The Farce in Sochi

When I was a small child trying to understand the Holocaust, I asked my grandparents—the children of Jewish immigrants who fled Europe well before the Second World War—whether or not they knew at any point what awaited their kin overseas. “We heard things,” they said. “From time to time, we heard things.” The Sochi Winter Olympics are in full swing and I hear things every day. On Friday, I heard that Anastasia Smirnova, a gay rights activist I interviewed in August, was arrested in St. Petersburg for carrying a banner quoting the International Olympic Committee’s policy against discrimination. I heard that in Moscow, 10 people protesting Russia’s odious “gay propaganda” law were detained by police and allegedly beaten and threatened with sexual abuse. I heard that across the country, gay Russian men are lured off the Internet by neo-Nazi thugs, and tortured on camera. On Sunday, I heard from Kirill Maryin, an openly gay 17-year-old from Novosibirsk, Russia’s third-most populous city, who hopes to flee the country as soon as possible. “My life is getting worse,” he told me. “I see no end in sight.”