Avgust Dobrovolsky.
A resident of Nizhnevartovsk, a city in the Russian Urals, was detained and beaten by police last year after they discovered from his phone that he was an active member of multiple queer group chats on Telegram, human rights organisation North Caucasus SOS (NC SOS) reported on Wednesday.
Avgust Dobrovolsky was detained by police last year while taking a university exam, after which law enforcement officers confiscated his passport and took him to the police station. While being held there, officers went through his phone and found messages he’s written to other members of a queer Telegram group. Dobrovolsky subsequently learned that two members of the chat had reported him to the police, which led to his arrest.
While Dobrovolsky was held at the police station, police officers said they were going to charge him with paedophilia and disseminating pornography and “put him away for at least 15 years”, threatened him with rape, put a knife to his throat, hit him on the head several times, and threatened to send him to the frontlines in Ukraine.
The police also demanded that Dobrovolsky give them the names of all the “gays and paedophiles” he knows, and transcribed all the contacts in his phone, NC SOS wrote. On finding out that Dobrovolsky’s mother is Chechen, the police also deliberated sending him to Chechnya, where Ramzan Kadyrov’s forces would “turn him into a normal man”.
Dobrovolsky was briefly released from the station but told to come back the next day, when he was forced to sign a false witness statement in a murder case, and offered work as a stool pigeon, moving into cells at pre-trial detention centres, sleeping with cellmates and finding out incriminating information for a fee of 1,000 rubles (€10). He was ultimately released with a 100,000-ruble (€1,000) fine for spreading “LGBT propaganda”, but was told the police would keep “monitoring him”.
Dobrovolsky then contacted NC SOS, whose activists helped him leave Russia before sharing his story from exile in a third country.
Amid the ongoing crackdown on Russia’s queer community, the Russian authorities recently planned to create a single database listing members of what Russia calls the “international LGBT movement”, which the country’s Supreme Court banned as an “extremist organisation” in 2023, independent outlet Meduza reported in January.
