Instead his father said, “I should kill you.”
Fearing for his life, Maksim turned to a gay rights group, the Russian LGBT Network, based in St. Petersburg,
which has established an emergency, round-the-clock volunteer group to help gay men escape the region.
But for the young man who calls himself Maksim, as for scores of other gay men arrested in a pogrom
this month in Russia’s Chechnya region, it pivoted into nearly two weeks of beatings and torture.
“When two gay men meet, they don’t tell one another their true names,” Maksim said.
“These people don’t trust anybody,” said Olga Baranova, director of the Moscow Community Center, a support group for gays
that is part of the volunteer network helping gay men flee Chechnya.
If there were a problem, there would be a policy.”
In a televised meeting with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on Wednesday, Mr. Kadyrov characterized as “libelous” news reports
that the security services in Chechnya had been persecuting gay men.
The following account is based on interviews with Maksim, who is in his 20s, and two other gay men who were detained by Chechen security agents.
