10 hours of walking in Moscow as 2 men holding hands

The candid-camera group ChebuRussia TV, which conducts social experiments in Moscow, has released a new video demonstrating what happens when two men walk around the city holding hands. Filmed in the style of the 2014 video “10 Hours of Walking in NYC,” ChebuRussia TV recorded hidden camera footage in Red Square and other popular areas in Moscow.

In Russian, the video is titled “The Beating of Gays in Russia,” though the violence (while disturbing) amounts mostly to verbal assaults and a few men pushing or intentionally walking into the couple, in apparent efforts to start a fistfight. In all these instances, the experiment’s “gay couple” walks on to avoid an exchange of blows.

In late 2014, ChebuRussia TV conducted another controversial social experiment, filming the reactions of passersby to a man mistreating a woman in a crowded shopping mall. In one case, a man of North Caucasian descent abuses a Russian woman, and in another case a man of Russian descent abuses a North Caucasian woman.

According to ChebuRussia TV, the former dynamic resulted in no serious reactions, while the latter produced numerous, almost instantaneous interventions from other North Caucasian men. “What happened to your courage?” the video asks its audience, when it’s over.