A Matter Of Life Or Death, HBO’s ‘Welcome To Chechnya’ Exposes The Medieval Persecution Of LGBT People In The Russian Republic

The Russian Republic of Chechnya doesn’t have gay people. At least that’s what its military dictator, Ramzan Kadyrov, says. “They are devils, they are subhuman,” he told Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel in July 2017, shortly after the persecution of LGBT people in Chechnya became internationally known. “Nonsense,” he said regarding the “alleged roundup, abduction and torture of gay men” in the republic. “We don’t have such people here. We don’t have any gays. If there are any, take them to Canada. Praise be to God. To purify our blood, if there are any here, take them.”

If only it were that simple. If only gay Chechens could simply “go to Canada.”

Since 2017, a group of activists in Chechnya have been working with LGBT organizations worldwide to liberate persecuted Chechens from the federation. If they remain in Chechnya, they risk being sent to concentration camps, where they will likely be raped, beaten and killed. One method involves putting a rat on someone’s back, then covering it with a metal pot, and then heating the pot from the outside so the rat begins clawing into the person’s back to escape the heat. There have been reports of people dying this way. Even people’s own families have been known to torture and kill them for their sexual orientation, something known as “honor killings.” They do this with impunity. After all, the government would do the same.

Welcome to Chechnya, a new feature-length documentary from Oscar-nominated director David France (How to Survive a Plague), follows these activists as they work tirelessly to extract two people from Chechnya and find legal asylum elsewhere. One is a 21-year-old woman who says that her uncle, upon learning that she is a lesbian, told her that if she didn’t have sex with him, then he would tell her whole family of her sexual orientation. Faced with a choice of incestual rape and likely death, she escaped to a safe house in Moscow, where she would have to wait indefinitely, without going outside, for a visa out of Russia altogether. The other is a 30-year-old man whose family, improbably for the conservative Muslim region, supports him and his partner of 10 years. As a result, they all face persecution by Chechen authorities, and must flee together.

These two stories provide the through-line in Welcome to Chechnya’s narrative, humanizing the horrors that thousands of men and women just like them face every day, and with little hope of escaping themselves. Even if they are as high profile as the Chechen pop singer Zelim Bakaev, they are under grave threat: In August 2017, Bakaev disappeared after returning to his hometown of Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, for his sister’s wedding. Bakaev was not publicly gay, but rumored to be so. He has not been heard from since, and the Chechen authorities deny any knowledge of his whereabouts.

Welcome to Chechnya is not easy to watch. The activists intercepted numerous videos, captured on cell phones, of people being tortured, attacked on the street and even raped. France included several of these videos in the final cut, and they are as harrowing as you might imagine. One depicts a woman’s family driving her to a desolate area at night, dragging her out of the car, kicking her and, just before the cut, a relative hoisting what appears to be a large rock directly over her head. In another, a man is forced to look at the camera while another man sodomizes him. In another, a young transgender woman tries to escape an attack by claiming that she was at a costume party. She was not successful.

Nor was it easy to make. France, who says he got the idea for the film from a 2017 New Yorker article about the LGBT persecution in Chechnya by the Russian-born journalist Masha Gessen, shot the film posing as a “ridiculous American tourist.” He used two phones, one to shoot “touristy” stuff, the other to shoot the “extractions.” If anyone asked to see his phone, he just gave them the one with the tourist footage. He also had to protect the anonymity of those fleeing for their lives, and relied on a sophisticated “deep fake” technology to digitally disguise their faces and, in some cases, their voices as well.

But Welcome to Chechnya is also a tremendous testament to human compassion, organization and love. The two primary activists in the film, David Isteev and Olga Baranova, go to great lengths to help those who reach out to them, often risking their own lives to do so. They fly with them to other countries, find them temporary sanctuaries and guide them through the asylum-seeking process. For their work, they have targets on their backs even in Moscow, more than a thousand miles north of Chechnya. Russian president Vladimir Putin may not have instituted concentration camps in the mainland, but he has openly supported Kadyrov and granted him absolute autonomy to do so in Chechnya. Isteev and Baranova’s efforts are nothing short of heroic.

Those fleeing Chechnya also infuse the film with hope, not just for themselves but for humanity itself. France captured many moments of the 30-year-old man and his partner showing the most basic forms of tenderness: the two men holding hands, sleeping beside one another, walking along a beach dreaming aloud about the seaside home they would like to share one day.

In the context of a film about the brutal, inhumane treatment they would face if they were to display such affection on a street in Grozny, these moments read as the potential of love to triumph over even the most unimaginable evil.

In the meantime, the genocide in Chechnya continues.