2023}} Inside Chechnya's Gulag For Gay Men

Standing on.a sunny day in the middle of the darkness

 

YEREVAN, Armenia — It was winter and the apple trees that line the streets of Grozny were bare when Salman Mukayev’s phone rang.

“I’m an officer with the Leninsky police department,” the voice on the other end said. “What is your name? How long have you been using this number? There has been some fraud on your account — we’d be grateful if you could come down to the station tomorrow to clear things up.”

Mukayev, a 40-year-old shop assistant from the capital of Russia’s southern Chechnya region, had never had any problems with the authorities before. He turned off the phone and put it in a drawer.

Then his wife got a call, he says. “He isn’t here,” she insisted, “he lives at another address. If you’re really investigators, you’ll have to find him for yourselves.” 

 

Two weeks later, they did. A black car pulled up outside Mukayev’s house and three men in dark uniforms climbed out. At least one was carrying a gun.

Once inside the unassuming police station building, set back from the tower blocks around it by a high wall, Mukayev was taken upstairs into a small room where eight or nine officers were waiting for him.

“They showed me a website I’d used before and asked if it was my photo on the account. I confirmed it was. They started accusing me, ‘You’re gay,’ ‘You were talking to a woman about homosexuality.’ I don’t remember ever having that conversation with anyone,” he said.

“I denied it and they threw me on the floor. First, they put a bag over my head. I was panting, convulsing. They took off the bag and demanded to know which men I’d met up with. I denied everything.”

“They attached electrical wires to my little fingers and shocked me. They put duct tape on my hands to keep me still. They put a table on top of me, and one of them sat on it. They covered my nose and mouth with a towel. I was suffocating,” Mukayev said. “They tried to beat the information out of me, asking me about other gay men I’d never spoken to and never met.”

No road back

Mukayev spoke to POLITICO over coffee in a leafy park in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, where he fled after his ordeal. Three years on, his fingers are still scarred with burn marks from the ordeal.

As word of his detention spread through Grozny, home to just over a quarter of a million people, Mukayev’s friend Timur (whose name has been changed for his protection) called his mobile to check he was safe. Instantly, the officers demanded to know where Timur lived and, broken by the torture, Mukayev accompanied them to his house so he too could be arrested.

Back at the Leninsky district police station, the pair were put in a room together and viciously beaten. Timur too was electrocuted. They were forced to admit on camera that they had sexual relations together. Once the officers had what they needed, Mukayev was taken down to the cell block.

“There were two men in my cell. They’d both been there for weeks, maybe months. They asked what I’d done — I replied only that I’d left a vicious comment online. I didn’t want them to think I was gay either.”

Russian gay rights activist Nikita Safronov poses in front of a police department as he is released after being detained in central Moscow for having collected two million signatures on a petition calling for a probe into a reported crackdown on Chechnya’s LGBT community. | KIRILL KUDRYAVTSEV/AFP via Getty Images

 

After several days in custody, Mukayev was ordered to sign a confession. A man who identified himself as an officer of Russia’s domestic security agency, the FSB, said he would make sure the torture ended and Mukayev would only receive a suspended sentence, provided he agreed to “cooperate.”

Cooperation, he explained, meant working with the authorities to meet gay men online, lure them to an apartment wired with surveillance equipment, and then turn them in.

“On the drive home, they started lecturing me — I should have grown my beard, should have changed my image. I knew that no matter what if I didn’t do something, I would probably be dead within a week,” he said.

Knowing that nowhere in Russia was safe from Chechen enforcers, Mukayev fled the country, first to Belarus and then on to Armenia, where he claimed asylum. His application, however, has since been rejected; he is appealing.

“Armenia must prove that it follows the principles and obligations committed to under international human rights treaties,” said Hasmik Petrosyan, Mukayev’s lawyer there. “The decision of the migration service is not clear. I can’t evaluate whether this is a political decision or not.”

Mukayev says there are only two possible outcomes if he is sent back home. “The first is that they will kill me,” he says. “The second is that they will make my relatives kill me to deflect suspicion from themselves — but I will be killed for sure.”

The worst place in the world to be gay?

One of Russia’s seven majority-Muslim regions, Chechnya saw two separatist uprisings led by Islamist separatists between 1994 and 2009. Since then it has been ruled by Ramzan Kadyrov, a local strongman backed by President Vladimir Putin.

‘Re-elected’ in 2021 with a purported 99.7 percent share of the vote, Kadyrov has persecuted his opponents abroad, targeted human rights defenders at home, and threatened journalists. But a special level of hatred is reserved for LGBTQ+ people, who routinely face abduction, torture, and murder.

“All those who defend human rights groups and the gays we supposedly have in the Chechen Republic are foreign agents,” Kadyrov blasted in an interview with the BBC in 2018. “They’ve sold out their country, their people, their religion, everything.”

“I don’t think the authorities in Chechnya try to mask that there’s open hostility to people who are gay or believed to be gay. It’s no surprise then that there have been numerous anti-gay pogroms,” said Rachel Denber, deputy director for Europe and Central Asia at Human Rights Watch.

“In 2017 and 2018, police just rounded up people who were believed to be men who have sex with men, and took them to police stations. They were beaten and denounced by their families,” she said. “That campaign is continuing, trying to get information off people’s phones and so on. And there’s an established pattern of total impunity. We haven’t really seen any efforts to rein in Kadyrov on the part of the Kremlin.”

Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov | Tatiana Barybina/Press service of the governor of/AFP via Getty Images

 

According to the Chechen human rights association Vayfond, the same allegations are being weaponized to target dissidents and even extort bribes. “Torture, extrajudicial executions, corruption, and violence are the hallmarks of the Kadyrov regime towards the population of the Chechen Republic, regardless of their religious beliefs, gender, political orientation or convictions,” a lawyer for the NGO said, granted anonymity to speak freely. “There have been cases when such allegations [of homosexuality] were used by the security forces as threats or to justify their illegal actions.”

There are signs that the war in Ukraine is making the situation even more precarious for those accused of being LGBTQ+. Miron Rozanov, a spokesperson for the Russian NGO SOS Crisis Group, which helped Mukayev escape, revealed the number of people getting in touch for support after being detained on the basis of allegations about their supposed sexuality has doubled in recent months.

“People complain they are being detained and given three options. The first, according to long-standing practice, is to face a fabricated criminal case. The second is paying a ransom: Since the start of the war, the amounts have increased and now average about a million rubles [€ 11,150],” Rozanov told Radio Free Europe’s Chechen channel late last year. “The third is being sent to the territory of Ukraine as a ‘volunteer.’”

Mukayev might be safe from that for now, but he is living with more than just scars on his hands.

“Yesterday I had a dream that I was being taken away again and tortured,” he said, squinting as the sun shone through the leaves of the trees outside. “I’ve been away from Chechnya for three years now and I still live in constant fear. It’s like I can’t breathe even when I’m in fresh air.”