However, unlike in many countries with laws against homosexuality, the policy didn’t appear to be connected to religion. Very few Russians attend church regularly.55 Instead, the policy seemed like it was meant to emphasize the difference between traditional Russia and the permissive West. As Russia expert Masha Lipman told me for an Atlantic article, “Russia is an illiberal country, and [President Vladimir] Putin’s government capitalizes on illiberal sentiments.”56

At the time, Alina Anderson was a Russian teenager who was bothered by how illiberal her country was becoming. Alina was born in a small Russian town called Lermontov, after the poet who was banished to the Caucasus for writing a controversial poem. She was mostly raised in Moscow, but some of the attitudes there seemed just as provincial to her. She hated overhearing racist criticisms of foreign tourists. When she would mention gay rights to adults in her life, some would respond, “What are you talking about? Gay people are just trying to molest kids.”

Russia’s anti-gay law is an interesting example of the psychological phenomenon in which, when our self-esteem is threatened, we start to desire surroundings that are more homogeneous.57 The idea is that when all else fails to give us a self-esteem boost, we can shore up our identity through sameness. (In fact, just doing the opposite, reminding people of their own self-worth, can make them more tolerant toward difference.58 One study found that after people wrote essays about their own positive traits, they were more likely to offer concessions to people who disagreed with them about abortion.) Russia has long been the punching bag of the Western world, with the goofy accents and the goofy hats and the goofy rusted-over Soviet architecture that Americans love to mock. Of course Russians feel insulted. And some Russian leaders have reacted to those insults by shutting down the borders of their minds.

All of this helps explain why Alina loved Marilyn, her teacher at an English-language after-school program. Marilyn was named after Marilyn Monroe, and she was just as pretty. She was a twentysomething New Yorker who wore a lot of athleisure, and Alina thought she was just the coolest. Marilyn showed her students documentaries like Good Hair, about the pressures many African American women face to make their hair resemble that of whites. She told them about all sorts of new ideas—government corruption, environmentalism, sexism—and Alina would look them up later online. “There’s a whole different world out there,” Marilyn would say.