Seven years for a drag bar. Russia hands down lengthy “LGBT extremism” sentences to night club owners and staff

The sentences

The Central District Court of Orenburg has convicted three employees of the bar Pose of organising the activity of, and taking part in, an “extremist organisation”, the court’s press service announced.

The heaviest term, seven years in a general-regime penal colony, went to the bar’s owner, Vyacheslav Khasanov, according to Ostorozhno, novosti outlet. The venue’s administrator, Diana Kamilyanova, was sentenced to six years and three months; its art director, Alexander Klimov, to two years and three months. All three pleaded not guilty.

According to the prosecution, the defendants, knowing that the “international LGBT movement” had been banned in Russia, staged at the bar “events united by the common theme of demonstrating belonging to persons of non-traditional sexual orientation for an indefinite circle of persons”—which is to say, parties with drag shows. The court also made Khasanov pay one million roubles, or about $13,000, as “criminal proceeds from the activity of an extremist organisation”, and barred all three from working in entertainment or public catering for up to three years.

The bar

Pose opened in Orenburg in 2021 and ran themed parties. It billed itself as the city’s “first themed venue”; after Russia passed its law against “LGBT propaganda”, it began describing itself instead as a “bar-theatre of parodies” and a “night bar with a show programme”. As a precaution, its staff stopped listing the address on social media, and would-be guests had to message to find out where to go.

It was, by design, never a gay club in the way the authorities would later cast it. The first Pose had opened in Ufa in mid-2020, the Orenburg branch a year later, and both were presented as venues for theatrical drag shows. For a time they worked more or less undisturbed, even after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine; when the security services took an interest, it was the routine kind, checking alcohol licences.

Local conservatives, though, were unhappy from the start. A government-linked outlet in Ufa ran a complaint from “concerned citizens” troubled by the club’s “LGBT theme”. In September 2023 a long queue for a concert by the flamboyant performer Albina Sexova was photographed and circulated by local channels alongside grievances. One, quoted by the regional press, read: “We bought apartments in a business-class building expecting peace, and instead we live in fear that our child will see this nightmare.” The Ufa venue closed that November after threats.

The raid

On the night of March 9, 2024, barely a week after the LGBT’s “extremist” designation took effect, the Orenburg bar was raided. The operation was carried out by police and the National Guard together with the “Russian Community of Orenburg”, an ultra-conservative movement that had attracted little attention before.

Mediazona’s sources in the city at the time could recall no other notable actions by the group. Its social media insisted it was “not a sect of nationalists” but an association standing “for a strong Russia and the flourishing of all indigenous peoples”. By its own description it “helped the front, helped churches, helped large families”, and trained its members in “tactical medicine, self-defence and the handling of weapons, so as to defend the country, family and loved ones in a time of need”. Its members have proudly reported conducting joint patrols with Cossacks.

It was the “Russian Community”, not the police, that first published video of the raid. A man in civilian clothes can be heard on stage announcing a “special operation” before asking anyone under eighteen to come forward “the nice way”. Some of those present were forced to the floor; one witness described officers kicking guests and staff and using a stun gun. Performers were made to recite their names and home addresses on camera, footage that was then posted online. Three employees, including Kamilyanova and Klimov, were held until the middle of the following day and their homes searched.

Same month, Yekaterina Mizulina, the head of a quasi-governmental censorship and denunciation outfit called “Safe Internet League”, was announcing that Russia had opened its first criminal case over LGBT “extremism”. Two days later, in closed hearings, the court sent the two employees to pre-trial detention; Khasanov was arrested a week after that. Klimov and Kamilyanova were later moved to house arrest. The case ground on for more than two years before the verdict.

The Chita club

The second case surfaced thousands of miles away to the east, in Chita, near the Mongolian border.

Today, the criminal appeals panel of the Zabaikalsky Regional Court increased the sentence of a local woman convicted of organising the activity of an “extremist organisation” by more than two years, its press service said. The release makes clear it concerns Tatyana Zorina, a 23-year-old entrepreneur.

In March the Ingodinsky District Court of Chita had given Zorina four years in a general-regime colony. The appeals panel raised that to six years and two months. Among the material evidence cited against her, the court noted six corsets, hip pads and a false breast.

Zorina was tried as the owner of the nightclub Jackson, which the security services entered in October 2024. By then the venue was operating privately, admission was by phone call only. The court described Jackson as a gay club, while the Investigative Committee claimed Zorina had run it “to propagandise the ideology of the banned international public association and increase its numbers”. She spent the investigation under house arrest.

What comes next

When the Orenburg case was first opened, lawyers who specialise in extremism prosecutions told Mediazona it would be a template—and pointed to where the practice would be borrowed from.

The richest body of case law, one noted, came from prosecutions of Jehovah’s Witnesses, banned as extremist in Russia, who had by that time, in April 2024, accumulated more than 450 convictions, 157 of them carrying real custodial terms—in two years these numbers have risen to 715 convictions with 227 prison sentences.

The crackdown on LGBTQ+ representation in Russia is widespread, covering book publishing and support organisations.