In fact, it has been fully legal since — a whole decade before the USA Supreme Court fully decriminalised homosexuality across the entire country in the Lawrence v. Texas ruling. Up until the late s Russia had the sort of LGBTQ standing you'd expect from an Eastern European country, namely that the situation for the local gay community was not great, but ripe for positive change.
Gay groups in Saint Petersburg
Sadly, over the past decade, this positive change went the opposite direction completely, particularly in June when the awful anti-gay propaganda law was introduced. To get an idea of the level of homophobia and outright stupidity prevalent amongst Russian politicians, check out this interview from October between Stephen Fry and Vitaly Milonov. The short answer is, yes, it is safe but …. Just before travelling on the Trans Siberian across Russia in , we were nervous!
After all, we all know Russia has a terrible reputation for LGBTQ rights, particularly in light of the awful anti-gay propaganda law passed in All our friends and family warned us:. As gay travelers, safety is our 1 priority!
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Sign up to our newsletter and get free access to it. No spam. Not ever. Just fun and interesting blog posts delivered straight to your inbox. Thank you! You have successfully joined our subscriber list. With hindsight, we are so glad we ignored this advice!
St. Petersburg Hotels and Places to Stay
We travelled through Russia for 2 months and survived unscathed! We also strongly believe that going there, supporting gay friendly businesses, meeting and making friends with the local LGBTQ community would be far more productive than boycotting them altogether. At the end of the day, whether you choose to travel to Russia, is a personal choice for you. We are not saying you shouldn't visit. Russia is a beautiful country, rich in culture and history that it would be a shame to skip.
It also has a thriving LGBTQ community living their day-to-day lives, particularly in Moscow, which has quite a large gay scene.
As long as you have common sense, have your wits about you at all times and avoid any LGBTQ activism, you'll be fine! Surprisingly, Russia has a gay scene, particularly in the two main cities: Moscow and St Petersburg. Moscow, in particular, has quite an impressive number of bars, clubs, cruising parties and saunas. Over a decade later, Central Station is still going strong in defiance of the anti-gay law in place. This place is huge, 5 stories high and a really fun night out on weekends. There are also cruising parties like Hunters , which is the biggest and the best, and also Imperia.
In terms of gay saunas in Moscow, there are many! We loved St Petersburg a lot. It's the most European-like city in Russia, and definitely one of the more liberal-minded places in Russia. The gay scene of St Petersburg is smaller than Moscow, but still buzzing with life. It is named after the fictional gay bar in the Police Academy movies.
It's also quite large, with 2 large bar areas, dance floor, VIP area and darkroom. There are a lot of pretty impressive bucket list items to check out in Russia. Having studied Russian history at length at school, we both had a huge curiosity to see more of a country that is so greatly vilified by our Western media — think Bond Villains , Russian interference in elections etc etc.
The Red Square is possibly the most famous location in the whole of Russia. All of Moscow's streets and then the highways that connect to those streets originate here, so it's often called the central square of Moscow. This is also the location of Lenin's Mausoleum, the Kremlin and the colourfully crazy looking St. Basil's Cathedral. Joining a tour of the Red Square and St Basil's Cathedral is also the best way to get the most from your time while learning some of the history behind this important cultural landmark of Russia. Another incredible building that blew us away was the Winter Palace in St.
It used to be the official residence of the Russian Emperors between to It's an impressive building, built in the Elizabethan Baroque style. Nowadays the palace forms part of the State Hermitage Museum, which is the second-largest art museum in the world! If you join a tour of the Hermitage Museum you'll be able to marvel at paintings, sculptures, jewellery and other art forms from around the world, including pieces that belonged to Empress Catherine the Great — yasss Queen!
Another stunning palace you need to see in St. Petersburg is the neoclassical Mikhailovsky Palace. Here you can see the world's largest collection of Russian art, covering all main trends from over a thousand years! You can join a guided tour of the museum if you're interested in learning about Russian art and the building itself.
We also really enjoyed exploring the extensive gardens behind the palace as well as the Field of Mars and Summer Garden just beyond that. We took a journey on the famous Trans-Siberian Express when we visited Russia and we would definitely recommend other visitors make the effort to experience this once-in-a-lifetime journey! Stretching 9, kilometres 5, miles across Russia from Moscow to Vladivostock, the Trans-Siberian is the longest railway line in the world. You can also explore the Trans-Mongolian route which gives you the chance to travel through three different countries Russia, Mongolia and China from Irkutsk to Beijing.
Whichever part you choose, it's truly a train trip you'll never forget! During our travels on the Trans-Siberian Express, we organised a stopover in Irkutsk to break up the journey and give us a chance to explore the region.
We then joined a tour from Irkutsk to Lake Baikal , which is the largest freshwater lake in the world by volume and the world's deepest lake! It's so big it seems like you're standing next to the ocean, not a lake, except there's no salt in the water. We also visited Olkhon Island which is the biggest island within Lake Baikal. Here we stayed with a local family and learned about their spiritual beliefs surrounding the island which was fascinating.
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If you'd feel more comfortable visiting Russia as part of a group don't worry, there are some gay tour operators organising gay group tours you can join! You'll be able to relax and feel perfectly at ease with other gay travellers while you explore the sights of this magnificent country. Out of Office organises a gay group trip to Russia which explores Moscow, St. Petersburg and Pushkin.
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You'll definitely feel like the long-lost Romanov princess as you prance among stunning gardens and explore opulent palaces. After transferring via the high-speed Sapsan train to St. Petersburg you'll then get to explore the Hermitage within the winter palace — one of our highlights! Grindr is allowed in Russia, but use your common sense for your personal safety at all times. Over the the last 5 years, the Russian government has been tightening control over online activity and has also demanded apps hand over information about its users or face being banned in Russia.
It has to date done this to Telegram , LinkedIn and Tinder. As far as we know Grindr and Hornet are not yet blocked in Russia, but regardless of this, we strongly recommend using a VPN to access your gay dating apps. This will allow you to hide your location and browse the web anonymously. We used Grindr and Hornet extensively during our trip to Russia and at no stage did we ever encounter any issues, but we were always careful.
We found it is a great to connect with locals, particularly when travelling to smaller cities like Yekaterinburg, Irkutsk, Kazan etc where there is absolutely no gay scene at all. Beware of Catfishing whilst travelling in Russia as there have been reports of violent homophobic gangs targetting gay guys on the dating apps , so please take care!
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Always meet the other person in a public area, ask for pictures first, cross-check their name on Google as well as on other social media channels to see if things add up. The sad reality is that due to the anti-gay propaganda law, you'd be hard-pressed to find any gay events taking place in Russia. Sadly, they always get shut down by the government, risking violence if they do go ahead. In June , the Moscow City Hall even went as far as enacting a year ban on gay pride parades taking place in the city!
We recommend watching this brief video to you an idea of the different attitudes prevalent across different sections of Russian society towards the LGBTQ community and Gay Pride events. It's interesting and inspiring to see more positive reactions by the younger generation:.