{"id":70176,"date":"2016-02-22T12:24:24","date_gmt":"2016-02-22T12:24:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=70176"},"modified":"2016-02-22T12:24:24","modified_gmt":"2016-02-22T12:24:24","slug":"russian-purge-for-putins-censors-only-suicide-is-worse-than-homosexuality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2016\/02\/russian-purge-for-putins-censors-only-suicide-is-worse-than-homosexuality\/","title":{"rendered":"Russian Purge: For Putin\u2019s Censors, Only Suicide Is Worse than Homosexuality"},"content":{"rendered":"

19 Feb 2016 – <\/em>It is the opinion of Russian censors that there is something worse than homosexuality, and that is suicide.<\/p>\n

The law \u201cOn Protecting Children from Information Harmful to Their Health and Development\u201d bans the propaganda of suicide to anyone under 18. A September 2013 order from Roskomnadzor, the communications authority, explains what that means: \u201cany mention of suicide as a way of solving a problem\u201d and \u201cthe inclusion of information of one or more ways to commit suicide, descriptions or demonstrations, including textual \u2026 of processes and procedures that depict any sequence of actions.\u201d A news site for the city of Saratov was so stymied by these restrictions that in September it published the following headline<\/a> about a high school senior\u2019s suicide: \u201cIn Saratov, After a Fight With Her Parents, a Student Committed a Certain Act for Certain Reasons.\u201d Reporting what<\/em> the girl had done might have violated the ban on description of suicide, and reporting why<\/em> she had done it might have suggested it was her way of solving a problem.<\/p>\n

There are no reliable statistics or studies of teenage suicide in Russia \u2014\u00a0in part, no doubt, because the chilling effect of Roskomnadzor\u2019s prohibitions affects researchers \u2014\u00a0but it is fair to assume that some Russian teenagers contemplate suicide, and that, like elsewhere in the world but more so because of Russia\u2019s anti-queer environment, a disproportionate number of these teenagers are lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender. Recent examples include 18-year-old Vlad Kolesnikov in the Samara region; he killed himself in December, after being bullied for both his sexuality and his opposition to the Russian war in Ukraine. In February, an androgynous-looking 14-year-old eighth-grader in Saransk took a selfie on a roof before jumping to her death. A local newspaper reported on the suicide, noting in the last line that \u201con social networks, the girl took part in discussions of pansexuality and LGBT issues.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>

A screen grab from the trailer for a Children 404 documentary.
Photo: Youtube<\/p><\/div>\n

Lena Klimova, the founder and administrator of an online support group for LGBT teenagers, has seen it all, but the suicide-with-a-selfie story set her off. \u201cYou know, my dears, it may be true that the world is shit,\u201d she wrote. \u201cIt may also be that we, the adults, are to blame for the world being the way it is. Maybe you\u2019ll get older and take care of the mess we\u2019ve made, once and for all. But here is what I can tell you for sure: There is nothing in death. No romance, no charm, no continuation.\u201d She went on. It was a rant. She had been thinking about suicide a lot, because she reads a lot of letters about it.<\/p>\n

Klimova launched the online community about three years ago. A then-closeted bisexual journalist living in the god-forsaken prison-industrial-complex city of Nizhny Tagil, she had set out to write a story about LGBT teenagers. The parliament was just then passing \u2014 unanimously, but over the course of months in several readings \u2014 its ban on \u201chomosexual propaganda,\u201d so the topic seemed timely. The depth of misery and despair Klimova discovered when she so much as scratched the surface was so profound that she decided to start a social network page for these kids. She called it \u201cChildren-404,\u201d for the error code one gets after requesting a nonexistent web page. The group\u2019s tagline is \u201cWe exist.\u201d<\/p>\n

Over the next couple of years, Klimova came out, got over 3,500 letters from LGBT teenagers (a few of them happy), received so much hate mail that it could make a (rather dull and repetitive) book of its own, made Children-404 her full-time job, and battled numerous attempts to have her prosecuted and the page shut down for violating the \u201cpropaganda\u201d ban. For now, Klimova has been hit with fines, but the online community continues to exist, safely enough on Facebook and precariously on the more-popular Russian social network VKontakte.<\/p>\n

After running the community for two years, Klimova put together a book of letters she had received and self-published it; the money came from a Russian-emigre LGBT organization in Germany. As she considered putting together a second, updated and more-polished edition, she was approached by several publishers. She doesn\u2019t want to name them for fear of \u201ccreating trouble\u201d for them, but one of them \u2014 Ilya Danishevsky, who runs an imprint at the AST conglomerate \u2014 volunteered the information to me.<\/p>\n

When Danishevsky took the book to his publishing house\u2019s lawyers, he got an answer he had never gotten before: a firm, unequivocal, nonnegotiable no. The notorious ban on homosexual propaganda \u2014 actually an amendment to the law \u201cOn Protecting Children from Information Harmful to Their Health and Development\u201d \u2014 forbids the \u201cuncontrolled and concerted dissemination of information that can harm the spiritual or physical development of children, including forming in them the erroneous impression of the social equality of traditional and nontraditional marital relations.\u201d Danishevsky was going to market the book in the \u201c18+\u201d category, so that on the face of it, the book would not violate the ban. But the face of it has little to do with actual law enforcement, so his lawyer (who declined to speak to me) was adamant: The very subject of the book, LGBT teenagers, had no right to exist under Russian law.<\/p>\n

The other editors who had expressed interest must have been hearing something similar from their lawyers or executives, because after several months they had all said no. \u201cThat didn\u2019t leave a lot of options,\u201d Klimova wrote to me. \u201cOne: knock on the doors of other publishing houses and wait months more for an answer \u2014 that seemed a dead end. Two: publish the book abroad \u2014 I\u2019m holding that option in reserve. Three: self-publish, and take care of the postal orders yourself. That\u2019s what we did with the first edition of the book, but it took a gigantic amount of time and labor. Four: use a service called Ridero. It allows authors to publish their books and then fulfills both e-book and print on-demand orders \u2014 that seemed ideal.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ridero is not subject to the same financial pressures as conventional publishers: It prints on demand, and if no orders come in, it loses hardly any money. It is still subject to Russian laws, though, so it has its own lawyers who review every manuscript. The vetting process usually takes a few days, but in Klimova\u2019s case, it dragged on for months. The service knew from the start, of course, that the book\u2019s subject was LGBT teenagers. But there was an even bigger problem: the subject of suicide.<\/p>\n

After weeks of waiting, Klimova got a letter from Ridero: \u201cWe suggest you edit the text so that the wording cannot be interpreted as violating the Roskomnadzor order.\u201d It turned out Russian LGBT teenagers mentioned suicide as a means of solving their problems or described the process itself on Pages 178, 183-190 (at least one mention per page), 215, 224, 274, 275, 276, 284, 285, 286, 295, 296, 308, 326, and 363. They wrote things like, \u201cI feel like an outcast. I have seriously considered suicide, but only because I don\u2019t know what else to do. It\u2019s a dead end.\u201d Or, \u201cI would not wish it on an enemy of mine, this struggle to accept yourself, when it is better to die than admit who you really are.\u201d<\/p>\n

Klimova and Ridero were able to settle on one phrase that they figured would not violate the ban: \u201cI considered suicide.\u201d Where that didn\u2019t fit, they cut the potentially offending references altogether. At the end of 2015, the book was finally cleared for publication. It is marked \u201cfor ages 18 and over.\u201d<\/p>\n

___________________________________<\/p>\n

Masha Gessen<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 theintercept.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Youths struggle with suicide in Russia but a restrictive law makes it difficult to publish articles and books about their troubles, especially for the LGBT community.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[181],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-70176","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sexualities"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70176","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=70176"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70176\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=70176"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=70176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}