The young woman was riding in a taxi to the airport when she decided to make the call. She had just left her home in Russia’s southern Chechnya region for good, she thought, first on a flight to Moscow to pick up emigration documents and then on a plane out of the country.
But the taxi driver was eavesdropping. And when the woman told her friend she had run away, he locked the car doors and drove her back home, fearing potential consequences for his role in her planned escape.
The 22-year-old woman was a lesbian who claimed that her relatives had beaten and threatened her with death after learning of her sexual orientation. Within a week of the fateful taxi ride, she was dead. Her family says she succumbed to kidney failure. Some who knew her believe she was poisoned; but a close friend rejects that claim, telling RFE/RL that she had indeed suffered from kidney problems.
The woman’s case, first made public in a July report by a Russian rights group, highlights the often terror-filled double lives that lesbians are forced to live in mainly Muslim Chechnya, where homosexuality is publicly condemned and rights groups accuse authorities of carrying out a campaign of torture and murder targeting gay men.
Lesbian and bisexual women often lead personal lives in complete secrecy, if at all, communicating with girlfriends via pseudonymous social-media accounts and dedicated SIM cards, and limiting their real-life contacts to a tiny circle of verified people.
Hovering over them is the pervasive fear of being outed and ostracized in a society where a woman’s reputation is considered a linchpin of family honor or of falling victim to an “honor killing” in a putative bid to protect the family’s name.
The young woman who died in July after trying to flee, assiduously hid her sexual orientation. But somehow screenshots of her online conversations with her girlfriend and other friends ended up in the hands of her relatives, who became enraged.
The Russian LGBT Network, the St. Petersburg-based group that recounted her story in a recent report, quoted her as saying before her death that her brother had given her a gun and begged her to kill herself to save the family’s honor, and that her relatives would say it was an accident, not suicide.
“Kill me yourself if you want,” the woman recalled telling her brother, according to the report. “I’m not going to kill myself.”
[She had tried to] leave the region several times prior to her failed final attempt in July. After one such attempt, she was placed in forced psychiatric care for three months, according to the Russian LGBT Network.
Her family kept her holed up in a room and under constant monitoring. Describing the final attempt to free the woman, the group’s report reads: “Unfortunately, the special operation was unsuccessful and fell apart as it was being carried out.”
The Russian LGBT Network report casts doubt on the official explanation of her death, which it described as “kidney failure due to complications after the flu.”
“Only her older brother was home at the time. She didn’t complain about her heath. People don’t die of kidney failure that quickly,” an acquaintance of the young woman told RFE/RL.
Due to religious considerations, families in Chechnya often bury their dead before autopsies can be conducted. RFE/RL was unable to confirm if the woman had undergone an autopsy.
Like ‘Coming Across A Unicorn’
Human Rights Watch (HRW) says that when police in Chechnya returned most of the gay men allegedly targeted, they outed them to their families and indirectly suggested relatives carry out an honor killing.
Kadyrov, whom rights monitors accuse of using security forces under his control to impose order and crush dissent, has called the allegations of antigay persecutions in Chechnya “lies,” telling the U.S. television channel HBO: “We don’t have those kinds of people here. We don’t have any gays.”
“Before the story with gay men, we would interact on social media, but now everyone is lying low,” one Chechen lesbian told RFE/RL on condition of anonymity.
Previously, she said, members of the LGBT community would meet for offline connections at secret parties held in rented apartments, obtaining alcohol through trusted contacts and keeping the noise to an absolute minimum so as not to tip off the neighbors. But the alleged campaign of violence against gay men has put an end to these gatherings, she said.
“Women, more often than men, are subjected to honor killings, and they can be judged only based on suspicion, even in the absence of facts,” the report notes.
“Relatives aren’t only scared that their daughters might be lesbians. They’re scared of the terrible shame. Public opinion in Chechnya is the primary court,” Irina Kosterina, gender coordinator at Germany’s Heinrich Boll Foundation, told RFE/RL.
“If it comes out that your daughter is a lesbian, that means no one will marry your other daughters, and no one will allow your sons to marry their daughters…. In the Caucasus, reputation is collective, and the reputation of that young woman automatically extends to some 60 people,” she added.
Earlier this month, a woman from Chechnya who was attempting to flee to Norway was detained in Belarus and handed over to her father, Novaya Gazeta reported. She had received threats after a photograph of her was posted on a social-network account criticizing Chechen women and girls for not wearing traditional Islamic clothing.
There have been reports of some Chechen LBT women being married off by their parents as quickly as possible.
The Chechen lesbian who told RFE/RL about the now-defunct LGBT parties said that many women, both straight and lesbian, face enormous pressure to stay close to home and under the close watch of male relatives. Men, meanwhile, can more freely pursue study and work in Russian regions with greater personal freedoms.
She is preparing to tell her parents that she wants to leave Chechnya, though she intends to hide the fact that she wants to move abroad.
“I won’t be happy here. I will depend on all of my relatives, on all of the men who know me, knew me, or will know me,” she said. She added, she does not know yet how to make her plan work.
“Leaving the country is as implausible as coming across a unicorn,” she said.
“My parents have wanted to marry me off for a long time already, looking for suitors, playing matchmaker, asking me every day if I have a boyfriend,” a lesbian in Chechnya, speaking on condition of anonymity, told RFE/RL.
“But for me, marrying a man who thinks it’s his right to touch you, it’s tantamount to being raped every day. A lot of girls would probably rather die.”
LBT women in Chechnya “are roughly in the same category as young women who have lost their virginity before marriage,” Kosterina said.
“Parents will typically try to hide [their sexual orientation] and marry them off as quickly as possible so that the husband would be responsible for her behavior,” Kosterina said.
One gay Chechen man living in Moscow told RFE/RL of a lesbian friend of his who, at age 19, accepted a marriage proposal from a man and lived with him for two years, all the while trying to avoid sexual relations. Eventually she returned to her parents “and was treated for a long time by a psychiatrist for panic attacks and depression.”
Merely finding a private space for sexual relations is exceedingly difficult for lesbians in Chechnya. While men can rent an apartment for such encounters, women of any orientation have no such option.
The issue of LBT women is so taboo in Chechnya that only a handful of such relationships are known to researchers, rights activists, and journalists who learned of them by chance.
“I’ve been working in the Caucasus for six years, and many people there know that I also work on LGBT rights,” Kosterina told RFE/RL. “During that entire time, almost no one asked for help until the situation with gay men surfaced.”
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