Instead his father said, “I should kill you.”<br />Fearing for his life, Maksim turned to a gay rights group, the Russian LGBT Network, based in St. Petersburg,<br />which has established an emergency, round-the-clock volunteer group to help gay men escape the region.<br />But for the young man who calls himself Maksim, as for scores of other gay men arrested in a pogrom<br />this month in Russia’s Chechnya region, it pivoted into nearly two weeks of beatings and torture.<br />“When two gay men meet, they don’t tell one another their true names,” Maksim said.<br />“These people don’t trust anybody,” said Olga Baranova, director of the Moscow Community Center, a support group for gays<br />that is part of the volunteer network helping gay men flee Chechnya.<br />If there were a problem, there would be a policy.”<br />In a televised meeting with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on Wednesday, Mr. Kadyrov characterized as “libelous” news reports<br />that the security services in Chechnya had been persecuting gay men.<br />The following account is based on interviews with Maksim, who is in his 20s, and two other gay men who were detained by Chechen security agents.
