LGBT activists complain about disruption of their action in Volgograd

The first in the last five years action of members of the LGBT community in Volgograd was disrupted shortly after the start. In the presence of policemen, Cossacks took away posters from solo picketers, tore them up and threw into a garbage bin, activists have reported.

Vlad Pogorelov and Alina Smolyakova, LGBT activists, tried to hold solo pickets on December 17 in central Volgograd, in the Alley of Heroes. Ms Smolyakova held a poster "All bloody regimes of the 20th century were homophobic". Mr Pogoorelov's poster read "In USSR, people were imprisoned for love. In Russia, people are humiliated, fired, beaten up, tortured and killed for it!", the "Caucasian Knot" correspondent reports.

"Vlad and Alina wanted to tell about the discriminatory law on homopropaganda, in force in Russia since 2015, which poisons the life of a certain group of people," Alexei Nazarov, a journalist of the newspaper "For Human Rights", who has arrived in Volgograd from Saint Petersburg specifically for the action, told the "Caucasian Knot" correspondent.

According to his story, "there were five Cossacks and five policemen" in the venue of the pickets.

"The activists were told that they did not belong here. The Cossacks, right at the policemen's eyes, grabbed posters and tore them up, while the policemen didn't react," Mr Nazarov has stated.

One of the Cossacks explained that he was liquidating "the propaganda of homosexuality, which is prohibited by the law."

This article was originally published on the Russian page of 24/7 Internet agency ‘Caucasian Knot’ on December 18, 2018 at 11:53 pm MSK. To access the full text of the article, click here.