Persecution of LGBTQ+ people in Chechnya

In 2017, the world learned a phrase that would become grimly familiar: there are no gay people in Chechnya. It was uttered by the republic's spokesman, Ramzan Kadyrov, after the first reports surfaced of secret prisons, electric-shock torture, and men rounded up on suspicion of homosexuality. Eight years on, the phrase has outlived several waves of purges; 2017, 2018, 2019, and reports continuing since, because it was never really a denial. It was a plan.

That, at least, is how Dr Alexander Kondakov, a Sociology Professor at University College Dublin who studies the mechanics of anti-queer violence in Russia, reads it. The claim that LGBTQ+ people simply don't exist in Chechnya, he argues, functions as "a symbolic act of both reasserting authority and power and reimagining a present and future for the republic", a culture from which queerness has been written out, whether or not it was ever really absent. Call it cultural erasure with a body count.

Between 2017 and 2020 alone, Chechen security forces arrested, imprisoned, and tortured more than 150 people, the overwhelming majority gay or bisexual men. Survivors describe being given women's names in detention, having their beards forcibly shaved, and being told, explicitly, that their sexuality disqualified them from manhood, a punishment aimed less at the body than at identity itself. Families, meanwhile, have faced pressure from authorities to restore their "honour" by disowning or, in the most extreme documented cases, killing relatives suspected of being gay.

What makes Chechnya distinct from anti-LGBTQ+ repression elsewhere in Russia, a country ILGA-Europe currently ranks dead last, 49th of 49, for LGBTQ safety and rights, is not the sentiment but the machinery. Dr Kondakov points to the republic's post-war institutional architecture: a security apparatus forged in two brutal conflicts with Moscow, still organised around checkpoints, fortified compounds and a police force with its own chain of loyalty. The federal government, he notes, has functionally ceded the field; an unspoken bargain in which Chechnya polices its own "traditional values" in exchange for staying inside Russia's borders, while Moscow avoids the political cost of intervening. A federal investigator sent to look into the 2017 reports made early progress, Dr Kondakov recounts, before being quietly removed from the case within months.

That bargain has a cost measured in silence. Since a 2023 federal law effectively banned gender transition procedures nationwide, 0% of transgender people in Russia can legally access gender-affirming care or amend their identity documents, a policy vacuum Chechnya's authorities exploit with impunity, since there is no longer even a paper process to subvert.

Fleeing does not end the danger. UN experts have documented Chechen authorities confiscating or destroying identity papers, threatening relatives with prosecution, and coercing people into signing blank confession forms before they can leave, tools designed to make flight legally and physically perilous. Even successful escape rarely means safety: Chechen state actors have a documented history of pursuing people across Russia's internal borders. Dr Kondakov is blunt about what happens next for those who make it out: the international asylum system they land in is, in his words, not "nice" to navigate under the best of circumstances, let alone for someone hiding from a government determined to find them.

Ilya is one of the men currently navigating that unwelcoming asylum system. After being beaten in a forest by men in military uniform who accused him of not belonging in Chechnya, he fled and was, by the time he spoke to journalists, living in a Moscow safe house alongside several other men in the same position, his real name withheld for his own safety. Moscow was only ever meant to be a stopover, not a destination, which is precisely the kind of limbo Dr Kondakov describes as the hardest part of getting out.

Demand for evacuation has surged regardless. Rainbow Railroad, one of the main organisations extracting LGBTQ+ people from hostile states, received over 600 urgent requests from inside Russia in 2025 alone, more than a 50% jump on the year before. That is not a cooling crisis; it is one still actively producing refugees.

Chechnya's justification, that heterosexuality is inseparable from cultural and religious survival, is not unique to the republic, or even to Islam. Versions of the same argument, that gender and sexuality are communal inheritances rather than individual choices, surface in debates from Uganda to Hungary to conservative movements in the United States. There is a genuine, if uncomfortable, philosophical question buried in there: how should societies balance inherited tradition against individual self-determination? Reasonable people disagree, in good faith, about how fast norms should change and who gets to decide.

What separates argument from atrocity is the presence, or absence, of coercion and violence. Chechnya has answered that question with torture chambers and forced disappearances, not persuasion. Whatever one believes about the proper pace of social change, a state killing or "correcting" its own citizens for who they love is not a position in a debate, it is a human rights emergency that international bodies have documented and condemned repeatedly, with almost no material consequence.

Dr Kondakov's own outlook, after years studying the pattern, is sober rather than hopeful: without something that genuinely disrupts the structure of power sustaining it, he suggests the cycle has no internal reason to stop. Documentation and evidence-gathering by organisations like ECCHR, which has invoked universal jurisdiction laws in Germany to pursue accountability outside Russia's borders may be the closest thing to a mechanism the world currently has. It will not end the purges. But it keeps a record that, one day, might matter.

Further information and opportunities to engage with organisations working in this area are listed below:
Rainbow Railroad | We help LGBTQI+ people get to safety
NC SOS
LGBT WORLD BESIDE | LGBT World Beside

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