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“Everyone’s involved and everyone stays silent”: Igor Kochetkov on Chechnya, LGBT activism and neotraditionalism

This year, brutal repressions against LGBT people continued in Chechnya. Here, the director of the Russian LGBT Network speaks about why this keeps happening.

By Evgeny Shtorn
“Everyone’s involved and everyone stays silent”: Igor Kochetkov on Chechnya, LGBT activism and neotraditionalism
Igor Kochetkov | Personal Archive
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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.

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Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0