Masha Neufeld “We Will Get Tere, but We Have to Grow as High as Tat”: Spinning the Narrative of Backwardness in the Russian LGBT Movement Te main focus of this chapter lies on the exploration of the activist strate- gies and the rhetoric used by Russian LGBT activists for protest, visibility and cooperation with Western partners. I analyze the rhetorical tropes and visual language of Russian LGBT activism, focusing on three major historical events and the discourses around them, which were of great importance for the local community: the frst open gay and lesbian festival of 1991, the frst Russian Gay Pride in 2006 and the controversy around the Sochi Olympics in 2013–2014. I attempt to trace the diferent Russian discourses, in which the construction of ‘Westernness’ as post-homophobic progressiveness and unquestioned role model for the global development of LGBT rights is not only passively accepted, but also actively cultivated. In the following text I argue, frst, that gay subjectivity as such was not imported to Russia from the West (as sometimes claimed by the neo- conservative Russian discourse), but only a specifc gay discourse that cen- ters on gay civil rights, public visibility and radical street protest. I show how certain activist groups adopted ‘Western-oriented’ strategies of radical visibility, to draw the maximum of international attention to them and their situation, notwithstanding the potential harm and the criticism coming from their local communities. Second, I argue that the dilemma of the Russian struggle for LGBT and/as Human Rights is that activists and projects cannot escape the com- parison to the West and that these comparisons ofen discursively create two separate geo-temporal entities of a post-homophobic and enlightened West and a homophobic and backward Russia/East, the latter not being able to catch up with democratic development. Tirdly, I argue that, because