The Gospel According to Queer Russians

Enough Is Enough’s “Stop Homophobia” demonstration in Berlin promoting a boycott of Russia’s Sochi Olympics (2013) | Adam Groffman / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

For more than a decade, Russia—and its client states like Chechnya—have carried out the brutal persecution of sexual and gender minorities, particularly gay men, with tacit approval from the Russian Orthodox Church. This violence is framed as a defense of “traditional family values,” part of a nostalgic vision of Russia promoted by Vladimir Putin and Patriarch Kirill. At home and abroad, they have positioned Russia as the last defender of “family values” and Christianity against what they claim is a decadent West. Measures like a “shared values” visa invite Western reactionaries disillusioned with progressive reforms to relocate to Russia. This posture has won praise from figures on the American Right, like Tucker Carlson, and has drawn converts to Orthodoxy, particularly young men seeking affirmation of heterosexual masculinity as both “traditional” and central to Christian faith. Unfortunately, Western accounts often fixate on how Orthodox Christianity and Russia’s cultural diplomacy plays into the US culture wars, dwelling on the so-called “Ortho-Bros,” young reactionary Western men who convert to Orthodox Christianity, or Orthodox priests from America who take the bait and move to Russia. What is strikingly missing from this conversation are the voices of those most affected by Putin and Kirill’s violent campaign. 

The newly published English translation of  Sergey Khazov-Cassia’s The Gospel According To … (Polari Press, 2025), first released in Russia in 2017, is an opportunity to begin to correct this problem. Translated into English by Reuben Woolley, the book offers readers important insight into this ongoing performance of “anti-decadent” purging. Khazov-Cassia, a journalist by profession, has written a work of what the publisher calls “documentary fiction” closely informed by his reporting experience. While his reporting has primarily focused on corruption and abuses of power in Russia, Khazov-Cassia has also documented the persecution of LGBTQ people across Russia and in the surrounding region. He documented the Chechen anti-gay purger, from survivors’ testimonies and Moscow’s denials, and later tracked family custody battles and Russia’s tightening anti-LGBTQ laws. His work remains some of the only reporting in the Western press centered on the actual victims of Russia’s anti-gay crusade. The book’s status as fiction should therefore be understood less as a reflection of a flight of fancy than a strategic anonymization of vulnerable subjects by one of the few reporters brave enough to tell their stories. 

The narrative of The Gospel According To …  intertwines the story of Eve, a gay man in contemporary Moscow, with a reimagined account of the relationship between Yeshua (Jesus) and Judas. Eve’s life unravels after he is falsely accused of pedophilia for helping a gay teenager fleeing an abusive home. This leads to his arrest and detention, where he suffers under the crushing weight of Russia’s repressive—and deeply biased—legal system. His ordeal, however, awakens Eve’s spirit of resistance and turns him into an international cause célèbre whose experience raises global awareness of the persecution of gay Russians. In shaping Eve’s story, Khazov-Cassia drew extensively on years of journalistic work, interviews with gay men who had served time in Russian penal colonies, and conversations with others who recounted the brutal realities of the country’s penitentiary system. His stated aim was “to show not one man’s story only but that of the entire system.” 

By paralleling Eve’s suffering with Yeshua’s sacrifice after his betrayal by Judas, Khazov-Cassia reminds readers that the Christian story centers on the broken body of a political prisoner—persecuted by a community whose religious leaders are driven by politics, and tortured by the state. In the preface to the English edition, the author writes, “I don’t know if Jesus Christ existed … but I know that in a Roman-occupied Judaea … messiahs appeared one after the other, each calling on the people to resist.” It is no coincidence, then, that when the high priest persuades Judas to betray Yeshua at the end of the novel, his chief argument for handing over the troublemaking rabbi strikes the same note: “Your Teacher is disturbing the people.”

The deployment of the Christian narrative as an act of political resistance has a long history in Russian literature—and, like all long traditions, it is a complicated one. Dostoevsky turned to the figure of Christ as a counter to authoritarian systems and rationalist utopias in “The Grand Inquisitor” episode of The Brothers Karamazov. In Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak embedded Gospel retellings in poetry, presenting Christ as the embodiment of human suffering and renewal, thereby affirming spiritual and artistic freedom against the enforced materialism of the Soviet regime. And in Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, the Passion story is retold through the eyes of Pontius Pilate, casting Yeshua Ha-Notsri as a wandering preacher of compassion whose quiet truth resists both imperial power and Soviet repression. In all three, Christ emerges not as a triumphant doctrinal figure but as a humanized and humanist presence, de-mythologized and un-deified, who destabilizes certaintyand offers an alternative to political and ideological captivity. In keeping with this tradition, Khazov-Cassia’s Christ is neither dominant nor dogmatic.Importantly, Khazov-Cassia bases his account of Christ’s life and betrayal not on the canonical Gospels but on the apocryphal ones—those accounts of the life of Christ left out of the Scriptures. In the preface, reflecting on the apocryphal gospels, Khazov-Cassia writes: 

Once Christianity received the right to violence, the Church sorted its views and opinions in accordance with the political motivations of the moment, leaving only the canonical texts we know today, and banning all else. Many of the other texts were destroyed, but parts survived, and were found by archaeologists in the 19th and 20th centuries. 

This suggests that invoking the noncanonical gospels is, in itself, an act of resistance, a defiance of the kind of religiously enabled political violence seen in Russia today.

In the context of the explicitly—and self-consciously—religious tone of Russia’s most recent authoritarian turn, Khazov-Cassia’s invocation of the gospel narrative (particularly when reliant on the noncanonical gospels) serves as a reminder that there has never been a singular Christian truth. The choice is nothing short of brilliant, both in political and literary terms. Following Dostoevsky, Pasternak, and Bulgakov, Khazov-Cassia juxtaposes the Christic narrative with contemporary reality in order to shake the reader out of her stupor in the face of contemporary atrocities. The story of Christ’s suffering summons a horror we suppress when faced with the suffering of our own time. Khazov-Cassia makes clear that if your compassion could not extend to Eve, it is unlikely that it would extend to Christ on his own terms. The Western public is a critical part of the audience of the Putin regime’s spectacle of oppression directed at gender and sexual minorities. Many in this audience—priests, politicians, and angry young men—are clearly enjoying the show. As we consider the geopolitical implications of Putin’s regime and its alliance with the Russian Orthodox Church, it is also important that we do not forget those who are suffering in the most immediate sense at the hands of the regime. The appearance of The Gospel According To … in English casts light on a dark corners of the contemporary world. It is our obligation to look.