No one would give way

The clashes at the Equality March, organized by the LGBT community in Ukraine’s capital, were unavoidable. It was known before it happened. Just as that these clashes would be ruthlessly exploited by Russian propaganda: of course, not in Russia self, but in the West, via proxies, “useful idiots,” and undisguised Putin’s agents. Yet the march was held, and the fights took place. The other things also happened, just as projected.

So, the LGBT community could not cancel the Equality March on the grounds of principle. Likewise on principle, the Right Sector could not miss an opportunity to forcefully counter the pageant. No less principled were TV stations, which would never miss an opportunity to show the saucy pictures on air (“Just look how many media are here! Enormous numbers! Pity that they are all coming, because theoretically, there could be fights,” said Natalia Humeniuk, head of Hromadske TV, commenting the situation). Vesti could not fail to present (at the speed of light) data from “own sources” (which are, as usual, extremely well informed about all sorts of provocations) on concrete right-wing radical organizations which participated in an assault on the LGBT action (mostly obscure, but related to the Right Sector). In their turn, politicians would never miss an opportunity to advertise themselves in one or another way, depending on their ideological imperatives, against the backdrop of the Equality March. In other words, no one would give way, so we have what we have.

I will omit Ukrainian accounts of the attack on the Equality March and the wounded law enforcers and certain participants of the action (I would only mentioned that the police officers have suffered much more serious injuries). Instead, I will cite some of the earliest international comments.

The viral comment, made by Tony Brenton, a well-known figure in the West who for some reason was named “a renowned German politician,” although he actually is a former British ambassador to Moscow, spread on the Internet: “Europe must give up on these wild barbarians who are in no way different from Moscow self. Leave them to solve their problems, even if they kill one another, all the better for the civilized world. Both Russia and Ukraine are two backward third world countries, violence being the main thing for these barbarians, so the civilized world must give them a free hand and close its doors before them for good.”

Luckily for us, the West does not listen a lot to Brenton; for example, early last September (simultaneously with Russia’s offensive in Donbas), Sir Tony (this is not a slip of the tongue, he bears a title), or Anthony Russel Brenton, wrote in his article for The Daily Telegraph: “Putin will not to be thwarted by NATO or economic sanctions. … Sanctions are a Potemkin policy, deployed in the absence of any effective alternative. They have probably done some economic damage, but their sole political effect has been to rally the Russian people behind their president, and reinforce Putin’s conviction that this is a struggle he cannot afford to lose, whatever the cost. … It has become clear in the past two weeks that the Russians are ready to go to the brink to achieve their political objectives in Ukraine. … So all we can do is prolong the agony and further immiserate Ukraine.” Therefore Sir Tony proposes to make Ukraine neutral, grant autonomy to Donbas and leave it under the general supervision of “the Russian wolf,” as the former diplomat refers to the Putin regime. So, why should we be surprised at “barbarians,” “blasts in the center of Kyiv,” and the alleged absence of any difference between Kyiv and Moscow? Yet there will be some in the West who will be affected; in Ukraine, too, there are idiots ready to broadcast them.

Curiously enough, as this article was being written, another comment (Russian this time around) on the Equality March was much less popular in the networks. Why? Maybe because it is totally devoid of scandal and contains a more sober and just assessment of the events than its British counterpart?

So, here goes Aleksandr Shmelev, Moscow: “Today’s gay parade in Kyiv is another example proving that it is Ukraine, and not Russia, that has become the leader of the post-Soviet world. Sympathies in all post-Soviet republics are divided in a pretty similar manner. Each [post-Soviet] country has a certain number of homosexual persons plus sympathetic intellectuals and human rights advocates. Each has the conservative majority which is shocked at it all. Each has its right-wing radicals, ready to bash ‘those faggots.’ In each of them, the LGBT community is just at the onset of the struggle for its rights. The only difference is the standpoint of the state. In 2013, the police in Kyiv was dispersing the participants of the gay parade and packed them in paddywagons. Today, on the contrary, cops defended them from the Right Sector activists, often risking their own health. Clearly, this is a big leap from the perspective of the conformity of the state machine with the norms of modern civilization. Meanwhile here, in Russia, it is just the opposite. The only idea of a sanctioned (!) gay pride parade (!!!) under the protection of the police (!!!) breaks at least a dozen of laws that are currently in force, from insulting religious feelings to attempts at revision of the results of the Great Patriotic War. Let alone the propaganda of homosexuality and incitement of all sorts and manners of hatred. Now in this respect the Russian Federation should be compared to Uzbekistan or some other ‘stan,’ but not to Ukraine. Since now, it is Kyiv that leads the post-Soviet world, and not Moscow anymore. It is Kyiv that will be looked up to in Minsk, Yerevan, Chisinau, and elsewhere.”

It looks as if all furious critics of the incumbents in Ukraine and in Kyiv should hear Shmelev’s opinion, and all those willing to argue with him, to enjoy the advantages of the 21st century and go to his Facebook page (www.facebook.com/aashmelev/posts/923345047708816).

Meanwhile, I will highlight several moments, without claiming my analysis to be exhaustive. When private matters are purposefully transformed into political (as was earlier done by feminists, and now is by a certain part of the LGBT community), incidents of such a scale become inescapable. Politics always means fighting for power, or at least for considerable influence on power. It will be funny to demand that Ukraine, where oligarchy was never liquidated, should become completely and totally civilized when it comes to LGBT problems. By the way, the assaulters were in any case less numerous than the participants of the march, and this already is a positive sign in itself.

But back to my thought. In my opinion, making the political out of the private threatens to destroy the very foundation of European civilization. Suffice it to say how successful were Bolsheviks at it, and later Nazis, and how hard-handedly and brutally they regulated the private sphere, all the way to imprisonment and executions, when an individual dared to ignore the call of the party and maintain intimate relations with a “people’s enemy” or an “Untermensch.” Actually, people in their forties still saw the times when wives rushed to party and trade union committees to complain about their unfaithful husbands. So, tread cautiously, dear fellows on both sides.

Of course, the private sphere has to be regulated by civilized legislation, but the experience of the 20th century shows that politization of privacy is a dangerous thing. This is the first moment. And the second is, that Ukraine is almost directly connected with the widespread low responsibility, which means that Ukraine is living almost according to Trotsky’s words “Neither peace, nor war.” The only difference is that Trotsky deemed such a situation favorable for the degradation of the enemy’s army and rears from inside, while today’s authorities use it for settling of their owns deals with the enemy and protection of the businesses of their rich cronies (how large are the volumes of trade with the annexed Crimea? And who is indeed feeding the Russian occupants there, earning huge profits at that?). In fact, it is the Ukrainian rears that degrade and decay, an example of which we saw at the Equality March. Yet if the authorities traditionally shrug off responsibility, someone must assume it – the LGBT community, the Right Sector, journalists, volunteers, a political party – and find the grounds for compromise, so that you-know-who should have no trumps for his anti-Ukrainian propaganda in the West and could not destabilize the situation in Kyiv.