploration are the only possible hegemons. I simply refuse to live according to the rules and values of the bureaucratic police machine that has seized our country. This brings me great pleasure. And freedom. The machine responds with anger and takes revenge on those who refuse to follow its perverted logic out of fear. Maybe others will follow the example of the sparrow from Chukovsky’s tales and, instead of trembling before the cockroach, simply eat it?

Power does not belong to those who control the post offices and paddy wagons, but to those who are free from fear.



[1] Nadezhda Tolokonnikova is one of the two members of the Russian punk band Pussy Riot sentenced to two years in a penal colony in March 2012 for their “Punk Prayer” of protest against Vladimir Putin. After her September 2013 hunger strike to protest prison conditions, Tolikonnikova was transferred from her Mordovian prison to a new prison colony in Siberia. She is isolated from friends, family, and her lawyer, and apparently has begun another hunger strike. There are widespread fears for her health and safety.
[2] From “Poem with an Epigraph” (1958). To the best of my knowledge there is no published English translation of this poem, so I have provided this crude translation.
[3] Article 31 guarantees the right to peaceful protest.
[4] The All-Russian Peoples’ Front is Vladimir Putin’s political party.
[5] This is a literal translation from the Russian. Kant’s first formulation of the categorical imperative is more accurately translated as “Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.” (Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals).

Monday, November 11, 2013

Russia AND the United States: United in Xenophobia

The good American in me wants to respond with ethnocentric horror to the vitriol of the xenophobia you describe, and to exclaim, “Thank goodness that could never happen here!” But as a scholar of African American history, I know that it has happened here and IS happening here.

The Southern Poverty Law Center produces the Intelligence Report. It documents and details hate groups in the United States. Anyone who isn’t familiar with the SPLC should become so – check it out here: http://www.splcenter.org/. Among many other things, the SPLC has been documenting the rise in extreme hate groups since the election of President Obama. “Hate groups in recent years have risen to more than 1,000, and the number of antigovernment ‘Patriot’ groups has shot up from just 149 in 2008 to 1,360 last year,” the SPLC found.

After his first election, President Obama was hanged in effigy in Oregon, Kentucky and in the hometown of President Jimmy Carter.


 

(Sources:
Oregon: http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=5927324&page=1
Kentucky: http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2008/10/30/1224956192843.html
Georgia: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34682818/ns/politics-white_house/)

Hate groups reacted to Obama’s reelection with the sort of anger and hyperbole we might expect: “The sun has set on humanity’s greatest era: 1500-2000,” declared a commenter on Stormfront, “the world’s largest white supremacist Web forum, which is run by a former Alabama Klan leader.” The commenter predicted that “the only way to survive this war of annihilation is separatism.” Another lamented, “We have truly fallen under God’s judgment. You will never see another white man occupy the White House again.”

As sad, depressing, and offensive as I find these sorts of comments, however, I am not terribly perplexed by the behavior of these groups, which clearly exist to express hatred and to promote white supremacy. I am stunned – saddened – confused – by expressions of similar hatred in “mainstream” America. When television stations called the 2012 election for Obama, “a crowd of mostly white students protested furiously” at Ole Miss, “chanting anti-black slurs and attracting hundreds more students during the ruckus. An Obama/Biden campaign sign was burned before campus police broke up the crowd…” Pontificating about the suggestion that by 2043, the U.S. will lose its white majority, Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly declared, “The white establishment is now the minority. And the voters, many of them, feel that the economic system is stacked against them and they want stuff. … It’s not a traditional America any more.”

(For documentation, see Mark Potok’s “White Hot: For the Radical Right, Obama Victory Brings Fury and Fear” here: http://www.splcenter.org/home/2012/spring/white-hot. Then go ahead and browse through other issues of the Intelligence Report: http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues.)

But such xenophobic reactions to our President and the declining white majority have some tragic real world implications that reach far beyond the chanting of racist slogans or the posting of horrible comments on the internet.

On Saturday, November 3, 19-year-old Renisha McBride was shot and killed in Dearborn Heights. She had just been in a car accident, and with her cell phone’s battery dead, she knocked on a door seeking assistance. “The shooter, who remains uncharged [because of the state’s “Stand Your Ground” law], told police he thought she was breaking into his home and that his shotgun accidentally misfired. McBride was standing on his porch and was shot in the front of her face, near her mouth, police said.” (http://thegrio.com/2013/11/08/detroit-activists-demand-justice-for-renisha-mcbride/#s:renisha-mcbride-protest)

On Saturday, September 14, police shot and killed unarmed Jonathan Ferrell, who had just been in a car accident and was running toward them. Police had been called to the scene because Ferrell had repeatedly knocked on the door of a woman in the neighborhood of the accident. (http://www.cnn.com/2013/09/15/justice/north-carolina-police-shooting/index.html)

And of course, George Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin and was acquitted for it.

White xenophobia is leading to black deaths. Apparently simply having dark skin is considered threatening enough to justify shooting black people.

Thursday, November 7, 2013

United in Xenophobia


 
Participants of the "Russian March-2013" in Moscow on November 4, 2013. (RIA Novosti / Iliya Pitalev)
(Photo from RT)
Monday was National Unity Day in Russia, a national holiday created to replace the Soviet-era Revolution Day. Intended as a unifying celebration of the multi-ethnic state, in several Russian cities it was celebrated with ultra-nationalist marches, fascist slogans, and violence.

An annual tradition on Unity Day is the Russian March, a parade of far-right extremists through major Russian cities. The Putin government – which pressures city governments to refuse demonstration permits to opposition groups – sits idly by while cities grant permits to this hate-fest. In Moscow the police briefly detained thirty or so Marchers, but the rest were left free to parade through Moscow carrying banners with slogans such as “Russia for Russians” and “Today a mosque — tomorrow jihad.”

Unity Day was predictably marked by violence. In Moscow Neo-Nazis staged the “White Car Event,” invading subway cars and assaulting immigrants. They beat one man almost to death, a Russian citizen with the misfortune to look like he comes from the Caucasus. Participants in the St. Petersburg Russian March did the Moscow marchers one better – they succeeded in beating an Uzbek man to death.

As usual, the search for thoughtful Russian reactions to the Russian March led me to Boris Akunin. On Tuesday he wrote regarding the rising tide of xenophobia: “In a country where people of many nationalities live, any political program rooted in ethnic bias must lead to pogroms, and to the threat of national collapse. Russia needs the diametrical opposite – a common cause, an overall project, a common goal – to unite its people and not disperse them into their separate compartments.”


Akunin despairs that no voice of reason has stepped forward to lead opposition to the extremists who occupy the Kremlin and terrorize the streets. Yet as he keenly observes, in a country subject to authoritarian rule for most of its history, “Enough of us clustered around the leaders! It is time to unite around ideas, programs and platforms.”

Monday, November 4, 2013

Taken from the Moscow Times, this needs no comment.

 
 
“Russian authorities have forgotten that the threads of an unraveling society cannot be woven back together with bayonets.”

Vladimir Ryzhkov, “Russia’s March Toward Ruin,” in today’s Moscow Times

Sunday, November 3, 2013

You know, John, I think a key part of the question that you raise comes down to who we consider our "consumers."  Are they the students?  If so, I truly can't understand the resistance, because the students that I speak with (granted, a somewhat self-selected group) would support a change that embraces diversity. 

Is it the parents?  They are often the ones who pay the bills, so I can see a practical argument to be made for considering their views -- though ultimately, I think we should focus on serving the student, both in terms of ideals and practicalities (a student who isn't happy here won't stay, regardless of mom and dad's thoughts). 

What I wonder about -- or worry about? -- is whether we are also shaping our policies to fit the views (or our assumptions about the views) of some of our major donors.  I certainly don't want to paint with a broad brush or make unwarranted accusations; I don't know any of our major donors, and I don't know their views on this or any other issue.  But I can't help but wonder if concerns about offending them, especially in an era when we can no longer expect much support from the state, factor into this discussion.  Once again, I guess I could understand the practicality in such an approach, but I think ultimately it could cost us in terms of our retention of a diverse student body.

Jennifer, I can’t help wondering how the issues you highlight fit into the “rebranding” process that SUNY Fredonia is currently engaged in. Conscious efforts to construct an identity inevitably lead to thinking about what we are not, as well as what we are. Most faculty and students I talk to tell me that what we are – or wish to be – includes tolerance and inclusivity, and this vision is proudly proclaimed in the university’s baccalaureate goals. But of course, “rebranding” is a concept drawn from marketing, its methods explicitly rooted in economic goals. If decision-makers conclude that our economic best interests don’t coincide with our broader community’s understanding of who we wish to be, how will the differences be resolved? You are right to raise the question of who benefits, and who wields power, in this process. By the way, if you didn’t see “The Fredonia Follower’s” delightful lampoon of the rebranding process, I highly recommend it.

In Russia, where power is wielded less subtly, it is perhaps easier to see the roots of intolerance aimed at the LGBT community. Vladimir Putin, supported by his tame Russian Duma, leads the way, promulgating laws that seek to “rebrand” Russia in a narrowly ethno-centric, male-centric, and Slavic way. There is no subterfuge about what Russia’s ruling class wants Russia not to be. The rising tide of intolerance in Russia has come as Putin’s popularity has slipped; he is looking for scapegoats, and it is always the people who most visibly challenge our sense of identity who suffer when this happens.

Do you suppose the narrowing vision of public higher education in America is falling victim to a similarly exclusionary process? As states defund public universities and insist that they focus tightly on economic outcomes for students, is the ability of public universities to promote and practice tolerance and inclusivity threatened? I fear that the utilitarian mind-set that dominates public discourse about higher education leaves little room for people who come to us seeking understanding of what it means to be tolerant, inclusive, human. If this is true, then we should be paying very close attention to the outcome of state-sponsored intolerance in Russia; it can teach us the consequences of incivility.

Friday, November 1, 2013

It is just amazing to me how many parallels we are discovering between civil rights issues in the U.S. and Russia.  Your Oct. 28 post about using psych camps to silence dissidents struck a chord, because I just finished a couple of lectures about sexual identity and sexual practice during the Harlem Renaissance/New Negro Movement.  To set the stage for the attitudes towards homosexuality and other non-conforming expressions of a gender or sexual identity, I presented a brief summary of emerging laws and attitudes towards homosexuality in the U.S.  One thing that I learned that I had not known previously: in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, women faced significant dangers if they tried to live an "out" life as lesbians.  The decision apparently was enough to prove psychological instability: these women were subject to imprisonment in insane asylums, where rape would sometimes be "prescribed" to "treat" them under the assumption that they could simply be taught to be straight/"normal." 

I apologize for my long silence!

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the status quo, and why it is so damned difficult to challenge or change it.  This seems to relate to pretty much every type of civil rights struggle I can think of, at least in the American context – the struggle for the vote and so much more that was a part of the African American pursuit of civil rights; the struggle to control their own bodies that was a part of the women’s rights movement; the fight for equal protections and privileges that LGBTQ citizens find themselves engaged in here and abroad…

I’m involved in a campus-wide discussion about how to make sure that our transgender students feel welcome, comfortable, and safe.  A big Rubicon that our campus needs to cross, in my opinion, is that of single-sex residence halls.  More specifically, we require our freshmen students to live on campus in single-sex residences.  That creates a problem for our transgender students, or any other student who does not identify within the strict dichotomy of male/female.  Some of our students who identify as female, for example, feel that the culture of some of the single-sex residence halls is hyper-feminine or hyper-masculine; they, too, would appreciate a gender-neutral housing option.

There are a number of practicalities to take into consideration.  This is not a change that can be made haphazardly.  And there are students who do like the option of single-sex housing.  So I’m trying to find a middle ground solution.  The one that I like would designate as gender neutral or gender inclusive one floor of each building that has, until now, been single-sex.  This gender neutral floor would be open to students who opted in; no one would be forced to live there.  Not everyone agrees that this would be a good solution, and there are many different reasons for these disagreements.

I can’t help but think that the biggest challenge that I (and many others who share these views) face is the power of the status quo.  And of course, the power of the status quo is exactly why it is so important to me that we make a change, even if it is a small one, like setting aside a single floor in each building.

I keep thinking back to my own experience living in the dorms.  (I know they’re residence halls now; when I lived in them, they were dorms!).  On my campus (which did not require freshmen or anyone else to live on campus), there were two large dormitories.  Both were co-ed.  Now, my dad was a fairly conservative guy – and when it came to his daughter, he was VERY conservative.  If there had been an option, he would have pressured me to live in a single-sex dorm.  And the person that I was then probably would not have resisted -- may even have welcomed it.  But it wasn’t an option.  And because it wasn’t an option, neither he nor I gave it a second thought (well, if he did, he didn’t tell me).  I walked away from the experience thinking that it wasn’t a big deal.  I didn’t ever really feel the impact of living in a co-ed building outside, perhaps, of the first week when my roommate and I debated whether we would feel comfortable walking down the hallway in our bathrobes.  (We got over it.) 

Now on the one hand, I could say that the fact that it wasn’t a big deal shows that it doesn’t really matter if we have co-ed housing.  But of course, just because it wasn’t a big deal for me doesn’t mean it wasn’t for others.  And the even larger point, for me, is that it sent me a really important message, as an 18-year old – IT DIDN’T MATTER.  Girls and boys could live in the same general space, and we didn’t have to fall apart.  We didn’t lose those male or female qualities that we chose to embrace and develop in ourselves, and we didn’t become crazy, over-sexed people who couldn’t control ourselves.  That, I think, is a very important message for students that age – at least, if they are today anything like I was then. 

Now, I understand that I can’t expect my experience to be the same that everyone would have – and that’s why I’m fine with keeping the option for single-sex living spaces available.  But I can’t help but think that part of the reason that some people fight so determinedly against the change is because they also understand that it won’t be a big deal.  I think there are many people fighting the option who realize that, in fact, students might enjoy the opportunity, and their parents would find that the people who came home to visit on the holidays weren’t any more alien than they were when they lived there during their high school years.  I can’t help but think that the significant resistance from some is because they understand that the change would very likely be either ignored or even embraced.  So then I can’t help but wonder whose interests, and whose values, are being represented.

Do you remember when President Obama was about to announce that he was withdrawing presidential support for the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” rule?  Do you remember how the media exploded?  For weeks, we were told that African Americans were socially progressive, but religiously conservative.  We were bombarded with questions: Will Obama lose support in the black community if he embraces this change?  Will there be a major outcry against his position?  I certainly remember the uproar – and I remember the silence that followed his announcement.  Some people agreed, some people disagreed, but Obama’s rating as President wasn’t negatively affected.  (If memory serves, it actually went up slightly overall, and remained unchanged among African Americans specifically.)  So why the hysteria?  Did politicians and news reporters really think that there would be an outcry?  Or were they trying to create one in support of their own position or their own ratings?

Why is there such resistance to making a small change to campus housing policies?  I can’t help but think that the reaction would largely mirror that of me and my father to the co-ed dorms I lived in, and the response of black America to Obama’s rejection of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell: a general silence that reflects the fact that the morals and well-being of our students and the community are not being affected adversely.  And so I wonder … are those who resist really representing what they believe to be the best interests of all of our students? 

Here's a related article that might be of interest: http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/11/01/242366812/germany-offers-third-gender-option-on-birth-certificates?ft=1&f=1001

Monday, October 28, 2013


On Sunday several thousand demonstrators marched in Moscow, demanding that the twelve men still imprisoned for their participation in the May 2012 Bolotnaya Square protests be freed. The treatment of one of those twelve has raised particular alarm bells: last week a Russian court ordered that Mikhail Kosenko be confined in a psychiatric hospital. For students of the Soviet dissident movement this raised the specter of the return of one of the worst chapters in late Soviet repression. Beginning in the 1960s the USSR used psychiatric confinement to punish dissidents.

Psychiatric confinement had a particular appeal to the Soviet government because it permitted the pretense that dissidents were not political prisoners – they were insane. Of course the main evidence of their insanity was that they protested against the state, but Soviet psychiatrists manufactured a diagnosis of “sluggishly progressing schizophrenia,” the only symptom of which was social maladaptation evidenced by … dissident activity. There were special psychiatric hospitals (sometimes called psych-camps) for dissidents, and they were the stuff of horror movies: the patients, heavily medicated with psychotropic drugs, shuffled about in a daze, watched by attendants whose principal qualification was that they were beefy enough to hold down recalcitrant “patients” while the next dose was administered.

The first cases of such psychiatric abuse came as early as the 1940s, but the widespread practice, and the establishment of special psych-camps for dissidents, began in the late 1960s, just as the USSR and the United States began actively pursuing détente. This was probably not a coincidence. The USSR needed to improve its human rights reputation to advance its international agenda, and the psych-camps provided a way to claim that dissidents were not political prisoners. The practice was also convenient for the Nixon administration, which could not easily ignore show trials like the infamous trial of Yulii Daniel and Andrei Sinyavsky in 1966, but could more easily ignore the confinement of “schizophrenics.”

Is Putin heading down the same road? Russian human rights violations are becoming a regular feature in the Western press, just as Russia prepares to welcome the world to the Sochi Olympics. As Mark Galeotti describes in his excellent blog on Russian crime and security, there are other signs that Putin is trying to polish Russia’s international reputation by backing away from embarrassing political show trials. If Russia reopens the psych-camps on the eve of the Olympics, let us hope that Western governments do not again accept psychiatric confinement as a convenient fiction and turn their backs on the newest generation of dissidents.

Wednesday, October 23, 2013



When Nadezhda Tolokonnikova spoke of the aesthetics of Russian power last summer she evoked the unique relationship between the arts and politics in Russia and the Soviet Union. That relationship was on full display this week when Russian TV channels broadcast the arrest of Orkhan Zeynalov, a migrant worker and accused murderer. Members of a special police unit, clad in their black uniforms, their faces hidden behind black ski masks, handcuffed Zeynalov, threw him to the ground, and kicked him with their black boots. This was public theatre, staged for the xenophobic mob in Moscow.

Tolokonnikova condemned the return of a “secret-police aesthetic,” linking it to its Soviet and Tsarist past; the Zeynalov arrest confirms this. Yet there is also something new in the aesthetic of Russian power today: it is profoundly masculine.

To be clear, the reality of power in Russia has always been masculine, and there are no more women in high office today than there were fifty or a hundred years ago. But aesthetically the Soviet Union consciously incorporated women into the pastiche of art and politics called “socialist realism.” Soviet propaganda posters portrayed the new Soviet Woman, freed from house work (“Down with Kitchen Slavery!” a famous poster slogan proclaimed) so that they could operate machines in factories or drive tractors on collective farms. Soviet movies portrayed women as factory managers and members of city governments.

Today the dominant images are unfailingly masculine, with photographs of Putin himself, bare-chested, heroic, and alone, leading the way. Putin is famously fond of his own physique, and he loves to appear shirtless in publicity photos: shirtless, on horseback; shirtless, fishing; shirtless, hunting; shirtless, swimming with dolphins. As an insightful (if slightly tongue-in-cheek) Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty article asks this week, is there something homoerotic in all of this?

The RFE article also raises a more serious question. It focuses on Elton John’s December concert dates in Russia and the homophobic reactions they are provoking. Elton John first toured Russia in 1979 and he is a big star there. His two December concerts are already sold out. In the city of Kazan, where he is scheduled to perform, an over-the-top Imam told the press that "attending the concert will lead to adultery, drugs, and alcohol. Orphans, single mothers, and sick children – all of them are the result of lechery."

The new, masculine aesthetic of Russian power seems to go hand-in-hand with the rise of homophobia.  The LGBT community is under attack in Russia, violently on the streets and legislatively in the Duma. For now the police stand aside and watch, but how long will it be before we see the black-clad men in ski masks putting the boots to gay men?