Russian LGBTQ History Museum Closes After One Week

Because queer rights are blatantly under attack here in the United States, it can be hard to remember our privilege as queer folks living here rather than in some countries abroad. On the UCLA Williams Institute LGBTQ Global Acceptance Index, which rates on a scale from 0 to 10 how queer-friendly a given country is, the United States scores a fairly disappointing 7.42, putting us at rank 23 on the list of 175 countries. In Russia, that score is only 3.26, which places them at number 126 of 175.

In 2013, Russian President Vladimir Putin passed laws banning the display of “gay propaganda,” including pride flags and publicly making statements or distributing materials in support of LGBTQ rights, around minors. In October 2022, a bill proposing the extension of these laws to all age groups, essentially making it completely illegal to outwardly support LGBTQ rights in Russia, was passed by the State Duma. On December 2, this bill was passed unanimously by the Federation Council, and on December 5 was signed into law by Putin himself.

This made things very difficult for Pyotr Voskresensky, who had only opened his museum exhibition on Russian LGBTQ history on November 27 and would have to close the doors after only nine days. This small exhibit contained a few dozen artifacts, and visitors were greeted by a portrait of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, whose sexuality has been denied by the Russian government. It was on a visit to the the Tchaikovsky House Museum that Voskresensky came up with the idea for his own museum, lamenting the sanitized, censored version of the composer that was presented to him.

“Our country is in a period of its transformation into a total dictatorship,” Voskresensky says, “and it is being built on a new ideology in which history plays a key role. Our past is our future, according to the government. And this imaginary past contains only ‘traditional values.’ There were no LGBT people.”