NIZHNY NOVGOROD, Russia—Vitaly’s nightmare began last Thursday morning when he read a news article on the website of TASS, the Russian news agency. It said that the Investigative Committee, a powerful law enforcement agency, planned a number of arrests of single gay fathers with babies from surrogate mothers. The worst nightmare of Russian LGBTQ parents—police taking children away and placing them in orphanages—was coming true. To Vitaly, a 40-year-old IT specialist, it meant one thing: hit the road, run.
The agency targeted men like him, who had babies born via in vitro fertilization and surrogacy. The TASS article said that the Investigative Committee had targeted 10 Russian single dads of “untraditional sexual orientation,” and planned to arrest them for “baby trade.”
A few hours after he read the TASS article, Vitaly, who asked to change even his first name to protect his safety, had a brainstorming meeting with his friends. They met at his apartment in Moscow, looked at the map and chose a country to use as his temporary shelter. Vitaly bought a plane ticket, packed his suitcase, grabbed his 6-month-old baby boy, and left Russia.
In a phone interview with The Daily Beast, Vitaly said he could never imagine he would have to flee his home in a few hours. “I planned my fatherhood for five years, I worked hard, bought an apartment, found a surrogacy firm and had a baby, hoping to bring my son up in Russia,” he said. Vitaly described his rushed meeting with friends, who helped him plot his escape to wherever the pandemic travel rules allowed. “The shock caught up with me only the next morning: I spoke with my mother on the phone—I couldn’t help it, I cried,” Vitaly said on Friday.
Earlier this year the state started investigating several private surrogate clinics and law firms that help Russian and foreign parents become parents. Police arrested seven people in July, took several babies to state institutions and placed a surrogate mother under house arrest. Vitaly’s lawyer at the surrogacy firm, Konstantin Svitnev, has helped many Russian LGBTQ and straight people become parents with help of surrogacy and in vitro.
“The investigators accused me in absentia of being the leader of a criminal gang that had allegedly traded babies born from surrogate mothers and sent them abroad,” Svitnev, a co-owner of the Rosjurconsulting surrogacy firm, told The Daily Beast in a phone interview. Svitnev left Russia earlier this year, and he is currently staying in Prague. “The state took babies of Australian, Chinese, and Filipino [parents] and placed them in some medical institution. In July they also took my four children away from my house in Moscow, where they were with nannies and placed in some institutions—thankfully, my family managed to find my children and take them to a safe place,” Svitnev, also a single father, told The Daily Beast.
One of the Russian LGBT Network’s leaders, Veronika Lapina, has been on a serious mission to save the lives of Russian gay women and men since 2017. “During the last three years we helped 177 Chechen LGBT people to flee abroad, before they fell victims of torture or murder. But the scale of attacks on Russian LGBT [people] is growing—authorities do nothing to investigate the human rights violations,” Lapina told The Daily Beast. “Russian authorities persecute LGBT activists all over Russia’s regions—some, like Yulia Tsvetkova, get prosecuted for their activism. Authorities banned gay ‘propaganda’ by law, made transgender people change their IDs, and now it sounds like there will be persecutions of single gay dads. We are ready to support gay fathers on all our platforms, provide them with legal aid.”
After publication of the TASS article, Russian MP Oksana Pushkina, the head of Committee on Family, Women and Children’s Issues, appealed to Russia’s prosecutor general: “I consider what is happening a flagrant violation of the rights of not only the fathers, but also the children,” Pushkina told RBC news agency. “The guys aren’t guilty of anything, our job is to protect them from lawlessness and obscurantism.”
What is the purpose of such persecution of single gay fathers? “I am convinced, that some men in uniforms and politicians intend to take all Russian surrogacy agencies under state control,” attorney Svitnev told The Daily Beast. It is already a large business and “the demand for surrogacy will only grow.”
Svitnev and his client Vitaly are among thousands of disillusioned Russians who have escaped from the country because of persecutions. According to Russian civil society activists, last year Chechen officials “ordered” families to murder their LGBT relatives. Canada has granted asylum to dozens of Chechen gay and bisexual men and women, a BBC report says. One of the refugees, a former resident of Grozny Arsen, told The Daily Beast he was worried about his safety even in Canada—but still could become “a witness for a court hearing,” if Russia ever begins to investigate crimes against LGBT people.
Vladimir Putin signed Russia’s “gay propaganda law” in 2013. It aimed to punish those who promoted “nontraditional sexual relations to minors” and disrespected traditional family values. Human rights defenders called for the state to stop persecutions, which inspired social hostility against LGBT people. But earlier this year a pro-Kremlin tabloid RIA-FAN produced an anti-LGBT ad, bashing gay families. It mocked adoptive gay parents and said in the end: “Is this Russia you want?” The ad called for Russians to vote for the amendments of the constitution. One of the amendments stated that marriage can only be between a man and a woman. The video went viral and caused such outrage on social media that one of the actors in the ad had to apologize to his Instagram followers. LGBT activists of Stimul group condemned the video ad, saying it “incited hatred and hostility.”
A prominent human rights defender, Svetlana Gannushkina, says she has been trying to help dozens of gay men and lesbians escape from Chechnya and other Russian regions in the past three or four years. “Before Donald Trump won the presidential election in 2016, the U.S. embassy helped Russians whose lives were in danger. But things have changed, the embassy is less responsive these days,” Gannushkina told The Daily Beast in a recent interview.
The number of refugees from Putin’s Russia is rapidly growing. Finland gave political asylum to 113 Russians last year, 10 times as many as in 2018. Russian authorities seem to be using the COVID-19 outbreak to twist the bolts tighter; political repression against those fighting corruption and religious and sexual minorities continues. Those in these groups with resources run and take their money with them, adding to capital flight and brain drain.
The Kremlin’s critics describe this period of Putin’s rule as “suffocating.” Some people just cannot stand the pressure. An independent journalist, Irina Slavina, founder of Koza.Press in Nizhny Novgorod, was often interrogated, fined, threatened for criticizing authorities, covering corruption, political repressions, injustice and other issues in her home town. Investigators raided Slavina’s apartment early in the morning on Thursday, when the journalist was still naked in bed. She had to dress in the presence of strangers, while police confiscated all her electronic equipment, along with her daughter’s and her husband’s computers. The next day, the journalist came to the police headquarters and set herself on fire and died, leaving a note on Facebook: “Please blame Russian Federation for my death.”
Local people brought flowers to the site of the journalist’s tragic act all day on Saturday. “She screamed to all of us about authorities taking all human rights away from us, strangling us alive, stripping us of our freedom to live a normal life,” Stanislav Dmitriyevsky, a local human rights defender, told The Daily Beast. To many Russians, Slavina’s death became symbolic.
If the TASS article is true, Russian LGBTQ people are now in danger of being arrested just for being parents. Today gay men feel psychologically traumatized. The author of the “Straight Talk with Gay People” blog, Karen Shainyan, cannot imagine the day he would have to escape from his home country. “That would be a catastrophe,” he told The Daily Beast on Monday. “I can live my life only in Russia—not only my friends but my work, my cultural interests are here, the escape would mean a personal failure.”
On Wednesday, Pussy Riot activists hung rainbow flags on the headquarters of the police and the Federal Security Service, FSB, and on the building of Russia’s Supreme Court and Ministry of Culture in protest against authorities “harassing” LGBT parents. Police arrested two Pussy Riot activists.
A lesbian mother, Yana Mandrykina, has opened a discussion on Facebook from a confession: her baby boy was born from a surrogate mother. She was frightened for the first time in her life, Mandrykina admitted. “The TASS article says that there are ten concrete Russian gay men who are being investigated on charges for being parents; and law enforcers are also pursuing a criminal case against doctors, surrogate mothers and single fathers,” Mandrykina told The Daily Beast. “I am convinced we should not stay silent and push back.”
Vitaly and his baby boy are now safe, far from Russia but all his thoughts are in the country where he still has his home and job. “It is unclear what the goal of persecuting LGBTQ parents could be, probably the police need to fill up Russia’s orphanages,” Vitaly told The Daily Beast. “But they should be aware, there are gay fathers at Sberbank of Russia, at Moscow city council, and in the State Parliament who must feel the same way as I do—terrified.”
