Reasons for Russia's anti gay shift

[Kitteh]

The most seemingly obvious answer is the growth of the Orthodox Church in Russia. There are a lot of studies that show that Russia is one of the few countries in the world that is actually growing more religious at a significant rate. This has to do of course with the fall of the Soviet Union, which wasn't as anti-theistic as it is commonly portrayed, since they realized that active persecution of the church would be a dumb political move; but didn't allow any mass proselytizing or involvement in politics for the church. I'm not sure this is the answer, though, because it seems like a lot of non-religious Russians are just as anti-LGBT as religious ones.

Another potential reason is that even if Russians were just as homophobic in the Soviet era as they are now, there wasn't room to develop that homophobia into a political movement as there is now. The Soviet government may not have been pro-LGBT in any way, but they didn't want their people organizing based around any political issue and would prefer that it just wasn't talked about. This seems like the kind of thing that happens in a lot of places today, like China for example. Perhaps this ties into the rise of the Orthodox Church, as maybe homophobic atheists are less likely to organize or act upon their feelings as members of organized religions. This idea is more a theory than something I've researched, would be interested to see if it sounds valid to people other than me.

And what Ernest said is also definitely true. Maybe this is becoming a bigger issue now that the LGBT rights movement has more visibility in the West and the support of many Western governments, making the anti-Western backlash even bigger.