Infamous article on the Chechen war by controversial gay journalist Slava Mogutin
Post-Soviet
1995
It is interesting to juxtapose this article by gay activist, journalist and professional épateur Yaroslav (“Slava”) Mogutin with another of his articles in this collection “The View from the Other Side.” In that piece he responds to the supercilious othering and abusive stereotyping of, and paranoid fantasies vis-à-vis, a human category to which he himself belongs (gay men). Here, writing on the first Chechen War (1994-96), he indulges freely in dehumanizing orientalism in relation to the Chechen people. The text presents a list of vicious and demeaning tropes about Chechens and reduces the nation as a whole to barbaric “headhunters” and “terrorists.” In a third article included in this collection (“Homosexuality in Soviet Prisons and Camps”) Mogutin rancorously reproaches a Soviet political dissident class hostile or indifferent to the Soviet system’s persecution of gay men for that class’s inability to recognize the injustice of a persecution based on sexual difference. In this article he himself displays an inability or unwillingness to recognize the injustice of persecution based on ethnic and religious difference. Having elsewhere indicted the Soviet and Russian societies’ complacent misrepresentation and callous, violent repression of his own tribe — gay men — Mogutin persists in a seemingly willful ignorance of the likelihood that the disparaging stereotypes of this other subaltern category of Russia’s population (the Chechen people) might be unfair and inaccurate, the products of a distorting, orientalizing perception of an ignorant and arrogant Russian imperialist chauvinism.
Mogutin’s complaints regarding a lack of Russian patriotism and solidarity (and his references to the divisive factionalism of the constitutional crisis of 1993) would appear to be symptomatic of more general anxieties of this historical moment. In the fragmented and unstable social and political reality after the failure of a seventy-year old political system (a political system which itself had been the product of the failure of a centuries-old political system seventy four years earlier), some forms of conservatism or sense of preservation of existing traditions and conventions likely seemed to many critical as a basis for social cohesion. Some of Mogutin’s adversaries (see the article “Gay Dawn” by Aelita Efimova included in this collection) chose something akin to what in the American context might be called a traditional family-values conservatism positing the nuclear family with traditional, sharply demarcated gender roles as the basic constituent unit of society. For these people, it was critical that exponents of alternative sexualities and/or alternative gender expressions remained marginalized or contained, if not necessarily actively persecuted. For Mogutin, the societal binder should be a sense of national identity, including, evidently, a confessional (Christian) dimension, and it was non-Russians who needed to be relegated to the margins. The combination of LGBTQ activism and aggressive Russian nationalism was not unique to Mogutin. Sociologist Laurie Essig writes about this phenomenon in her book Queer in Russia: A Story of Sex, Self, and the Other (Duke University Press, 1999), where she devotes considerable attention to the nationalism of figures like Mogutin and lesbian activist Evgeniia Debrianskaia, who was for a time married to the nationalist ideologue Alexander Dugin. Among other things, Essig recounts a moment when Debrianskaia tried to sideline the Russian-American Jewish lesbian activist and journalist Masha Gessen (featured in “Masha Gessen interview with Elena Bonner,” “Lesbian Masha Attacks the Bureaucrats”) because of their “foreignness.”
Mogutin’s own prejudices and chauvinisms are very much on display here, including an aggressive, militant masculinity that seems even to have something of a misogynist slant (note the remark about female snipers who must not be “getting it” from their men at home). Per Essig, the virulent ethnic prejudice in this article would be exploited by Russian legal authorities as a pretext to prosecute their homophobic prejudice against Mogutin. He was charged with inciting racial hatred and, on the advice of his lawyers, sought asylum as a persecutee in the US, a country sharply criticized in this article as an ignorant and arrogant misjudger of Russia’s military action in Chechnya.
Mogutin, Slava
Russia
Novyi vzgliad, January 28, 1995