Nikolai Alekseev is an Anti-Semitic Disgrace
Nikolai Alekseev, a 35-year-old lawyer from Moscow, is arguably Russia's best-known LGBT activist. He's the founder and chief organizer of Moscow Pride and has been arrested several times for holding pride events in defiance of official bans. He won the first-ever successful suit against Russia for LGBT human rights violations in the European Court of Human Rights in 2010 and reportedly has several other complaints pending. And he's been hailed by everyone from the New York Times to the Advocate to Russian-born gay porn entertainer and LGBT activist Michael Lucas as Russia's gay-rights champion.
Yet over the past several weeks, as the world has focused its attention on the Draconian and barbaric crackdown on LGBT rights in Russia, Alekseev -- already known for an ample ego and volatile temper -- has turned his wrath away from the anti-gay Russian government, and towards LGBT Russians who've applied for asylum in other countries, Western mainstream and LGBT media outlets, and any activists, commentators, and social media followers who express disagreement or displeasure with his tone and tactics.
And he's changed that tone too: after spending the last eight years alerting the West to the plight of Russian LGBTs (and basking in the ensuing media attention), Alekseev now claims that the situation actually isn't so bad in that country at all, and that hysterical, meddling Westerners are exaggerating the danger posed by Russia's "'horrific [anti-LGBT] laws'" (scare quotes his). According to the new Alekseev, folks concerned about LGBT Russians should just move along. No persecution here, folks.
To one activist who took issue with Alekseev's anti-Western vitriol on Facebook, he responded with a misogynistic slur; he baselessly accused two others of being pedophiles. And for his latest stunt, he lashed out at Lucas -- who penned an op-Ed for Out.com discrediting Alekseev -- with several derogatory remarks, then launched a series of broader anti-Semitic attacks.
Lucas wrote:
Alekseev, who spells his last name Alexeyev on Twitter, responded with a full-on meltdown. He threatened to sue Lucas, claimed he was quitting activism altogether, and then said he would "personally hire a contract killer" to murder Lucas if the article somehow caused the death of his 72-year-old mother.
And then Alekseev jumped headfirst into the cesspool of anti-Semitism. First he retweeted a tweet calling Out Magazine a "Jewish slut magazine that supports Jews and their filthy faggotry propaganda" and another smearing Matthew Breen, editor-in-chief of the Advocate, as a "Jewish pig, Israeli monkey." For the record, Breen is not Jewish; Lucas is.
It only got worse from there. When the group Human Rights First cancelled his participation in an upcoming conference call, Alekseev unleashed a tirade of disgustingly vile anti-Semitic remarks. The following are screenshots from his Facebook and Twitter pages, arranged chronologically. I will indicate whenever tweets have been translated from Russian via Google. Note: the term "yid" (sometimes spelled "jid") is an extremely offensive anti-Semitic slur.
In the 1970s and 1980s, no one in Russia was talking about gay people. The scapegoats then were the Jews, who were demonized by government propaganda campaigns (under the guise of "anti-Zionism") and faced widespread discrimination. Russian Jews who wanted to escape this treatment by emigrating were forbidden to do so, and by the early 1980s these "Refuseniks" had become a major problem for Russia's international relations.He continued: "...[Alekseev] can no longer be trusted as an advocate for LGBT Russians. Stick a sickle in him: He's done."
So in 1983, a desperate Russia tried some public-relations trickery. The Department of Propaganda set up the Anti-Zionist Committee and recruited or pressured various prominent Soviet Jews -- soldiers, writers, artists, scientists -- to join it. To decline meant repercussions. The idea was to show that even the Jews themselves agreed with the Kremlin's smears. Happily, the effort failed; neither Jews within Russia nor the international community were fooled by the Kremlin's "pocket Jews," and the AZSCP collapsed into irrelevance.
If "gays are the new Jews" in Russia, as many people have said, then Nikolai Alexeyev is the new Anti-Zionist Committee. Russia is desperate again: The upcoming Sochi Olympics are important to Putin's sense of his standing in the world, and the international campaign against Russian homophobia is staining them more every day. This campaign is working, and Russia knows it. What better way to slow this movement's momentum -- and to confuse and discourage those in the West who have been working for it -- than for its most visible advocate to minimize its importance and dismiss it as a Western, anti-Russian plot?
It could not be clearer to me that the Kremlin is up to its old tricks -- and that somehow, it has gotten to Alexeyev.
Alekseev, who spells his last name Alexeyev on Twitter, responded with a full-on meltdown. He threatened to sue Lucas, claimed he was quitting activism altogether, and then said he would "personally hire a contract killer" to murder Lucas if the article somehow caused the death of his 72-year-old mother.
And then Alekseev jumped headfirst into the cesspool of anti-Semitism. First he retweeted a tweet calling Out Magazine a "Jewish slut magazine that supports Jews and their filthy faggotry propaganda" and another smearing Matthew Breen, editor-in-chief of the Advocate, as a "Jewish pig, Israeli monkey." For the record, Breen is not Jewish; Lucas is.
It only got worse from there. When the group Human Rights First cancelled his participation in an upcoming conference call, Alekseev unleashed a tirade of disgustingly vile anti-Semitic remarks. The following are screenshots from his Facebook and Twitter pages, arranged chronologically. I will indicate whenever tweets have been translated from Russian via Google. Note: the term "yid" (sometimes spelled "jid") is an extremely offensive anti-Semitic slur.
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