Russia’s homophobia is sanctioned by inaction

If you’re old enough to remember Mikhail Gorbachev, with his distinctive birthmark, you might wonder if he was actually just a dream.

Back then, we learned new Russian words such as ‘glasnost’ and ‘peristroika’, replacing more sinister ones such as ‘gulag’. Today, our grasp of Russian centres on two words — homophobia and repression. Oh, and ‘disappearing in Siberia’, if you are a young mother who got shouty about Putin in a church — nobody had heard from Pussy Riot’s Nadezhda Tolokonnikova in almost a month. Lost in the gulags, like Solzhenitsyn.

The Arctic 30 — 28 Greenpeace activists and two journalists — are threatened with seven years’ incarceration. But everyone knows about them, and they have British passports — what is now a hellish interlude in their lives will one day make for book deals and dinner-party anecdotes.