On the anti-gay law in Lugansk

By redguard

It has been reported that the Lugansk People’s Republic recently reintroduced a Soviet-era law criminalizing homosexuality. It carries a possible sentence of 2 to 5 years.

We oppose this law because it obstructs the broadest unity and solidarity of the working class in the struggle against oligarchy, fascism and imperialism in Donbass and Ukraine.

We hope the law will be rescinded quickly.

For anti-fascists and anti-imperialists in the West, where the struggle of LGBTQ people has won an important place in the people’s movement, the Lugansk law is jarring. But it is important for us to understand the context.

In Ukraine, and in Russia, U.S. and European-backed NGOs have played a critical role in promoting right-wing, counter-revolutionary, and pro-imperialist movements like EuroMaidan. Bourgeois LGBTQ organizations have had a very visible role in this process, just as bourgeois women’s organizations were used as a cover to promote imperialist intervention in Afghanistan more than a decade ago.

The U.S. and other imperialist countries use these organizations as tools primarily for domestic consumption, to disorient and divide the progressive forces here. They don’t care what impact it has on LGBTQ people in Ukraine or Russia, who then have their experience associated in the public mind with imperialist subversion.

And what has been the impact of the Maidan coup?

For Lugansk and its neighbor, the Donetsk People’s Republic, it has meant a civil war. The Ukrainian military, fueled by fascist shock troops, have for the last seven months carried out endless war crimes targeting civilians. According to the UN, about 1,500 people were killed in the so-called “Anti-Terrorist Operation.” This estimate, terrible as it is, is ridiculously low. Donetsk says that there are at least 1,300 people missing from its territory, and 400 unidentified bodies in morgues. It also doesn’t include the bodies now turning up almost daily in mass graves in areas liberated from the Ukrainian National Guard, the 48+ anti-fascist activists killed in Odessa, or the victims of the Malaysian Airlines provocation.

While LGBTQ organizations were used to promote Maidan in the West, the coup has not meant more freedom or liberation for queers in western Ukraine. On the contrary, Kiev’s right-wing mayor cancelled this year’s Pride march under pressure from the fascist gangs that rule the streets there, even though the march was supposed to be pro-coup. Members of the neo-Nazi Svoboda party, one of the leaders of the coup regime, were caught on camera terrorizing people at a gay nightclub. And so on.

In the former Soviet Union, there has not been an uprising of working-class LGBTQ people like Stonewall that makes their struggle visible and demands to be included in the revolutionary and working class movement. Nor has there been an opportunity for the kind of organized “coming out” supported by societal institutions like we have seen in socialist Cuba over the last two decades.

What is the best way that anti-fascists and solidarity activists in the West can help create space for LGBTQ revolutionaries and anti-fascists in Donbass, Ukraine and Russia?

Not by moralizing or threatening withdrawal of support from people who are under attack by imperialism.

Rather, showing solidarity – especially, encouraging expressions of LGBTQ solidarity with the struggle of Donbass and the anti-fascists of Ukraine – can help to open people’s eyes, make them start asking questions, and eventually open up political space for LGBTQ people there to organize in the context of the people’s movement, in whatever way makes sense for them.

For example, last June, the International Action Center, Workers World Party and Fight Imperialism, Stand Together made a strong intervention at the LGBTQ Pride Parade in New York in solidarity with Ukraine anti-fascists and the Donbass people’s republics. It had an impact. Our signs and photos were reblogged and commented on by friend and foe alike in Ukraine and Donbass for weeks afterward. It was a revelation for many.

Similar approaches have been successfully used in the past in the Cuba solidarity and political prisoner movements. We need more.

Most important, we should never forget who is really the greatest enemy of LGBTQ people and all people struggling for liberation around the world: U.S. imperialism.

It is the U.S. that engineers fascist and right-wing coups to protect its military interests and targets LGBTQ people, from Honduras to Ukraine and beyond. It is the U.S. that promotes and protects racist homophobes like Christian fundamentalist Scott Lively, who travel the world inciting anti-LGBTQ hate from Uganda to Russia under the guise of “religious freedom.”

The defeat of the U.S. imperialism in Donbass or anywhere opens up political space and possibility for people to fight for their liberation, for the development of solidarity among the working class and oppressed, regardless of any conjunctural, temporary problems like the Lugansk law.