Moscow police raid two more queer venues as Russia’s LGBT crackdown continues

Moscow police raided two queer party venues overnight on Friday, the second weekend in a row that law enforcement officers have stormed into gay clubs in the Russian capital, state-affiliated newspaper Izvestia reported on Saturday.

According to Izvestia, in raiding the two nightclubs, Sisters and Bizarre, police were looking for “representatives of non-traditional sexual orientations”.

A Sisters club-goer was found in possession of drugs, Izvestia claimed, while “rooms with BDSM equipment” were discovered at Bizarre. The newspaper published a video of the raid, showing patrons lying face down on the floor. It is not known if anyone was arrested following the raids.

Bizarre is located in the same building as the Central Station, one of Moscow’s most popular queer clubs, which has already been targeted in earlier raids, but a source told Novaya Gazeta Europe that Central Station had not been subjected to a raid overnight.

Last Saturday, exactly one year after Russia’s Supreme Court ruled the “international LGBT movement” to be an “extremist organisation”, police in Moscow raided a number of queer clubs to tackle “LGBT propaganda” and “non-traditional sexual relations”, with at least a dozen people arrested for “petty hooliganism” over the following week.

Since the Supreme Court ruling effectively made any form of queer identification illegal in November 2023, six criminal cases have been opened against club owners in various Russian cities, according to Parni+, a Russian LGBT website.