Andrei Kotov committed suicide at the end of 2024, while in pre-trial detention, after being arrested for the alleged crime of having founded “an extremist organization”, a travel agency for homosexual couples in Russia. But even in death, the Russian justice system – which operates under the direct influence of the Kremlin, like the rest of the country’s powers – did not let him rest in peace. Eleven months after his death, a Moscow court found him guilty of the crimes he was accused of.
Kotov, 48, was arrested on November 30, 2024. The founder of the Men Travel agency was one of the first Russian citizens jailed after the Supreme Court Putinism approve one year earlier, in 2023, declare the “international LGTBI movement” as “extremist”, an abstract label that does not concern any specific group and at the same time criminalizes any public manifestation of that community, from the defense of its existence to the detention of private parties.
Russian justice accused the businessman of the crimes of “founding an extremist organization”, “participation in said organization” and “filming minors up to four years of age to produce pornographic material”. Kotov rejected these accusations in the first court testimony. A month after the arrest, on December 29, 2024, the businessman was found dead in his cell in Moscow’s Vodnik prison. His lawyer confirmed the suicide.
In the rest of the world, the death of the person under investigation usually leads to the extinction of his criminal liability and the dismissal of the case. In today’s Vladimir Putin’s Russia, the Golovinski District Court of Moscow held the trial behind closed doors for a year. The prosecution announced that it would continue the proceedings and the deceased’s legal representatives did not ask for the case to be dismissed. Ultimately the judge found Kotov guilty.
The Russian Investigative Committee said during the trial that Kotov’s travel agency “generated among citizens a false image of the institution of marriage enshrined in the Constitution and carried out actions aimed at undermining traditional family values.”
Torture
The owner of Men Travel reported being the victim of torture following his arrest. “I had to say what they wanted,” he said, and assured that he was beaten and tortured with electric shocks. The anti-torture organization in Russian prisons, Gulagu.net, claims that authorities spread the word among inmates that Kotov organized trips for LGBT couples and was homosexual. “Officials deliberately created conditions to be able to put pressure on him, bend his will and force him to accept demands for self-incrimination (before the police, not before the judge),” the NGO published in a statement.
A source close to the independent media process Mozhem Obiasnit (We can explainin Russian) stressed that the security forces had set a trap for the businessman. “One of the witnesses was a puppet. He went to visit him at the request of the authorities to collect evidence against Kotov about LGBTI propaganda, but he could not say anything coherent at the trial either. And the other witnesses simply did not show up,” the newspaper writes.
According to Gulagu.net, at least two of the eight closed-door hearings in the trial were postponed due to the failure of witnesses to appear.
Regarding the filming of naked minors, a British BBC source underlines that the accusation referred to an alleged recording in a public place, but the content of the images is not known.
Regular raids
The persecution of the LGTBI collective has worsened since the Supreme Court approved, in November 2023, the decision of the Russian Ministry of Justice to declare the so-called “international LGTBI movement” extremist. Police frequently raid gay clubs and events and several people have already been prosecuted.
The human rights organization OVD-Info has carefully examined the application of the law over the past two years. “The legal basis for charges in extremism cases is completely absurd. Maybe it’s a coincidence, maybe it’s a deliberate policy to intimidate everyone,” a lawyer for the NGO says in a report.
The Russian Supreme Court has ruled that the “international LGBT movement” was created in the United States in the 1960s with the alleged aim of promoting “a birth control policy that encourages non-traditional family relationships”, and that it then arrived in the former Soviet Union when a Marxist founded an organization in defense of homosexuals in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) in 1983. According to the ruling, members of this alleged “movement” share the use of feminine terms in their speech.
OVD-Info investigated the Supreme Court ruling and concluded that it was supported by excerpts from Wikipedia.
