Reinforced concrete shelters will be installed across the Kursk region, local Russian authorities announced Thursday as Ukraine keeps up its daring attack on Moscow’s territory.
“Today we began to install reinforced concrete shelters in Kursk. On my instructions, the Kursk city administration identified key points for placing concrete modular shelters in crowded places,” Aleksey Smirnov, Kursk’s acting governor, said in a statement.
Ukraine’s surprise cross-border incursion earlier this month caught the Russians on the hop, and Kyiv’s forces have expanded their offensive, capturing more towns and territory with little resistance.
Neither was great, as written about by David K. Johnson in The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government. That said, having read much about this time period and the history of the early gay rights movement in the US, I would pick the US any day of the week over the nonexistent gay rights movement in Russia and many other communist countries, who still give people like me the cold shoulder.
Still, forming a gay civil rights group in 1948 was a progressive step in the right direction (the Mattachine Society), and the leaders paved the way for the more well known gay rights movement in the 1970s. They walked so our ancestors could run.
Russia hasn’t been communist for almost 35 years.
There’s gay rights groups in communist countries too. They tend to take different forms though, due to different cultures and circumstances; you don’t have to form protection groups if you’re not in danger of getting hate-crime’d.
In China for instance, they’re more focused on gaining familial acceptance than government persecution. In Cuba, they had a referendum to enshrine LGBT+ rights in the constitution.