La "répressions des gays" en Tchétchénie

...So finally the Novaya Gazeta correspondent asked Alekseyev straight up: Is he aware that his gay parade petitions incited local investigations in the North Caucasus against LGBT activists—leading to mass arrests and murders in Chechnya?

Alekseyev answered by accusing the Novaya Gazeta reporter of “speculating in unsubstantiated information, acting on baseless rumors, and he personally knew nothing about alleged persecutions that had anything to do with what he’d done.”

Novaya Gazeta, whose reporters have been at the forefront of the fight for gay rights in Russia, concluded that at the very least, Alekseyev was guilty of incredible negligence for not taking the local culture into account—and the lives of local gays in the North Caucasus. At the end of the article, they noted that other Russian LGBT groups were forming hotlines and outreach programs for victims of the anti-gay crackdown in Chechnya and surrounding regions. They noted that GayRussia.ru was not participating.

So where, alas, did the New York Times coverage diverge from Novaya Gazeta’s? As I said earlier, they did bring up in this article and others that the Chechnya crackdown was sparked by Nikolai Alekseyev’s gay parade petitions. But if that’s all you knew, you’d assume he was a gay activist with the same progressive politics as any gay pride parade activist in Europe. And you’d assume, therefore, he’s the good guy in this story.

And since every story involving Russia needs a bad guy, you can probably guess who the New York Times pinned this on. Here’s a hint: Pinning everything that’s gone wrong in the world on Vlad The Bad just won the Times a Pulitzer. Why mess with a winning formula?