Just before the New Year, Russian independent media reported chilling news: Andrei Kotov, a 48-year-old Russian man and director of a travel agency called Men Travel, had died in custody in Moscow, reportedly by suicide. Kotov had been detained just over a month earlier, on November 30, 2024, on charges of involvement in the nonexistent “LGBT movement,” which the Russian Supreme Court had declared illegal in late 2023. Investigators claimed that Kotov was planning a trip to Egypt during the New Year holidays for “proponents of nontraditional sexual values.”

Kotov’s death marks a grim new chapter in the persecution of LGBTQ+ individuals in Russia. State-sponsored homophobia has become a far more serious issue. Indeed, back in 2013, the hysterical ramblings of political weirdos like Vitaly Milonov and Yelena Mizulina in the Duma about the “threat” of LGBT propaganda and their verbal attacks on gays were usually met with mockery. Today, the discourse around LGBT propaganda has become a serious and threatening matter. Russian homophobia and the law on LGBT extremism kills – and Kotov’s chilling case is a testament to that.

From the moment of Kotov’s detention, it was clear that homophobia – particularly among officials in law enforcement – would add an extra layer of hatred toward him and lead to more sadistic treatment. On the night of his detention, 15 uniformed men stormed into his apartment: two men in masks beat Kotov in the face, while the third used a Taser. Then, they interrogated him and, having found intimate photos on his phone, started mocking him.

Sexualized violence in Soviet prisons survived the Soviet Union

Of course, ordinary, non-LGBTQ+ victims of Putin’s regime are treated harshly too, but LGBTQ+ people are likely to face more brutality. What is truly horrifying is the deep-seated hatred and disgust toward LGBTQ+ people in Russian prisons, where individuals accused of “LGBTQ+ extremism” will eventually end up.

It is common knowledge that in Russian prisons, those even suspected of being gay are subjected to dehumanization, humiliation and sexual violence, both from fellow inmates and prison authorities. Vladimir Osechkin, a Russian-born human rights activist, claims that, according to his sources, Kotov, while in detention, was raped and had already been relegated to the ranks of prisoners with “low social status.”
Sexualized violence undoubtedly exists and has existed in penitentiary systems worldwide throughout history. Even before the Soviet Union, in tsarist prisons, sexualized violence among males was quite common: older inmates inflicted sexual violence on younger inmates.

Age, physical strength, prison status and one’s perceived masculine or feminine behavior, as well as resources, dictated who would be sexual prey and who would be sexual predator. If a youthful newcomer was raped by fellow prisoners, he would be rapidly incorporated into the prison’s social system as a “pederast,” at its lowest caste. After this status was set, he would become a prostitute, not to mention an object of attacks and abuse from other prisoners.

These practices continued in the Stalinist Gulag. Sexual violence among males was so widespread, and its role in establishing unofficial prison hierarchies so evident, that Gulag officials, after Stalin’s death, took measures to crack down on prison homosexual activity and homosexual violence.

After the dismantling of the Gulag and the establishment of “penal colonies,” Khrushchev and Brezhnev-era prison authorities also tried to tackle male sexual violence in prisons. Prison authorities discussed the issue at the highest levels and brought in Soviet sexologists, encouraging them to find a cure for male prisoners who had consensual sex with other males or raped other prisoners.

All these attempts were futile. The culture of sexual violence at the center of which stood homosexual rape has only solidified.