In the new, post-Soviet Russia, some people have been excluded from the possibility of possessing human rights based on different identity claims. Lesbians and gay men are among those who are excluded. Though in some states the mechanism of this is manifestly inscribed in the law, in Russia the mechanism is hidden in the field of silence: the field of discourse on homosexuality is full of lacunas. While the most productive speakers are certainly LGBT activists, the most passive ones are the state officials. These forces come into discursive play where rights are at stake. The purpose of this paper, based on original research on the emerging activism of gays and lesbians in Russia, is to uncover the regulative features of silence in the Russian discourse on homosexuality.

The 1973 Chilean coup gave rise to an unprecedented growth in a global human rights consciousness. In its aftermath, transnational activists from a diverse array of political and ideological backgrounds found common cause – indeed, a common language of human rights – in campaigns to ameliorate the repressive acts of the Chilean military junta. This article focuses on two models of activism in particular: Amnesty International, whose 1973 investigative mission set the terms of the global debate about human rights in Chile; and transnational solidarity activists, especially Chilean exiles from leftist parties, whose vision of social activism narrowed as their interest in human rights surged. These campaigns – while not without tensions over the role of politics in the moral appeal to human rights – both articulated a transnational discourse of human rights and created new activist techniques to foment moral outrage by revealing the prevalence of torture through the power of personal testimony.