Oleg Klyuenkov believes he has also run into trouble because of his affiliation with Rakurs, where he is a project manager. His difficulties began in December 2013, when he returned from a trip to Arkhangelsk’s sister city, Portland, Maine. Klyuenkov says he was fired from his job as a professor of philosophy at Northern Arctic Federal University because of his work in the LGBT community. Shestakov disputes that account, stating that Klyuenkov was dismissed “in strict accordance with the labor laws of the Russian Federation for violations of job descriptions, employment contracts, including absenteeism.”

Last month, the Archangelsk Court fined Rakurs 300,000 rubles for refusing to accept the status of “foreign agent,” which is defined as a political group that accepts foreign funding. “This is happening across the country and LGBT programs are being closed systematically,” Vinnitchenko says. “Our friends are in fear of persecution. The LGBT community here is in a kind of moral panic.”

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Russia’s post-Soviet, top-down homophobia began in earnest several years ago, just as the nascent LGBT community became publicly visible. The shooting of Chizhevsky is one of dozens of attacks that have occurred in Russia in the last few years, and especially since President Vladimir Putin signed the federal anti-gay propaganda law in 2013.

At the end of 2014, Human Rights Watch documented a growing number of beatings, harassment and kidnappings by vigilantes on the subway, in the street, and at clubs. Out of 78 victims of homophobic and transphobic violence interviewed in the investigation, 22 were afraid to report the attack to authorities.

Baev, the LGBT activist, is a professional translator who began demonstrating in the 1990s, when he was at the University of Novosibirsk. He has lived in Moscow for the past decade. “Official homophobia began as a reaction to the gay pride movement” that started in Moscow in 2006, Baev says.

Soon, anti-gay laws began proliferating across the country. The assembly of Arkhangelsk in the far North, for example, passed its own so-called LGBT propaganda law, an initiative pushed forward by local associations of Christians, Muslims and Cossacks, in 2012. The coalition in the White Sea port city argued publicly that 99 percent of homosexuality was the result of propaganda, according to the Russian daily Moskovskie Novosti. Variations of the propaganda law were passed throughout Russia, from Saint Petersburg to Samara, until the federal anti-gay propaganda law was enacted in 2013.

Harassment and persecution of lesbians and gays were not the only consequences. The laws also pushed HIV/AIDS education underground, according to health care workers and activists.

The offices of LaSky—where Dmitry Chizhevsky was shot in Saint Petersburg—was once known as a safe haven for the LGBT community. A non-governmental organization with centers all over the country, LaSky once offered a place for the LGBT community to congregate; it was also a nexus of HIV prevention and outreach.

The Moscow branch of LaSky was in disarray this winter. The office flotsam revealed an organization in its final throes: Amid the empty desks, a small skeleton staff used the time they had left to try to raise funds, outside of Russia, for a new start. On New Year’s Day, LaSky, citing a lack of funding and the laws targeting NGOs and the LGBT community, closed its doors after providing public health support for marginalized people, especially gay men, for more than a decade.

“We are all in a state of perpetual worry. I cannot quite describe it,” says Andrey Beloglazov, the executive director of LaSky in Moscow. “It’s an anxiety bordering on fear. Because when the government began its crackdown with legislation related to LGBT activities, we didn’t believe it would get so serious, or go so far.”

Pavel Koskin outside the narcology hospital where he works. Pavel is an openly gay social worker who recently contracted HIV. | Oleg Yakovlev

The public health consequences of these laws have been brutal, according to Beloglazov. “When people are hiding, they move around from place to place and gravitate toward secret relationships,” he says. “They are afraid of seeking medical assistance.”

Pavel Koskin, now 45, was treated in the Saint Petersburg Narcology hospital for a drug addiction when he was in his 20s; long recovered, he is now a social worker at the same hospital, tending to clients who struggle with substance abuse and are HIV-positive. As part of his own recovery two decades ago, he says, he came out as a gay man.

This article represents his coming out as an HIV-positive individual. After breaking up with his longtime companion, Koskin “had casual sex three or four times two years ago. And now I am HIV-positive. I knew everything. I work in the medical field. And I got HIV.”

“It’s time,” he says, referring to his decision to discuss his status publically. “I haven’t come out as HIV-positive at work, in part because I see how the doctors here treat people with HIV. But they may have guessed as much.”

Koskin is not an isolated example. In fact, Russia and Eastern Europe are among the few regions in the world in which the AIDS/HIV epidemic is worsening, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “The number of deaths from AIDS increased in 2013 by more than 22,000,” Dr. Vadim Pokhrovsky of the Russian Federal AIDS Center told Politico. “There are at least 200 new HIV infections every day.”

The rate of new HIV infections has spiked since the government crackdown. New HIV infections increased by 10 percent in 2012 and that rate continues to increase, Pokhrovsky says, up 15 percent in 2014.