The Chechen Knot: 13 theses.

It is interesting to juxtapose this article by gay activist, journalist, and professional épateur Yaroslav (“Slava”) Mogutin with a piece published a year earlier: “The View from the Other Side,” which appeared in Top Secret (Sovershenno sekretno), a monthly magazine in print since 1989. Mogutin’s 1994 piece responds to supercilious othering, abusive stereotyping, and paranoid fantasies toward 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 from the same period, “Homosexuality in Soviet Prisons and Camps” (1993), Mogutin had rancorously reproached a Soviet political dissident class hostile or indifferent to the system’s persecution of gay men for its inability to recognize the injustice of oppression based on sexual difference. In “The Chechen Knot,” he displays this same unwillingness to recognize the injustice of oppression based on ethnic and religious difference. Besides trafficking in racist stereotypes, “The Chechen Knot” includes complaints about Russian society’s lack of patriotism and solidarity. Expressing the general anxiety radiating outward from Soviet collapse, Mogutin condemns the divisive factionalism of the constitutional crisis of 1993, which ended with President Yeltsin bombing his own parliament. In the fragmented social and political reality that succeded the seventy-year-old Soviet regime, itself the product of tsarist-era failures, Mogutin and many of his contemporaries turned to conservatism as a possible basis for social cohesion. Some of Mogutin’s adversaries, including journalist Aelita Efimova, chose what Americans might recognize as traditional family-values conservatism, positing the nuclear family, with its sharply demarcated gender roles, as the basic constituent unit of society. Commentaors like Efimova promoted the marginalization and containment, if not the active persecution, of alternative sexualities and gender expressions in the name of preserving society’s integrity. For Mogutin, the key societal binder was a sense of national identity that included a a confessional (Christian) dimension. In this scheme, non-Christians and non-Russians would be relegated to the margins. The combination of LGBTQ activism and aggressive Russian nationalism was not unique to Mogutin: another prominent example of this tendency was Evgeniya Debryanskaya, a lesbian activist and wife to far-right “philosopher” Alexander Dugin. Mogutin’s militant masculinity displays a great-Russian chauvinism that easily shades into other “isms,” including misogyny—exemplified in his assertion that female snipers must not be “getting any” from their men at home. Sociologist Laurie Essig believes that Russian legal authorities exploited the virulent ethnic prejudice in “The Chechen Knot” to prosecute their homophobic prejudice against Mogutin. He was charged with inciting racial hatred and, on the advice of his lawyers, sought asylum in the US, a country he had denounced in “The Chechen Knot” article as an ignorant and arrogant critic of Russia’s military action in Chechnya.