Personal is Political

The forests are on fire. Moscow is covered with smog and smoke and slowly suffocating.
And now all his is coming to the city I'm currently living in. Today, the streets are filling with smoke and the smell of something burning...

As I will be offline until onday, I'm writing this post today.

May 9 is the Victory Day, Den' Pobedy, the day of Victory over Nazi Germany. It's the day I celebrate personally because though I was born long after the Great Patriotic War (Second World War for those outside of the former USSR), and no one among the relatives I know personally was a soldier then, I still feel personal connection to that war and that day.
Mostly, I feel it because I know exactly that if the USSR lost in that war, I won't be born, ever. My father is Jewish. He was a child than, safe in evaquation - he would be dead. My mother's parents come from Belarus and Ukraine. She was born after the war - she wouldn't be born.
Also, I've read enough of books like The Diary of Anna Frank to imagine quite vivdly what would happen to me if I lived through that war, if I happened to be in ghetto or in concentration camp.
And to end on a more positive note, I've watched so many films and read so many books about that war while growing up that I can't but feel proud for the people who fought, and suffered, and won. Won this war not for the goverment, but for themselves, for their children, for their future. In spite of all the ugly and cruel things the Soviet goverment did to them during and after the war, they still won, and that's what I am celebrating.

Some songs about the Great Patriotic War that fill me with emotion:
Довоенный вальс - Valtz Before the War, a song about the last days of peace.
Священная война - Sacred War, it was written in the beginning of the war, in 1941, and was practically a hymn, filled with rage and determination.
Смуглянка - Smuglyanka, about the partisan movement (and love), a lovely, jolly song despite the grim circumstances.
Нам нужна одна победа (also performed by it's author, Bulat Okudzhava) - We Need One Victory, a song in a melancholy yet decisive mood.
День Победы - Victory Day, the ultimate end-of-the-war song.

There's a lovely spring flashmob in Moscow, DreamFlash, when people go the the Arbat with soap bubbles. There are all kinds of freaks and fancy dress and fun and additional events like Free Hugs. And there are always LGBT people, with rainbow flags and drawing on their cheeks and so on. It's a gay-friendly all-inclusive flashmob. No politics at all.

This year, some people decided to repeat in in Saint-Petersburg. And some idiots from LGBT community decided not just to go and be openly gay, but to announce it widely in the Internet as 'gay-pride' (though there are political, real gay-prides planned for later in th year in several cities). Result? An OMON squad, people arrested, beaten up, journalist arrested, too, attempts to confiscate cameras and/or to delete pictures and records.

Now, people outside of LGBT community are angry at LGBT. People inside of the LGBT community are angry at the idiots who called it gay-pride.
The interesting thing is, almost nobody says anything really angry against the OMON and goverment. People think it's normal - not good, but normal - to break down a peaceful event just because there are some gays openly participating in it.

Fuck it.

Constitutional Court of Russian Federation considers that the law forbidding the 'propaganda of homosexuality' does not contradict the Constitution.

There is no firm definition of 'propaganda', so basically, anything fits - including sexual education programmes and any kind of positive gay visibility in media.

There is no law forbidding homophobic speeches and defamation of homosexuality.

So, basically, any homophobic bigot can say that it is bad and wrong to be homosexual, and all the awful homosexuals are pedophilic deviants, but no one has the legal right to say that homosexuality is a variation of norm, and homosexuals are normal people.

It is one law in one county (oblast), and it is aimed at 'propaganda homosexuality to underage'. But the fact that it exists and is considered contitutional shows how much we 'don't have any discrimination of gays' in Russia, as our goverment stated.