‘How do you even f—?’ In Russia’s anti-queer crackdown, police have spent years raiding nightclubs, private parties, and medical institutions. Now, the authorities have the data for another Great Terror.
Since November 2023, when Russia’s Supreme Court designated the non-existent “international LGBT social movement” as an “extremist organization,” police departments across the country have executed a full-scale crackdown on the queer community. Officers have raided clubs and parties and placed LGBTQ+ people under surveillance while bigots harass queer community members and try to expose them to employers and parents. Wherever the authorities go, they collect evidence that facilitates monitoring, from video footage and business records to fingerprints and even mouth swabs. Meduza special correspondent Lilia Yapparova has learned that Russian officials are also discussing overhauling the country’s data-collection practices to create a single electronic registry for monitoring LGBTQ+ individuals — a database that would make blackmailing and persecuting queer people vastly easier.
Caution: The following article contains hateful and upsetting language. Meduza is preserving these remarks to present a full picture of this story.
Up in smoke
One day in 2019, Yael Demedetskaya opened her laptop in New York to watch a former colleague in Moscow set fire to stacks of medical records from their old clinic. Doused in lighter fluid, more than 6,000 files burned to a crisp at the edge of a city park. Living in exile in the United States, Demedetskaya had arranged for the records’ destruction to protect transgender patients from Russia’s accelerating crackdown on its LGBTQ+ community. Hunting down trans people’s medical files to fill ever-growing databases is now a core feature of the state’s persecution.
More than a decade earlier, Demedetskaya and her husband launched the Transgender Foundation and, later, a clinic to provide medical assistance for people during gender transitioning. The Demedetskys fled Russia and sought asylum in the United States in 2017 after threats from the police and being violently attacked by a group of men. Their group’s work ended with Russia’s ban on gender transitions when the authorities determined that the foundation posed a “national security threat.”
Demedetskaya told Meduza that her clinic deliberately avoided digitizing its records in case they needed to be destroyed to hide patients’ identities from the authorities. “So it would be impossible for them to find anything,” she explained.
Other institutions weren’t so prepared. Demedetskaya’s gynecologist friend said police “came snooping around” at another clinic in December 2023. When the officer responsible for searching the records for trans patients proved too inept to find anything (he even accidentally erased some files), the authorities simply confiscated the office’s entire computer — cords, monitor, and all. After this incident, the clinic stopped providing surgical assistance to transgender individuals.
Seven sources who spoke to Meduza, including human rights activists from across the country, also reported police raids on medical institutions and individual doctors who assisted transgender people. After Russia’s Supreme Court designated the LGBTQ+ community as an illegal “extremist movement” in December 2023, officers went looking for records of the special certificates previously issued that allowed people to change their gender markers on official documents. (Before Russia banned gender transitions in July 2023, medical commissions reached “transsexualism” diagnoses in 087/u-Forms that permitted amendments to birth certificates and other records.)
Human rights attorney Maxim Olenichev says officials have approached clinics outside Moscow and questioned doctors about the “legitimacy” of old 087/u-Form certificates. Meduza spoke to other sources in Moscow and Yekaterinburg who reported similar inquiries that led clinics to suspend services to trans patients. According to Ekaterina Dikovskaya, another human rights lawyer, inspectors demand to know “who came to them, when, and for what reason.” In other words, they seek data protected by medical confidentiality. Meduza’s sources were unaware of any evidence that clinics have actually complied with these requests and handed over such information.
Into the cloud
However, a partial record of people who have transitioned has leaked to Russia’s gray market for personal data — most likely a data export from the civil registrar's office, where trans individuals with 087/u-Forms once amended their birth certificates and passports. (Registrar employees must notify the police about such changes within five days.)
Meduza could not determine the list’s origin, but human rights activists familiar with the records believe police officials may have leaked the information. “They just needed to access their databases and press a button,” said Yan Dvorkin, the head of Center T. Potential employers screening transgender job applicants appears to be the primary use of these leaked public records.
According to Evi Chayka, the founder of the EQUAL PostOst queer alliance, the Internal Affairs Ministry’s Center for Combating Extremism (Center “E”), the Kremlin, the State Duma, and lobbying groups promoting the pseudoscientific practice of “conversion therapy” maintain their own lists of transgender people in Russia.
According to Meduza’s source in Russia’s Internal Affairs Ministry, the main obstacle to developing larger databases for the LGBTQ+ community (and sex workers) is a shortage of money and manpower. “The ministry is facing a 60-percent staff shortage. Center ‘E’ essentially no longer exists because all its regional branches are down to two people each,” said the source, referring to the problems exacerbated by so many security officials leaving to fight in Ukraine. “[They don’t have the men] to go around knocking on doors saying, ‘Well, faggots, are you going to check in?’” agreed another source with knowledge of the Internal Affairs Ministry’s operations.
Trans people, especially young men, are also at risk when using online dating apps like Hornet. For example, officials in Stavropol lure victims to dates and then ambush them in sting operations. The police have captured nearly two dozen men this way, says Yaroslav Rasputin of the media outlet Parni PLUS. “They’re primarily interested in their male acquaintances who live as couples,’” Rasputin told Meduza.
According to another source, Center “E” police have used Hornet to catch people in Dagestan and tried to convince them to collaborate to trap others. “Gays know you; they trust you,” officers told Meduza’s source. “You’ll invite them to an apartment, and our people will be waiting.”
Under the ground, above the board
In mid-February 2024, police officers raided a private party at an apartment outside St. Petersburg, forcing guests up against a wall and subjecting them to humiliating questions on camera. “So, you like licking pussy? How do you even fuck? Are you a boy or a girl?” They asked a trans man where he had “lost his dick.” Everyone else, whose gender identity the police doubted, was forced to lift their skirts, show surgical scars, or demonstrate their genitals by tugging on their underwear.
Since November 2023, when Russia outlawed the “LGBT movement,” police have raided dozens of private parties in as many as 18 regions across the country. National news outlets and government officials describe these incidents as a crackdown on a network of “paramilitary groups” that supposedly incite “open gender war” against Russia, “dehumanization,” and “devil worship.” The police frame each raid as a step toward “curbing” anti-state activities.
Conservative politicians like State Duma deputy Vitaly Milonov and United Russia party functionary Dmitry Chukraev have orchestrated their own operations against LGBTQ+ people. In early January 2025, Milonov bragged on social media about assisting the authorities in a raid on a “bordello.” In a video shared on Telegram, he postured outside an apartment guarded by four large men, their faces blurred. Two weeks later, Chukraev joined the police on a similar raid in Yekaterinburg. The victim, a transgender sex worker from Uzbekistan, was later deported. “I want to say to those people, if I may put it this way, who remain here,” Chukreev said after the raid, “you still have time to leave [Russia] voluntarily.”
Activists like Yaroslav Mantsevich, deputy chairman of the Sverdlovsk “Union of Veterans,” carry out similar work, assisting law enforcement in sting operations against Russia’s “extremist” queer community. Mantsevich told Meduza that his group has “infiltrated closed chats and clubs” that are popular among Yekaterinburg’s “non-traditional” crowd.
“We have someone on the inside there. He’s our guy, leaking information so we can conduct a raid with the police,” Mantsevich explained. “We’ve embedded two agents, and there are another six in the pipeline. These guys create social media profiles and Telegram nicknames. They gain trust, find out where the actual meetings happen, and try to get an invitation. The idea is to win their trust so they vouch for you.” Mantsevich says his group is committed to shutting down LGBTQ+ parties entirely: “We need to make them understand they’re being watched, so they don’t even think of organizing them. To destroy this at the root.”
Faced with such pressure, some LGBTQ+ party organizers have resorted to sharing guest lists with law enforcement. A swing party organizer in eastern Russia told Meduza that he allows plainclothes officers to attend his events. He said he also granted the police access to his group’s private Telegram chat, where participants share their photographs, telephone numbers, and STI test results (a condition for attending the parties). “Staff from three different agencies are in the chat, but I won’t tell you which ones. If any guest catches their interest, I provide all the information I have: when they attended, what they did, what they like and prefer,” the organizer added.
In 2023, the authorities opened drug and economic crimes investigations against four people who attended these swing parties. Speaking to Meduza on the condition of anonymity, the organizer said he sees nothing wrong about his collaboration with the police.
To the stars
Attorney Maxim Olenichev, who consults on “LGBT extremism” cases, says the authorities likely have enough “evidence” collected during raids on nightclubs to launch a sweeping campaign against staff and clientele alike. Human rights lawyer Ekaterina Dikovskaya told Meduza that she and her colleagues believe a large-scale felony investigation is underway.
If the “state’s war on sex,” as one human rights activist described it, leads to mass arrests, it could have repercussions for Russia’s establishment. Event organizers and activists told Meduza that the police primarily target LGBTQ+ individuals who work for the government, especially in high-ranking positions. During raids, officers order public officials to identify themselves. They even look for officials’ family members. “Anybody’s mom work there? Anyone got a relative in uniform?” police asked staff at a club in Tula. When the authorities threatened a private party organizer in Karelia with prison, they were especially interested in any “well-known figures” on the guest list, including employees of the Internal Affairs Ministry, tax police, and Federal Penitentiary Service. Afterward, the region’s media outlets started smearing a local sports star.
In April 2024, federal lawmakers twice proposed verifying the sexual orientation of state officials to bar “apologists for perversion” from entering government service. (Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin endorsed the initiative, citing the need for “purity” in the state’s ranks.)
Around the same time, one of Meduza’s sources was fired from an organization subordinate to the parliament for displaying “extremist” LGBTQ symbols. “In a single day, they called a quick video conference to disown me,” the source recalled. “I know LGBTQ representatives at high levels, and many toe the party line while leading active sex lives. It reminds me of People’s Commissars [Genrikh] Yagoda and [Nikolai] Yezhov, who actively engaged in same-sex relationships while orchestrating the Great Terror and banning homosexuality in the 1930s.” Queer Russians in government service have learned to ignore the “political insanity” of the state’s persecution, the source said.
Another source with LGBTQ+ friends in public service told Meduza that they’ve limited their social lives to extremely private gatherings. “Many are packed and ready to leave, but there’s nowhere to run — they’re under sanctions, and nobody in Europe will take them,” the source explained. “But sometimes I write to these people and ask how they can support all this. When their own government sees them as some weird crap that needs to be wiped out? None of them has ever explained it to me.”
So far, few in Russia’s political establishment have suffered in the LGBTQ+ crackdown, but repressions will inevitably expand within government structures, says human rights activist Evi Chayka. “Because, now, all it takes to ruin someone is the word ‘fag,’ and the person is removed, fired, their children are taken away, they’re sent to the front, institutionalized, or imprisoned,” Chayka told Meduza. “Our organization has already heard [pleas for help] from people working in state propaganda, legislative assemblies, the Defense Ministry, and the Federal Security Service. [The crackdown] is also affecting many people in the prosecutor’s office and the presidential administration. And their numbers will only grow because their peers are so lost in hatred and corruption that they’re all too happy to use these methods.”
How does Chayka react when she hears from panicking state officials? “Coldly,” she admitted. “Let’s watch from the sidelines and hope they eat each other.”
Russia’s Internal Affairs Ministry did not respond to Meduza’s inquiries.
Story by Lilia Yapparova
Adapted for Meduza in English by Kevin Rothrock