Today, LGBT people in Russia are facing unprecedented levels of hate crime.

In the North Caucasus Republic of Chechnya, the authorities carried out repressions against LGBT people - at the start of 2017, and then again in January 2019. But while Chechnya leads in terms of the numbers of victims and the level of brutality, it is far from an exception.

I spoke to Igor Kochetkov, director of the Russian LGBT Network, about activism, Chechnya and homophobia in Russia today.

Igor, for me – like many – you’re a kind of Don Quixote figure. I can see how ready you are to defend your principles with dignity, how thoughtfully you think about our struggle as a whole. What made you leave your job as a university lecturer and become one of the most prominent rights defenders in Russia today?

I’ve been asked a lot recently about what made me get into activism, and I’m more and more convinced that something like this was bound to happen to me. What comes next are some big words about rights defence.

The socio-political context in which I grew up fostered the development of these principles. I’m a child of Perestroika. That period and my teenage years began at the same time. I remember, my friends and I organised a revolt against our school’s Komsomol committee, and my first street action was in 1988. It wasn’t a protest in the strict sense of the word. My classmates and I went out onto Nevsky Prospect to collect money for people affected by the Spitak earthquake in Armenia. But we still ended up in the police station, it was still the Soviet Union after all.

I was involved in other rights defence actions in my student years. But I thought about my life mostly in terms of research and teaching back then. For me, research was also a field of battle for the truth – or what might be called justice. And the more I grew into the academic life, the more I became convinced that justice and truth aren’t the most important things for academia. It was right at the beginning of the active phase of my disenchantment with academia that I accepted my homosexuality. I accepted it late (I was 30), dramatically and very enthusiastically. I think this was my own form of emancipation. The intimate very quickly became public and political.