This was the shocking result of a survey by the NGO Levada Center. The organisation interviewed parts of the Russian population in the countryside and in the city in a representative sample. A total of 1600 people took part. The aim of the survey was to investigate the nation’s attitude towards people whose behaviour “deviates from socially accepted norms”.

18% of Russians interviewed said queer men and women should be “eliminated”. 32% of respondents agree both that queer people should be isolated from the rest of society and that they should be left alone with their problems. Only one in ten said that the community deserved support.

Other groups that became the focus of the survey included homeless people, sex workers, drug addicts and people with HIV/AIDS. According to the results of the survey, queer people ranked 6th on the Russian unpopularity scale. Only members of religious sects (21% want to get rid of them), extremists (44%), murderers (61%), paedophiles (75%) and terrorists (80%) come off worse.

It seems tragic that Levada Center must actually take a positive view of these results. The organisation has been conducting the survey regularly since 1989 – in the first year, more than a third of the people (35%) were in favour of literally wiping out the entire queer community. Put in relation to the previous years, Levada then generally speaks of an increase in tolerance. So sociologist Karina Pipiya told the Russian daily Kommersant with hope:

“The stigmatisation of socially weak people has decreased over the past 30 years, and measures that help them rather than isolate them have become more established.

Russia is one of the most prominent queer-hostile countries in the world and has repeatedly caused international outrage in recent years. President Vladimir Putin recently defined marriage as solely a union between man and woman and had it enshrined in the constitution. Moreover, his propaganda law threatens to punish anyone who presents the queer community in a good light.

Although homosexuality is not illegal in Russia, queer people there encounter violence, stigmatisation, exclusion and hatred on a daily basis. In the Spartacus Gay Travel Index 2020, the country ranked 161st.
The independent Russian republic of Chechnya, however, where homosexuals are systematically persecuted and murdered, comes in 202nd place at the very bottom of the ranking – making it the most queer-phobic place in the world.

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