Welcome to Chechnya

Text:

Harald Olausen

According to some ideals, a person should be at least outwardly stable; his mood should remain steadily calm and content regardless of the circumstances. However, it cannot be the desired norm for everyone. Such good self-esteem may be a sign of a lack of emotional sensitivity and inflexibility. There is then something hard and ossified in man. Pyotr thought it was nice to travel by taxi, especially to the peaks of others. Kills time, has fun like a slightly poor man, and looks carefree gentlemanly (supposedly) to his poorer from the back seat, arrogantly nibbling his nose and showing his middle finger. Especially if he saw some despicable group of skins walking with beer bags in their hands somewhere in the dark alleys.

Then he could open the window and shout something outrageous and shameless about the satiety of his soul in St. Petersburg-torn Russia, and finally spit out the decent chills of decent disgust in his spine-hours before closing the window contented with even this slight "revenge is sweet" expression. was entitled in a free Finland far from the shackles of Russia, his former homeland, where he was not allowed to be what he was and wanted to be and did not love freely what he loved because it was not in the minds of those in power or the "holy people" manipulated by the extremist Orthodox Church.

Paul, who was a theologian as opposed to Jesus Christ, who was a moralist, found "disgusting homosexual customs" common among nations that had "exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and honored and worshiped the objects of nature more than God". To Tertullian, gays had been expelled, "not only from the threshold of the church, but from all its protection, for homosexuality was not sin but unnaturalness". In the Eastern Church, sexual asceticism flourished in its place of birth. The East retained the traditions of earlier times as set forth in the apostolic rules and canons. Marriage was proved to prevent man from serving God perfectly because it made him craft too much of worldly affairs. There was no compulsory celibacy in the East, but Eusebius suggested that those who had surrendered as servants of God should refrain from wife in order to be free from family worries and difficulties.

In Russia, what Pyotry thought was sacred and negative was what the most saint ordered to be worn in the holy robe, even though it was not. The starting point was the prohibition not to touch the most holy, for it kept everything unchanged. Otherwise, the world and man would be lost in the midst of evil and sin. In this way they led the common man to believe that both time and being were not external forces dependent on him but on something higher, which would ultimately defeat man if he disobeyed this monopolized "chosen word" of holiness that good can only be done to another when it is his own. in his opinion, evil, has been removed from the crowd so that good will remain and that good will be himself who does so good to himself, allowing his conscience to do evil to remove good, so that good may be done by him, good, to another good, to himself.

However, even in Russia, at the end of the Putin regime, time was intuitively transformed into a Bergsonian stream and a Heideggerian awareness of existence that opened up at the moment of consciousness, rather than the death of some great unknown and sacred thought ever present in Augustine's narrow eternity. Therefore, in return, the abusers had their moments and the opportunity to swim upstream and still live a full life on their own terms, despite all the evil and contentious things perceived in the eyes interfering with their lives.

Pyotr had noticed how the self-esteem of the ordinary Russian and the Finns were far apart. The Finn trusted in his own abilities, because he was free to choose his own grief. The Russian knew it wasn't worth it. It was always the same and common to them. The good self-esteem of Finns could be a sign of a lack of emotional sensitivity and inflexibility. According to Pyotr, there was something hard and ossified in the man at that time. The collective humiliation of the Russians, on the other hand, made them soft and friendly. But it was different. He knew from experience how very few Russians overcome their character weaknesses, but almost all knew how to hide them if forced. And Russia was always forced. The compulsion concerned everything but life itself and was evident in the way they treated their inferior and bullied the weaker; the saddest moment of Russianness, in Pyotr's opinion, was not the abyss of gloom that was easily visible on the surface but what, like an iceberg, hid beneath the surface in the invisible like a submarine in a pit lurking in a pit, or an alligator of thirst arriving at a drinking spot and therefore reckless gnuj.

In this satirical utopia, man was supposed to be a self-centered, pleasurable being who was made to do by command, threat, and coercion what the rulers themselves wanted. At the bottom of it all, he felt, was his inability to name and want good. But something good about the constant struggle for survival, Pyotr thinks, might be possible; he himself remembered how, as a child, he gained strength from the anger he had experienced, and when badly humbled, he did not become discouraged, but got upset and wanted to show himself to his bullies. However, turning perceived suffering into victory required, in order to succeed, not to give up one's own wishes and desires. And that there is someone who does everything.

Pyotr did everything for Misha and vice versa. They would have been like two inseparable friends anywhere in the world if they had been allowed to live freely as they wished. Now Misha was in St. Petersburg and Pyotr in Finland, where he drove a taxi and wondered how even harder it was to take a taxi a few times a week in the morning safely home from a noisy place full of drunken people and without the sense of Misha's father's taxi. Pyotr had moved to Finland with his mother's new man a few years ago, and got a taste of the small luxury pleasures that sweetened life, even though he had to pay a heavy price for it, losing his best friend Misha in the middle of everyday life, who could not even follow him to Helsinki for the weekend because of their citizenship.

Misha was a notorious Chechen by nationality, hated in Russia and branded the scapegoat for all problems. Although it was not so in reality, Pyotr knew. Both Misha and his family were kind and simple, a little content and peace-loving peasants with a high moral sense of themselves and others, and always an equal desire to help other people, whether they were Russian or persecutors. Misha was a tagged man because he wrote on his own website before the police arrested him, the following kind of memoir about young Chechen gays who were executed one cold morning for no reason in the courtyard of a police prison.

"The morning they came, it was raining out of the sky and I had a sweat and suddenly I remembered how much I loved everything I didn't remember, even though I was dizzy and uncomfortable anyway. We shouldn't have been in this hole anymore. It was only a matter of days and we would have flown to freedom like Moscow through London to London. That morning, when they came, they had fol lowed me in my dreams at night and chased me to my teeth with only one purpose in mind: love was a terrible thing to hate." - The Chechen police tortured and killed me and 56 other gay men shortly after I turned 22 on the night of January 25-26, 2017. The youngest of us was less than 20 years old and the oldest was only 33 years old."

He recalls what happened to Chechen gays. Why is the struggle of gays in Chechnya for their lives not limited to the victims portrayed in the film? Because every incision in the body of someone's victim is an incision in our own as well. It is told by the transmies leading the rescue operation, who recalls at the end of the film that if nothing is done similar terror and murder will first spread to the environment and then know where. And it has already spread. Unfortunately. Pyotr had visited the Love & Anarchy film festival in Helsinki and seen the film Welcome to Chechnya. One film was at the festivals above the others and deserves both five stars and a special mention: Welcome to Chechnya, as this film may have a broader meaning in the LGBTQ world than just that it is a good documentary on a difficult issue.

Welcome to Chechnya was definitely one of the most touching films at this year's Love & Anarchy Film Festival, which I would love to watch as many LGBTQ citizens as possible already because lesbians, gays and transgender people care about each other in a fused harmony - no exceptional collaboration no longer in the west successful for years. The film could almost serve as the last cry of distress in the Russian gay world struggling for death in its own survival for understanding the common interest. the old cliché that only together are we strong is a fact that many still do not understand for their own destruction until it is too late. Watching a movie becomes a beaten and powerless feeling. Rarely had Pyotr seen anything as nauseatingly violently and brutally painful as the torture of innocent people as it was in this dock.

Pyotr's first cries burst out of his eyes right from the start of the film, so inhuman, harsh and shocking is the inconsolability of Russian gays in a country that murders its own defenseless minorities only because the "terrorists" from accidents and mistakes, such as the fact that the country is poor only because leaders steal everything possible that has some value. He just thought of his Misha and cried and couldn't do anything else. Welcome to Chechnya, was an important reminder that the rainbow battle for human rights is not over yet, as well as convincing evidence of the importance the international LGBTQ movement and Western media can play in building an air bridge to save LGBTQ citizens from the gay genocide in Chechnya. Every little gesture of sympathy for this work and all possible help are both welcome and, in a way, a special duty of Pyotr, like all other LGBTQ citizens in the West.

Pyotr, who had been able to enjoy life in Helsinki from the very beginning as one of the great insights of his own life and its most important future value, had fun sitting in Helsinki whenever he got a taxi on his mother's new man's work wing through experiencing homeliness as if from an old habit. Before his sudden death, Misha's father had been a few years ago as a taxi driver on Misha's hometown around St. Petersburg in the western part of the Leningrad Governorate, Priladozhsky, more than fifty kilometers from St. Petersburg's historic center. After Misha's father heard his son was gay and got acquainted with Pyotr, he had almost demanded tears in his eyes demanding to be allowed to be transported home safely from the homo discos at the time of their closure, almost defenseless gay adolescents who did not even have their hair growing properly yet.

Life in St. Petersburg was therefore not at one time for Pyotr, from whom he saw as the old saying goes; miles away from what he was men or whether he was any man at all, as he was shouted at the streets at night among bald and big-skinned skin hooligans, for his nature shouted in their ears disrespect for their godly but unpleasantly true, constant fear and hiding, and trips to the old hometown after crossing the Russian border were not necessarily pleasing to watch or remember, especially after Misha's father was one night after first fetching Misha and Pyotr safely home in downtown Ploshch 'A homody disco called Central Station at Lomonosova 1, later found when he didn't start to belong at home, badly beaten from his garage and stabbed to death so that no one was left unclear about the performance of the skin gangs by the administration of the assassination order to intimidate more gay families, and in this case fathers in particular.

Pyotr still remembered at the funeral he could not watch with crying the body of Misha's father lying in an open coffin and badly ruffled in the face, for he knew the skins were smiling deadly behind the body, and they would be the next victims with Misha if he could not move to and with his mother. Misha's father had taken on the deadly attacks intended for Misha and Pyotr. One day Pyotr had no faith in his luck when he got a visa. Joy was dampened by Misha, who had stayed in St. Petersburg but moved with his family to his relatives in a safe Chechen house less than 20 kilometers from St. Petersburg in a suburb of Vsevolozhsky. The house had a bomb-proof basement and bulletproof windows and they were guarded by state-of-the-art security systems. Misha worked in the house's own restaurant as a chef and his mother in the laundry in the same house. In the evenings, Pyotr and Misha were connected to each other via the internet for an hour.

Pyotr came to Misha on weekends whenever he had no shifts. It was only a four-hour train ride from St. Petersburg to Helsinki. And yet those two worlds were like night and day, Pyotr thought. They had nothing to do with each other. Helsinki was a safe, quiet and busy small town in Pyotr's opinion. St. Petersburg, on the other hand, is a noisy, big, and big-world city that never changes for night entertainment, never sleeping. What was no stranger to it was whether it was murder, sex, partying or love. Today, on Friday, Pyotr would still be at work in Vallila's S-market's food department as one of the shelf-fillers until 2 p.m. Then he went around the corner at Sturenkatu 31 in the shower, watering the flowers, feeding the cats, changing clothes and packing goods.

This is how he reminded himself out loud to cheer up his monotonous work to keep himself awake and alert if a customer happened to ask where a product was. The morning shifts from 06.00 were, in Pyotr's opinion, the worst, busy as the shelves cried out in the wake of busy nights now that the S-markets had also become open meeting places for the younger and looser sections of the population open 24 hours a day, every day of the week. Pyotr recounted how he would board the train to St. Petersburg departing from Pasila station at 5.30 pm. In St. Petersburg at the Finnish station, he would be at St. Petersburg's time sometime after 10 pm, if all went well. The train he was aiming for was Russian and so full of surprises, delays, technical faults that he could not say exactly exactly to the Misha coming to receive him, whether the train might have arrived at exactly 22.30, as it was announced on schedule and never was.

Or only at 11 p.m., which was much more likely. What it often was - even more often only after midnight, so Mishan was not advised to come from the suburbs of St. Petersburg an hour's drive too early to paint and malay in vain at the station, always waiting for skins staying at the station looking for gays while waiting for him. Humiliation in Russia was always associated with power relations. The train came, if it came and when it came, whether it was late or not, it always reminded me that climbing it was not a matter of course for everyone like Misha. Sometimes the train came how it happened, depending on when the train was serviced last time and where. If in Finland, everything was fine, what it was rarely. If in Russia, the probability of delay delayed increased.

Also uncertain were the schedules of the relatives of the main conductor of the train if the family was significant, as was often the case, and the position of conductor was received as a reward for some service to a politician or they were directly related to one. And if they got on the train in time in Vyborg, the train would stay somewhat on schedule. Which meant being late but still at a decent time at the same time of day and not like sometimes in the worst winter time in Siberia maybe next week. How close was the conductor's relationship with the upper floors of politics? Their degree resulted in whether he cared more about his extensive family or clients. And if the conductor's relatives didn't make it, the train was delayed just as these cheerful, mechatic and Russian-like already quite drunken crowd with their luggage had been pushed at some point after a long wait into a finally full train full of similar hilarious and loud voices, and already then lost drunken Russians.

After all, perhaps, at least, Pyotr did not think he was very hilarious, because these Russians were the ones who thought that his laws did not matter as much and especially the same civil rights as they wanted, because it hampered the majority's idea of ​​what was best for others. That is why Pyotr hated them and his former homeland, which he barely endured because of Misha and the weekends he had to spend here because Misha could not get to Finland with him unless they soon came up with a shortcut to Misha, for whom nature had easily boiled from birth. to the salvation of blood, a sense of justice tinged with childish idealism, and a delicate complexion of defiant age, so that he would not have gone, as Pyotr feared, for he knew all too well, in this case, of the frightening Misha, and was therefore both scared and worried about him.

"He wanted and wanted!" Replied Misha "That was the problem when there was no will or the will took away when it was different from those who dictated how" Lord Modesty "today would use its power over everything, crush it or not. below where his big leg had made movement impossible. "" It was again tied up and no wonder, "thought Pyotr and felt guilty for not being next to Misha to help with this. Misha panicked and was on his way. Had panicked since the Chechens had begun to be accused of being terrorists in Russia and chased like big criminals with a taste of blood in their mouths. Since then, the Chechens had begun to change their names and appearance in order to fade the obvious connection to their homeland. For some it worked, but not for Misha. Misha was the most typical-looking Chechen youth and he had not agreed to Russianize his name even in the face of compulsion to protect himself, so the man of principle he had a taste of death in his mouth.

This is exactly what Pyotr had feared. Misha's hot blood had once again boiled over his crustaceans and he, caring little for his own safety, had set out to challenge the authorities, even though he knew the fragile wires of his own life were moving through their sadistic hands. And they were not notoriously gentle when it came to an already finished body in their eyes, belonging to two classes of unlawful pursuit, which no one wanted or dared to brainwashed by Putin's propaganda; gays and chechens.

When Pyotr had begun to imagine the right side of things, that Misha had begun to grumble and quarrel loudly in front of the watchful eye, he did not get peace for himself but tried to think about what was coming. When the Helsinki-St. Petersburg train arrived a few hours late at St. Petersburg Finland - Finljandski - everything was as before. Pyotr was among the first to get off the crowded train. People rushed headlong in the station hall into the arms of friends and relatives waiting for them. The gay boys who used gays chose with their gazes the lonely male passengers, who they classified as virgin and imagined as easy prey, to visit to intimidate and push in the hope of a little extra pocket money.

Here Lenin had given his famous speech when he arrived in St. Petersburg via Finland. In the autumn of 1917, Lenin traveled from his hiding place from Helsinki to St. Petersburg by train to lead the October Revolution. The same man who created the Czech Republic, the State Police, or Emergency Commission, which still ruled the country under a different name, the FSB. The Bolsheviks took power in St. Petersburg on November 7, 1917. In his famous speech at the Finnish station, Lenin promised to continue the class struggle until the foundations of class struggle and class dominance disappeared; private ownership and disorderly social production. It happened differently. The passion for destruction was more powerful in him than the love for the proletariat. All good intentions turned the opposite in Russia, even though no one wanted to, Pyotr argued. Maybe because of the large size of the country? The promise to continue the class struggle was exactly the same kind of false promise in nature as the demand for "bread, peace, and land," which made the soldiers sympathetic to the Bolsheviks, but which, as soon as they returned, turned into bloody corpses.

Even today, the situation was as inconsolable as when Lenin began his revolutionary activities, Misha reminded Pyotr in an email that he would not forget the depth and hopelessness of the Russian problem. No one dares to cross the stick for a good cause, because that's the only way things have always been and always will be before Misha thinks before someone steps in again, and starts his own mole work to reveal the naked greed of power to grow himself at the expense of others, and when Misha looked out the window, he saw gray concrete in a gloomy evening and here and there split fractures of time patina-weary fractures around which the edges have fumbled to look like the point goes and firm unless something changes (what now one century had just disappeared into non-existent, memory-j invisible side) so that the new faces could once again make the same age-old same stupidities and mistakes made by each generation, so patched and repented that the famous rest of life, which should be other than dancing with roses, which is now interrupted by accidents, death, cunning and hey as a road paved with belts, it had to travel the same path from cradle to grave, when all the other wanderers of life struggling with the ultimate questions, when they did everything alone - beat their heads against the wall until their heads softened over time and blood stains dried on the walls never to do it again, even if no one remembers why.

As a Russian, Pyotr had sucked from breast milk a game of how to cope with the Russian congestion that smelled of untreated backyards, garlic and cabbage and about a hundred different brands of vodka. He walked as if enchanted with the crowd without hurting himself or still having to deviate from his desired direction. From the outside it would have been the beginning of the end and obvious chaos, but in the Russian world it was a perfectly normal and controlled departure from the common means of public transport before standing again in the crowded subway rolling nose in each other's asss sniffing each other's open misery, like in the 30's.

For some strange reason, none of the gay hackers on duty at the station noticed Pyotr this time, but he slipped out. A couple of them have delved into conversations with militias of the same age and look. Maybe they have a bigger fish in sight? Ordered homicide maybe? Or some wealthy landmark who is blackmailed from his young boy lover? Who knows. According to underground stories, these happened almost every day because they were a big and profitable business. Pyotr sighed in relief when he saw that the gay crackers were not leaving after him this time and began to search with his restless eyes for his lost Misha. They had agreed with Misha to meet at the most invisible metro station on Pl. In front of Lenina. Pyotr wore dark clothes and a black hoodie to protect his head. Misha had written that he would dress the same way, but he was not seen anywhere near him. Pyotr became restless after waiting in vain for Misha for more than half an hour. Misha's phone didn't answer and he wasn't on Facebook or answering emails. Something like this he had been afraid of after Misha's fierce eruptions and became more restless moment by moment.

Misha could not be found anywhere and Pyotr had to leave Peter with great sorrow in his chest. It wasn't until he walked towards his home in Helsinki's Myllypuro on Sunday night that he recognized a familiar figure leaving to follow him from the bus stop nervously to his sides, flashing a black hoodie to protect his head. Pyotr felt blood return to his body and a spark of hope ignited in his heart. Later, when she forced Misha before the shower and the evening tea to tell everything about her successful escape trip, she burst out laughing in the middle of Misha's story, starting to call him Miss Putina, after all Misha got across the border disguised as a woman stamped visa.

Suomeksi aiheesta löytyy elokuva-arvosteluni tämän vuoden 2020 Rakkautta&Anarkiaa-elokuvafestivaaleista osoitteessa: https://www.qx.fi/kulttuuri/244953/syynissa-rakkautta-anarkiaa-2020-elokuvafestivaalin-queerelokuvat/