A Gay Russian, Exiled in Ireland
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Listener supported. WNYC Studios. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. A while back, our writer Masha Gessen came on the program to tell the story of a man named Yevgeny Shtorin. This was 2019, June, Pride Month, and our episode was about the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising.

Masha and I were talking about the way that many countries were moving gradually toward acceptance of LGBT people, but around the world, other nations were on the opposite trajectory. Russia was among those instituting new forms of legal repression. Yevgeny Shtorn was one of many people whose lives were disrupted by that backlash, and in some ways,

I look back at that conversation with a sense of foreboding about what's happening now in parts of America and other parts of the world. So here's Evgeny Shtorn speaking with Masha Gessen. Gray and windy and rainy sometimes. I was walking with Evgeny Shtorn in Galway, which is a coastal city in Ireland.

This is early May, and I had first heard of Yevgeny a couple years ago when some friends let me know that he was looking for help trying to get out of Russia. Something horrible was happening to him. I got some more details later. Zhenya, can you start by talking about how you ended up in Ireland? I think the story starts in St. Petersburg.

No, the story starts in the Soviet Union in 1983, when I was born, in the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic. Yevgeny was born in Kazakhstan, when it was still part of the Soviet Union. When he was a teenager, there was a recruiting push for young Russian speakers from Kazakhstan to go study in Russia, and he did. And that's also when he came out. I was practicing same-sex in school with boys, but...

I wasn't gay man at that moment. So it just, when I moved to St. Petersburg, when I first went to 69 nightclub and another one, which I liked more was Grешniki, Sinners. So yeah, when I, that was a very moment when I just realized that this is my culture. This is my music. This is my style. This is where I feel comfortable and I really feel part of it. How old were you?

17, 18. Oh, so right as soon as you got to St. Petersburg? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It wasn't yet an identity, let's say. This is something that I didn't have in Kazakhstan, obviously. I was thinking I'm the only one there. Well, except for the other boys. I think they also were thinking they're the only one. Yeah, it was interesting. In St. Petersburg, Yevgeny met Alexander, who became his partner.

Alexander wasn't in Ireland when I was there. We talked to him over Skype. Yevgeny and Alexander had a room in a communal apartment in St. Petersburg. They also had a cat named Musa.

She's like Garfield. She has a lot. So you and Alexander and Musya are living in St. Petersburg? Yeah, we were living on Vasilyevsky Island, a huge communalka. Community apartment. Yeah, super terrible. Alexander got a PhD in sociology and started working at a non-profit doing research on LGBT issues. This was in the mid-2000s when the gay movement in Russia is developing rapidly.

It's not like Western Europe, but things are moving in the right direction. People are becoming more open and there are more spaces appearing. They're not just like community spaces and bars, but there's research, there are discussion groups, there are film festivals. Things are moving along. Well, we were living in a real bubble. Like, you know, the NGO world, no one judge you for being a semi-sex couple. But there's some trouble with Yevgeny's papers.

Back when he became a student, he applied for his Russian passport and got it easily. Ten years later, he is suddenly told that there was a problem. So Yevgeny went back to the embassy of Kazakhstan and they rescinded his citizenship as well. And suddenly he finds himself stateless. He doesn't have a passport and he doesn't have the ability to travel. It's just a kind of disabling status. On an everyday level, like every policeman who stops you

and looks at your papers, knows that something is wrong with you. If you want to check in in a hotel, huge issue every time. They look at the papers of a stateless person and they don't understand what the status is. But they definitely know that it's officially bad. But Russia tells him he actually has a path to citizenship.

He can stay in the country on a residency permit and apply for a passport in five years. He can't break any laws and he's got to work. He gets a job at the same NGO as Alexander, the Center for Independent Social Research. Meanwhile, Russian politics is changing in a big way. In 2012, Vladimir Putin returns to the presidency after months of mass demonstrations. And Putin is immediately looking for a way to discredit the demonstrators.

And LGBT people make the perfect scapegoat because we stand in for everything. We stand in for the West. We stand in for all the things that have changed in the last quarter century that make you uncomfortable. We also stand in for the promise of going back to an imaginary past without gay people. And of course, no Russian thinks that they've actually ever met a gay person in person. So that makes it really easy to create this image of the villainous queer people. First, St. Petersburg.

and then the federal parliament pass a ban on what they call propaganda of homosexuality or propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations. You can't have any positive or neutral coverage of LGBT issues in any kind of media. You can't have public demonstrations. But the biggest purpose of this law is to signal that there are second-class citizens in Russia outside the protection of the law.

That means that hate crimes skyrocket. And Yevgeny actually decided to go back to school, and his subject of study is hate crimes against LGBT people. I was analyzing the court decisions on the murders of gay men, how people were killed in Russia. And usually, like, it's normal situation where two people are killed.

drinking, and then one of them is declaring or proposing. There's drinking, it seems like there's going to be sex, and instead there's a murder. Basically, the homophobia is in a very private spaces, and this was my main finding. Yevgeny's finding was in direct contradiction to the state's message, which was essentially, you can do whatever you want in the privacy of your own homes, we just don't want you corrupting our children.

In fact, violence was coming to people's homes. So while Putin is cracking down on LGBT people, the other attack is on NGOs. The Foreign Agents Law requires NGOs that get foreign funding to submit to special reporting requirements. The whole thing is designed to paralyze their work and also to designate them as pariahs. And the center where Alexander and Yevgeny work ends up on the list. So here's Yevgeny.

a stateless person working for a foreign agent NGO and studying LGBT issues. And he goes and applies for his Russian passport. I got a phone call. Calling from the migration service.

We are working with your application on citizenship. I said, what is wrong with it? No, no, no, everything is okay. We just would have to discuss it with you personally. Could you please come tomorrow at 10 a.m.? The man on the phone gave him an address, his name, and a phone number. But when he arrived the next day, that migration office was closed. Yevgeny called the number, and the man came down to meet him. Young, my age more or less, somehow good-looking even.

well dressed, polite. Went with him to the first floor and it was nothing, just a camera and an ordinary door. We entered. The thing that I saw and that really impacted me was this huge portrait of Andropov. Andropov? Andropov, yeah. Andropov was the head of the KGB and a hero of Putin's and a former head of the Soviet Union. Yeah.

And then he shows his knizhichka. His ID. His FSB ID. The FSB is the Federal Security Agency, the successor agency to the KGB. As soon as Yevgeny saw the FSB ID, he knew he wasn't there to talk about a passport. The conversation with the agent lasted two hours. They talked about his master's thesis and about the murders of gay men and the work of the center.

What was terrifying is mostly he was naming some people that I won't name here. He was particularly interested in certain individuals, foreigners. He wanted you to talk about them? Yeah. The man wanted Yevgeny to agree to be an informant. Basically, his main attitude was very polite, but in a very subtle, very tender way, he mentioned...

The law on espionage and the law of the traitor of motherland. The prison sentences are essentially life in prison. Yeah, basically, like my main goal was to at least get out of there, but also not to damage other people.

At the end of the interview, the FSB agent asked if they could talk again. Yevgeny said, sure, basically anything to get out of there. He gets out of there, called Alexander, said everything is okay. And as soon as they got home, Yevgeny wrote on a piece of paper, FSB. The New Yorker's Masha Gessen will continue in a moment.

I'm Maria Konnikova. And I'm Nate Silver. And our new podcast, Risky Business, is a show about making better decisions. We're both journalists whom we light as poker players, and that's the lens we're going to use to approach this entire show. We're going to be discussing everything from high-stakes poker to personal questions. Like whether I should call a plumber or fix my shower myself. And of course, we'll be talking about the election, too. Listen to Risky Business wherever you get your podcasts.

Well, we're in the center of Galway, which is terribly touristy, terribly shopping-y. It's one of those places that doesn't feel like a place to live. It's a town where people are coming to relax, spending their weekends and holidays. Yevgeny managed to get himself on a plane to Ireland. Ireland is not a bad place to land. It's generally very friendly to persecuted people.

especially in some ways to LGBT people. The prime minister is gay. The country held the first successful referendum on same-sex marriage. And there are definitely worse places to apply for asylum than Ireland. For example, in the United States, you might end up in detention and you don't qualify for any public assistance. But Ireland has one of the slowest asylum processes in the world. To somebody who is stuck in the process, it can feel just interminable. Yevgeny is living in what's called direct provision.

which is this network of hotels and hostels and former convents, which are run by private companies but funded by the state. He has a small room with a single bed. He gets three meals a day. He can't cook. He cannot have overnight guests, which means that Alexander can't come and spend the night with him. Alexander is not in Ireland with Evgeny. I would go wherever he is, right?

But I'm just a citizen of Russia. I have to get a visa to any country I want to go. It's been more than a year. And so we both are waiting and waiting and waiting. And you want someone who's been with you 15 years right beside you. And you cannot have it. And we don't know what future is bringing us. I just can't visualize the future. I can't see it.

What do you think is preventing you from imagining the future? Tiredness. I'm very tired. You know this feeling, to wake up tired after sleeping 10 hours. You wake up and you're tired. This is the type of tiredness I have. Yevgeny is taking a course at the university in Galway because he felt a depression coming on. He spends every day in the library. He leaves the hostel in the morning. He reads and he writes until the library closes at 10 o'clock at night.

I met other queer migrants in Ireland. I met people from South Africa, from Zimbabwe. The thing is, in some ways, it's becoming harder for LGBT asylum seekers to find a place in the world. Many countries don't grant asylum on the basis of persecution because of sexual orientation or identity. The United States is one of those countries, but it's getting harder and harder to get into this country to seek asylum.

And that possibility of getting refuge is actually narrowing just as the world is becoming more polarized in the treatment of LGBT people. So in some parts of the world, we're seeing incredible advances in LGBT rights, including really striking ones like India. In other countries, we're seeing a horrifying backlash. Kenya's highest court recently upheld a ban on gay sex.

A new law in Brunei has made gay sex punishable by death by stoning. So even as global culture is pulling more people out of the closet, when the culture becomes more repressive, there's no closet to go back into. So people end up really exposed. I found myself in a sense of nullified belonging. I don't belong to any country. I don't belong to any ethnic group, anything. Actually, my only diaspora is a

queer LGBT diaspora. That's where I feel that I'm part of this queer nation. This is my diaspora. Evgeny Shtorn, speaking with Masha Gessen in 2019. Masha tells me that since our story first aired, Shtorn received refugee status and his partner Alexander found a job in Ireland. They were married in March. I'm David Remnick and that's the New Yorker Radio Hour for today. Thanks for listening. I hope you'll join us next time.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbess of Tune Arts with additional music by Louis Mitchell. This episode was produced by Max Balton, Brita Green, Adam Howard, Kalalia, Avery Keatley, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, and Ngofen Mputubwele, with guidance from Emily Botin and assistance from Harrison Keithline, Michael May, David Gable, and Alejandro Decke. ♪

The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherena Endowment Fund.