Archive of Resistance: How Russian Activists Are Saving Queer History from State Oblivion
In Russia's official history, LGBTQ+ people do not exist. Their lives have been erased from archives, reinforcing the Kremlin's myth of homosexuality as a "Western import." However, activists and artists are defying repression to create their own archives, rescue queer artifacts from flea markets, and document the community's everyday life to preserve memory for future generations.
Russia's First Offline LGBTQ+ Museum
In 2021, St. Petersburg activist Pyotr Voskresensky purchased a porcelain perfume bottle from the mid-19th century for 30,000 rubles. It depicts the seduction of the nymph Callisto — a motif popular among queer women of that era. In the Russian Empire, aristocratic women used such bottles to find partners: it was enough to casually take out the perfume near a woman they liked.
Within a year, Voskresensky collected more than 100 similar items for the country's first offline queer museum. Many cost him next to nothing at markets and flea markets — sellers didn't know the real value of the items. A photograph of drag performer Nikolai Barabanov, who had been performing in women's clothing since 1908, cost just one thousand rubles.
The idea for the museum came after visiting the Tchaikovsky Museum-Reserve in Klin. In the wing where the composer's brother Modest (also gay) lived, bronze statuettes of Narcissus and Antinous have been preserved — "a classic queer interior from the early 20th century," according to Voskresensky.
In spring 2022, when the museum was ready to open, the war began. Voskresensky's friends were sent to prison for their anti-war stance, including artist Sasha Skochilenko. That autumn, he still opened the museum in his home for a month and a half, understanding that "the window was closing." "I created a questionnaire for guests and personally verified each application to keep out people with homophobic views," the activist says.
Over a month and a half, 200 people visited the museum: staff from St. Petersburg museums, historians, activists. When Putin signed the law completely banning "LGBT propaganda" on December 5, 2022, Voskresensky closed the museum and later took the exhibits abroad.
Racing Against Roskomnadzor
Back in 2018, artist Pavel created an archive website for contemporary art, which included queer works. After the complete ban on "LGBT propaganda," he hid this content but continues to save everything related to Russian queerness. "This is my attempt to rescue content that falls under censorship and gets deleted from the internet. In 30 years, people will need to study how Russian queers lived during the war in Ukraine," he explains.
The scale of censorship is enormous. In 2025, 170,300 materials with queer themes were deleted from VK, Rutube, TikTok, Telegram, and other platforms at Roskomnadzor's demand. The previous year, 45,300 publications were blocked. By 2025, Kinopoisk had removed 46 TV series that touched on queer themes. Even the Duolingo app removed exercises with phrases like "Clara met her wife Maria at a lesbian bar" at the agency's request. When users began mass-deleting content out of fear of prosecution, Roman Polyakov launched the YouTube channel Queerorama. His mission is to preserve materials so Russians don't get the impression that queerness never existed in Russian pop culture. "Just a few years ago, we lived in a completely different reality. At 4 PM you'd turn on the series 'Destined to Become a Star' on Rossiya channel, then switch to STS where 'Not Born Beautiful' was playing. These series had gay characters. And nobody minded," says Polyakov.
Queer Tours of St. Petersburg
Until 2022, Pyotr Voskresensky led tours about the lives of LGBTQ+ people in St. Petersburg for eight years straight. He picked up the idea from tour guide Yuri Piryutko, who had been conducting such walks from the 1990s until his death in 2014. At first, Voskresensky invited only queer people and their allies. In 2016, he joined a community of unusual tours, and ordinary citizens began attending the walks, including elderly St. Petersburg women.
"After the tours, the older women would thank me because, in their words, I was transforming their perception of LGBTQ+ people. People were very surprised that homosexual relationships aren't about sex, but about love," the activist recalls. In summer 2023, activist Irina conducted a one-time tour — at the initiative of the queer project Side by Side — to support queer Russians who remained in the country. In a park where queer people used to gather during Soviet times, she explained the origin of the Russian slang word "goluboy" (blue): gays joked that they gathered in parks like pigeons (golubi) to find partners.
Archives That Were Saved
When queer magazines and newspapers appeared in Russia in the early 1990s, Moscow resident Elena Gusyatinskaya began collecting them. Over time, the collection grew into a full library called ALG (Archive of Lesbians and Gays), including fiction and academic literature, magazines and newspapers — including samizdat publications that never made it into state libraries. More than 30 academic works were prepared based on ALG materials — from term papers to doctoral dissertations. Where the archive is located in 2026 is unknown, but according to activist Evgeny Pisemsky, the library was successfully taken out of Russia.
Pisemsky — founder of queer media outlet Parni+ — created the website "Museum of LGBT History in Russia" in 2015. Together with volunteers and historians, he published materials about queer people in Ancient Rus, Tsarist Russia, and the USSR. "Very often newcomers come into activism and think there were no activists before them. We don't know our own history, and because of that, we may be making the same mistakes," he explains. When the war began, running two projects became difficult, and work on the online museum stopped. The website is available for reading, but no new content appears.
Telegram Channels and Zines
Karina hesitated for a long time before opening the Telegram channel Queer History due to Russia's homophobic laws. She was pushed to action by an incident: a VK user claimed that Tchaikovsky's homosexuality was invented by activists in the 1980s. Karina sent a page from a 1909 book where the composer was listed among famous homosexual people. The user didn't believe it. "I wanted to figure out whether homophobia really is a traditional value for Russia," she says.
In the Russian Empire, criminal punishment for homosexual relations only appeared in 1835. After the 1917 revolution, the Bolsheviks abolished it. The sodomy law only returned in 1934 under Stalin.
Tyumen artist Gosha has been making zines with comics, diary entries, and notes from queer people since 2014. Artists from Tyumen and neighboring cities sent in their work. "We made zines unofficially, for a narrow circle. We took advantage of the fact that people perceived the comics as some kind of eccentricity," he says. Filya Rudneva from St. Petersburg created a zine about trans people in emigration and inside the country. At the start of the war, she became interested in the lives of queer people in besieged Leningrad — and discovered there was no information at all.
"I wanted to look at ourselves not through the constant description of deprivations we experience, or rights we don't have. But through the everyday, because that everyday constantly slips out of focus," she explains.
Why This Matters
"State rhetoric in Russia portrays LGBT as something foreign, Western, and dangerous. LGBT people are essentially told that their history is not part of Russia's history," says Dmitry from the Urania project.
Journalist and founder of the media outlet Lobby, Maria Latsinskaya, believes that the representation of queer people in history helps people understand: "You're not a mistake or some trend that came to Russia from the West, but the same part of society as anyone else."
Professor Ekaterina Haskins of Pennsylvania State University, a researcher of memorial culture, notes: "States that promote one 'correct' interpretation of the past restrict unofficial memorial activity. But that makes this work all the more valuable." American Slavist Dan Healey, author of research on Soviet queer people, mentioned that he knew a Russian who had been collecting publications about sexuality since the 1950s — 15,000 volumes in a small apartment.
In Soviet times, when the criminal sodomy law was in effect, queers secretly held wedding ceremonies at the sculpture "Sleeping Hermaphrodite" in the Hermitage. "Repressive laws anger people and motivate society to resist them. All these projects are about resistance," says Pyotr Voskresensky.
Based on materials from 7x7
Russia's First Offline LGBTQ+ Museum
In 2021, St. Petersburg activist Pyotr Voskresensky purchased a porcelain perfume bottle from the mid-19th century for 30,000 rubles. It depicts the seduction of the nymph Callisto — a motif popular among queer women of that era. In the Russian Empire, aristocratic women used such bottles to find partners: it was enough to casually take out the perfume near a woman they liked.
Within a year, Voskresensky collected more than 100 similar items for the country's first offline queer museum. Many cost him next to nothing at markets and flea markets — sellers didn't know the real value of the items. A photograph of drag performer Nikolai Barabanov, who had been performing in women's clothing since 1908, cost just one thousand rubles.
The idea for the museum came after visiting the Tchaikovsky Museum-Reserve in Klin. In the wing where the composer's brother Modest (also gay) lived, bronze statuettes of Narcissus and Antinous have been preserved — "a classic queer interior from the early 20th century," according to Voskresensky.
In spring 2022, when the museum was ready to open, the war began. Voskresensky's friends were sent to prison for their anti-war stance, including artist Sasha Skochilenko. That autumn, he still opened the museum in his home for a month and a half, understanding that "the window was closing." "I created a questionnaire for guests and personally verified each application to keep out people with homophobic views," the activist says.
Over a month and a half, 200 people visited the museum: staff from St. Petersburg museums, historians, activists. When Putin signed the law completely banning "LGBT propaganda" on December 5, 2022, Voskresensky closed the museum and later took the exhibits abroad.
Racing Against Roskomnadzor
Back in 2018, artist Pavel created an archive website for contemporary art, which included queer works. After the complete ban on "LGBT propaganda," he hid this content but continues to save everything related to Russian queerness. "This is my attempt to rescue content that falls under censorship and gets deleted from the internet. In 30 years, people will need to study how Russian queers lived during the war in Ukraine," he explains.
The scale of censorship is enormous. In 2025, 170,300 materials with queer themes were deleted from VK, Rutube, TikTok, Telegram, and other platforms at Roskomnadzor's demand. The previous year, 45,300 publications were blocked. By 2025, Kinopoisk had removed 46 TV series that touched on queer themes. Even the Duolingo app removed exercises with phrases like "Clara met her wife Maria at a lesbian bar" at the agency's request. When users began mass-deleting content out of fear of prosecution, Roman Polyakov launched the YouTube channel Queerorama. His mission is to preserve materials so Russians don't get the impression that queerness never existed in Russian pop culture. "Just a few years ago, we lived in a completely different reality. At 4 PM you'd turn on the series 'Destined to Become a Star' on Rossiya channel, then switch to STS where 'Not Born Beautiful' was playing. These series had gay characters. And nobody minded," says Polyakov.
Queer Tours of St. Petersburg
Until 2022, Pyotr Voskresensky led tours about the lives of LGBTQ+ people in St. Petersburg for eight years straight. He picked up the idea from tour guide Yuri Piryutko, who had been conducting such walks from the 1990s until his death in 2014. At first, Voskresensky invited only queer people and their allies. In 2016, he joined a community of unusual tours, and ordinary citizens began attending the walks, including elderly St. Petersburg women.
"After the tours, the older women would thank me because, in their words, I was transforming their perception of LGBTQ+ people. People were very surprised that homosexual relationships aren't about sex, but about love," the activist recalls. In summer 2023, activist Irina conducted a one-time tour — at the initiative of the queer project Side by Side — to support queer Russians who remained in the country. In a park where queer people used to gather during Soviet times, she explained the origin of the Russian slang word "goluboy" (blue): gays joked that they gathered in parks like pigeons (golubi) to find partners.
Archives That Were Saved
When queer magazines and newspapers appeared in Russia in the early 1990s, Moscow resident Elena Gusyatinskaya began collecting them. Over time, the collection grew into a full library called ALG (Archive of Lesbians and Gays), including fiction and academic literature, magazines and newspapers — including samizdat publications that never made it into state libraries. More than 30 academic works were prepared based on ALG materials — from term papers to doctoral dissertations. Where the archive is located in 2026 is unknown, but according to activist Evgeny Pisemsky, the library was successfully taken out of Russia.
Pisemsky — founder of queer media outlet Parni+ — created the website "Museum of LGBT History in Russia" in 2015. Together with volunteers and historians, he published materials about queer people in Ancient Rus, Tsarist Russia, and the USSR. "Very often newcomers come into activism and think there were no activists before them. We don't know our own history, and because of that, we may be making the same mistakes," he explains. When the war began, running two projects became difficult, and work on the online museum stopped. The website is available for reading, but no new content appears.
Telegram Channels and Zines
Karina hesitated for a long time before opening the Telegram channel Queer History due to Russia's homophobic laws. She was pushed to action by an incident: a VK user claimed that Tchaikovsky's homosexuality was invented by activists in the 1980s. Karina sent a page from a 1909 book where the composer was listed among famous homosexual people. The user didn't believe it. "I wanted to figure out whether homophobia really is a traditional value for Russia," she says.
In the Russian Empire, criminal punishment for homosexual relations only appeared in 1835. After the 1917 revolution, the Bolsheviks abolished it. The sodomy law only returned in 1934 under Stalin.
Tyumen artist Gosha has been making zines with comics, diary entries, and notes from queer people since 2014. Artists from Tyumen and neighboring cities sent in their work. "We made zines unofficially, for a narrow circle. We took advantage of the fact that people perceived the comics as some kind of eccentricity," he says. Filya Rudneva from St. Petersburg created a zine about trans people in emigration and inside the country. At the start of the war, she became interested in the lives of queer people in besieged Leningrad — and discovered there was no information at all.
"I wanted to look at ourselves not through the constant description of deprivations we experience, or rights we don't have. But through the everyday, because that everyday constantly slips out of focus," she explains.
Why This Matters
"State rhetoric in Russia portrays LGBT as something foreign, Western, and dangerous. LGBT people are essentially told that their history is not part of Russia's history," says Dmitry from the Urania project.
Journalist and founder of the media outlet Lobby, Maria Latsinskaya, believes that the representation of queer people in history helps people understand: "You're not a mistake or some trend that came to Russia from the West, but the same part of society as anyone else."
Professor Ekaterina Haskins of Pennsylvania State University, a researcher of memorial culture, notes: "States that promote one 'correct' interpretation of the past restrict unofficial memorial activity. But that makes this work all the more valuable." American Slavist Dan Healey, author of research on Soviet queer people, mentioned that he knew a Russian who had been collecting publications about sexuality since the 1950s — 15,000 volumes in a small apartment.
In Soviet times, when the criminal sodomy law was in effect, queers secretly held wedding ceremonies at the sculpture "Sleeping Hermaphrodite" in the Hermitage. "Repressive laws anger people and motivate society to resist them. All these projects are about resistance," says Pyotr Voskresensky.
Based on materials from 7x7