#yelena is then banned for life for the third time

[yorkshireteauk]

kate and yelena decide to do a rage room together which goes as well as expected until a worker comes in to tell them the hour is up and kate then has to spend the next ten minutes trying to pry her wife off of an innocent stoner while explaining they’re not a part of the room

[yessadirichards]

Sharapova ends a career that was stuff of Hollywood

PARIS: From the shadow of Chernobyl's nuclear wasteland to international super-stardom and from penniless arrival in the United States, without a word of English, to estimated earnings of at least US$300 million.

For a long time Maria Sharapova's story was the stuff of Hollywood dreams, a testament to the power of one individual to make it, whatever the odds, whatever people think.

A drugs ban in 2016 and persistent injuries cast a shadow over her career and on Wednesday, with an announcement in Vogue magazine, the 32-year-old brought her eventful career to an end.

"How do you leave behind the only life you've ever known? How do you walk away from the courts you've trained on since you were a little girl, the game that you love," she wrote.

"Tennis — I'm saying goodbye."

Sharapova shot to international fame as a giggly 17-year-old Wimbledon winner in 2004 -- the third youngest player to conquer the All England Club's famous grass courts.

She would go on to win the Australian and US Opens while claiming two titles at the French Open, despite famously likening her movement on Roland Garros's crushed red brick to a "cow on ice".

Siberia-born Sharapova first picked up a racquet at the age of four in Sochi, where her Belarus-born parents had settled after escaping the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.

Overnight celebrity

Spotted by Martina Navratilova, she was encouraged to move to Nick Bollettieri's Florida academy, the proving ground of Andre Agassi and Monica Seles.

Father Yuri and the seven-year-old Maria left for the US in 1994 with just $700 to their names.

Yuri took odd jobs like dishwashing to finance his daughter's dreams although visa restrictions meant mother Yelena was back in Russia, separated from her daughter for two years.

Sharapova made her professional debut at 14 in 2001 and by 2003 reached the world top 50. She won her first tour titles in Japan and Quebec.

Then in 2004, her Wimbledon final triumph in straight sets over Serena Williams made her an overnight international celebrity.

One year later, she became the first Russian woman to be ranked number one in the world while, in 2006, she won her second major at the US Open.

But in 2007 and 2008, she began her long, on-off battle with shoulder trouble.

She still had time to win the 2008 Australian Open before a second shoulder injury. But in 2012 she captured the French Open to become the 10th woman to complete a career Grand Slam. She added Olympic silver to her resume that year.

Her 2014 French Open title was another high after a dispiriting injury low.

More injury troubles followed before the bombshell announcement of her positive test for meldonium at the 2016 Australian Open -- where she fell in the quarter-finals to Williams, her last match before a 15-month suspension.

With Williams, she endured her most testing rivalry -- on and off the court.

The two famously exchanged personal insults over their love lives when Sharapova began a two-year romance with Bulgarian player Grigor Dimitrov, a rumoured previous suitor of the American.

Sharapova had previously been engaged to former Los Angeles Laker Sasha Vujacic.

Commercial Jackpot

She may have been unlucky in love, but Sharapova hit the jackpot in her commercial affairs.

She once signed a contract extension with Nike worth a reported $70 million and Forbes calculated in 2016 that she had made more than $300 million over her career from playing and endorsements.

"Beauty sells. I have to realise that's a part of why people want me. I'm not going to make myself ugly," she said.

She owns luxury homes and made a lucrative career as an entrepreneur.

In 2012, she launched her own line of candy, 'Sugarpova', and during her suspension, signed up for a Harvard Business School course.

For 11 years before her doping ban, Sharapova was the highest-paid female athlete in the world, said Forbes. When she was suspended Tag Heuer cut off talks over a new deal and Porsche and Nike suspended promotional plans, though they did not sever their links.

When Sharapova returned in 2017 her world ranking had disappeared, leaving her at the mercy of wildcards into tournaments.

Those free-passes irked many of her contemporaries already suspicious of the Russian's aloofness.

Troubled by her shoulder, she struggled to recapture her best form.

When she lost in straight sets to Donna Vekic in the first round of the Australian Open in January, the writing seemed on the wall.

"You realise that you're not immortal, you're never going to play this forever," Sharapova said. "At one point, life goes on and there's a lot of things to look forward to."

"You have family, children, other business ventures. To me, that doesn't make me sad, that makes me excited."

In her farewell note in Vogue, she wrote: "In giving my life to tennis, tennis gave me a life. I'll miss it every day."

[bountyofbeads]

ESCAPING THE LIST

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/natalie_vikhrov/russia-chechnya-lgbtq-purge-trans-man-queer-women?ref=bfnsplash&utm_term=4ldqpho

This is a heartbreaking 💔 story on the suffering and human rights abuses in Chechnya if you're trans, queer or you identify as #LGBTQ 💜💙💚💛🧡❤️

Trans Men And Queer Women Have Been Swept Up In Chechnya’s Anti-LGBTQ Crackdown

Giving rare interviews, a trans man and queer women tell BuzzFeed News about the nightmare of escaping Chechnya’s anti-LGBTQ purge.

By Natalie Vikhrov | Published July 27, 2019, at 8:27 a.m. ET | BuzzFeed | Posted July 27, 2019 10:50 AM ET ||

The phone call that would change M.’s life came one spring evening in 2018. “You’re on the list,” the baritone voice on the other end of the line said.

The caller identified himself as a member of the military and accused M. of indecent behavior. “We need to cleanse our republic of these people,” the voice said. The man didn’t say the word — he didn’t have to. M. knew the voice on the phone was implying he was both a woman and a lesbian.

M. walked over to the window of his apartment, tugging the curtain closed against the dark outside, and asked, “Where is your evidence?”

“We don’t need evidence,” the man replied. “The fact that you’re on the list already counts against you.”

With those words, the nightmare for M. — a trans man — began. For more than two years, the Russian republic of Chechnya has been rounding up gay and bisexual men, torturing them, forcing them to give up the names of other men, and killing them — or ordering their families to — as it launched a brutal anti-LGBTQ campaign. At least 150 people have fled the region. M. knew now it was not just gay men being targeted but trans people and queer women as well.

“We don’t need evidence. The fact that you’re on the list already counts against you.”

M. is among a number of LGBTQ people from Chechnya hiding in other parts of Russia, although this offers little sense of security. The country adopted an ”anti-gay propaganda” law in 2013, which launched a new wave of vigilante attacks against LGBTQ people — the activist Yelena Grigoryeva was killed in St. Petersburg just last week — and nowhere is that more true than in Chechnya, a majority-Muslim republic ruled by a thuggish leader given free rein by the Kremlin to crack down as he wishes.

M. worries that if he is not granted asylum abroad soon, he could be found and forced to return home. While some LGBTQ people risk falling into the hands of the authorities, others face punishment from their own families. That could mean violence, forced marriages, or so-called honor killings.

BuzzFeed News is identifying M. with only an initial because of concerns about his safety. He is believed to be the first Chechen trans man to publicly share his story in detail since the anti-LGBTQ purges began.

Four queer women from the North Caucasus also agreed to share their stories, via phone and video calls, on the condition that they are only identified by pseudonyms assigned to them by LGBTQ activists.

Their plight has received much less international attention despite the additional gender-based discrimination they face. They all hope, by speaking out, to raise awareness of their situation.

M. knew he was a boy from a young age, although it would be years before he understood what that meant. He recalls being 5 years old and wishing he could cut off his hair, and praying to God to make him a man. As a teenager, he asked for forgiveness for his “sins.”

M.’s mother and grandmother, who raised him, brushed off his talk of being a boy as childhood games. They wanted him to grow up to become a traditional Chechen woman.

By the time he was in the fourth or fifth grade, his family had banned him from wearing pants, instead forcing him to dress in pink sweaters and long skirts and, later, a headscarf.

“It was the sport pants that we’d wear for physical education that saved me,” M., now in his late 20s, told BuzzFeed News in a series of video calls. “I wore them in secret when everyone went to bed. It was important for me just to wear them and walk around in them.”

M. was attracting attention, however. One day, when he was in his late teens, a local mullah accused him of having a “jinn,” or a demon, inside him.

“He said that a male jinn was sitting inside me and trying to seduce my brain,” M. said. The mullah told M.’s mother, “There’s something not right” with him.

M. later went to university in Chechnya, and it was in his third year there that he was approached by another student. “She said I looked like a lesbian,” M. said. “I said, ‘I’m not like that and don’t approach me about this again.’” But he couldn’t stop thinking about the conversation. Eventually, M. decided to speak to the other student again. It marked the first time M. told anyone about his gender identity outside of his family.

“He said that a male jinn was sitting inside me and trying to seduce my brain."

“I asked her about transgender people,” he said. “She promised to introduce me to other transgender people, other influential people who were part of Chechnya’s secret LGBT community, and I agreed.”

The woman invited M. to her apartment, but shortly after he arrived, men in military uniforms walked through the door, and the woman told M. to wait in her bedroom. She spoke to the men for about 15 minutes before they left.

“This woman was speaking to them like a man would speak to a man,” M. said. “Women can’t talk to men in Chechnya like that.”

M. asked her what the men had wanted, but she said they were friends of her brother. M. told her he had to get to class and left. Outside the apartment, he saw a parked car with men in military uniforms inside.

M. thinks the men’s arrival was no coincidence, and he broke off all contact with the woman, who he thought had helped set him up. He believes it was this incident that years later would turn him into a target for the Chechen authorities.

After the LGBTQ purge in Chechnya started in late 2016, survivors began sharing harrowing accounts, almost all anonymously, of beatings, electric shocks, and starvation. But the Russian LGBT Network has collected testimonies of gay men being hunted and blackmailed in the republic since the late 2000s.

There is little understanding in Chechnya of sexual orientation, and even less of gender identity. That has been reinforced by the brutal rule of Ramzan Kadyrov, who was accused by the US Commission on International Religious Freedom in a 2011 report of exploiting Islam and “distorting Chechen Sufi traditions to serve his own ambitions and justify his arbitrary rule.” He has forced women to wear traditional dress and employed vigilantes, known as Kadyrovtsy, as a morality police to make sure women stay in line. Kadyrov has brushed off criticism of the LGBTQ purges and insists there are no LGBTQ people in Chechnya.

Much of the attention has focused on gay and bisexual men, but queer women and trans people have been persecuted too. A report by the Queer Women of the North Caucasus Project, a group dedicated to helping queer women and trans people from the region, states that the “first piece of information about so-called 'lists of lesbians’ surfaced in the autumn of 2017.”

“It was our world, closed off from everything.”

For some queer women, it was possible to build a life in Chechnya — albeit a secret one — before authorities began their violent campaign.

When Kamilla was at university, her brother gave her a mobile phone — a small, colorful thing that she used to find an online chatroom for queer people from the North Caucasus. That was where she befriended another lesbian, and the two decided to rent a flat together. It’s rare for two women — two lesbians at that — to have their own space, so it soon became a meeting point for a growing LGBTQ collective.

“Someone would be dating, someone would be going through a breakup, someone would be crying,” Kamilla, who left Chechnya in mid-2017 and now lives in Europe, told BuzzFeed News. “It was our world, closed off from everything.”

In January, the Russian LGBT Network reported that another “wave of persecutions” was underway in Chechnya, with around 40 people detained and at least two dying as a result of torture. And it wasn’t just gay and bisexual men being targeted.

“It’s like a stolen car. Women are searched for in the same way … and it doesn’t stop until the girl is returned to the republic.”

Chechen women have been especially vulnerable, since their families often control every aspect of their lives: where they go, whom they speak to, and what they wear. Even if they are permitted their own phones and social media accounts, they are frequently monitored by their families, giving them fewer opportunities to independently seek out help. That makes it harder to evacuate women from the region safely.

“Even a gay man — not an openly gay man — can tell his family he found a great job in Moscow and he’s going to go there,” said an activist from the Queer Women of the North Caucasus Project who asked to remain anonymous because of security concerns. “A woman can’t say that.”

Sometimes a woman can run away, but this brings perceived dishonor onto the family, so relatives often go to great lengths to bring her home and punish her.

“It’s like a stolen car,” the activist said. “Women are searched for in the same way … and it doesn’t stop until the girl is returned to the republic.”

The situation is the same for trans men because their gender identity is not recognized in the North Caucasus.

M. was lucky. Despite being regarded as a woman by his family, he was allowed to choose what he studied, to graduate, and, eventually, to leave the North Caucasus in 2015, but on the condition that he return every six months. He moved to a major Russian city outside the republic and got a job in health care.

There, he found a certain freedom. “I was able to cut my hair above the shoulders,” he said. “About three or four months later, I bought [men’s] pants.”

At first M. was afraid of being spotted by a relative or an acquaintance from home, so he bought a cap to partially cover his face. Later, when it sank in that he was afforded a certain amount of anonymity by living in a big city, he started enjoying the freedom of it all.

Not long after that, he found love.

M. and his partner Zhenya were introduced by a mutual friend about a year after M. moved to the Russian city. They bonded over a shared fondness for Sigmund Freud and Friedrich Nietzsche.

“It was love at first sight,” Zhenya, who identifies as pansexual, said. Zhenya, also in her 20s, grew up in Dagestan, a republic bordering Chechnya that is also majority Muslim and deeply traditional, though not ruled by a leader like Kadyrov. In her teens, Zhenya had identified as a lesbian and struggled to come to terms with her sexual orientation. When she finished her education, she reached an agreement with her mother to move to a bigger city if she sent money back home, which is how she and M. met.

M. and Zhenya made a comfortable life for themselves, far from home. But then, on the spring evening last year, that one phone call changed everything.

M. was terrified. He was due to take a trip home soon to visit his family — a condition of them allowing him to leave Chechnya in the first place.

M. remembered how the caller turned his threat into an attempt at blackmail.

“I respect you and I want to help you,” M. remembered the man telling him. He then demanded 200,000 rubles (around $3,200), a huge sum for M., who agreed anyway in order to make the threat go away.

M. spent the following weeks trying to raise the money — the sum was several times his monthly salary. During this time, the man kept ringing. But fearing that it would only lead to him being extorted more and more, M. ultimately decided against paying the man off.

He and Zhenya changed numbers and moved apartments. For two months they heard nothing.

In July, despite the threats, M. went to visit his family in Chechnya, while Zhenya went to see hers in Dagestan. In Chechnya, M. kept a low profile, only leaving the house once, to help a sick neighbor. But that was enough to alert people to his presence. Later that day, a group of men dressed in black uniforms came to the house, asking M. for the 200,000 rubles. They appeared to be wearing the uniforms of a special police unit that was reportedly “particularly involved” in the detention of LGBTQ people, according to a report by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) published in December.

M. told the men he had the money, but he would have to wait until he was back in the big Russian city to deliver it, and promised they would get it within a few days. The men seemed to accept that but warned him not to shut off his phone during that time. They also said they would send someone to accompany him.

M. fled Chechnya the following morning, jumping on a minibus for Dagestan, where he reunited with Zhenya so they could consider their options. At first they thought of traveling to Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula annexed by Russia in 2014, thinking they could then cross the border into Ukraine. Finally, a friend suggested they contact an LGBTQ organization in a major Russian city.

M. and Zhenya have been in hiding since, unable to work officially, as activists work to find a country that will give the couple asylum.

But they are running out of time. M. has already missed one visit home, and his family calls him constantly. M. believes that if he goes back to Chechnya, it’s likely he will be detained by the men he’s now dodged twice. He fears he could then become the next victim of Chechnya’s LGBTQ purge.

More than 100 of the 150 Chechens helped by Russian LGBTQ activists to flee since the start of the purges have found asylum in Western countries, including Canada, Germany, and France.

But in the two years since Chechnya’s LGBTQ purge first received media attention in the West, activists say that help from other countries is less forthcoming now.

Olga Baranova, a human rights activist with the Queer Women of North Caucasus Project, was forced to flee Russia herself after becoming a target for Chechen authorities while evacuating a queer woman from the republic. She’s now seeking asylum in the US while helping activists back in Russia from a distance.

“Embassies don’t see this as such a critical situation anymore,” Baranova said.

There are widespread calls for the West to step in, including from the OSCE, which has urged its participating states to grant protection to LGBTQ Chechens under the Geneva Refugee Convention.

But even when there is political will, an application for asylum takes time. During this process, the family could file a missing persons report, which would mean a queer woman or trans man would be stopped if they tried to cross the border.

“For me and you, that’s nothing,” Baranova said. “You can go to the police and say, ‘I don’t want them to look for me.’ They’d say, ‘OK, let us call the people who are looking for you and you can tell them that you don’t want to be found.’

“But [queer women and trans men] are not in a condition to say, ‘I don’t want anything to do with them.’ Dad, mum, relatives come, and they just go with them, without saying anything.”

Sometimes activists have less than 24 hours to get a woman out of the country, but that often means traveling to another unsafe location.

Zarema, who’s in her early 20s, was among those evacuated in this way. She is currently in a country that BuzzFeed News can’t name for her safety.

“They beat me so bad … I couldn’t get out of bed."

When she was 17, she started dating a girl from her neighborhood in Chechnya. But because she was only allowed to leave the house to go to school, they mostly texted each other. One afternoon, Zarema had left her phone charging on a table when she got a text from her girlfriend. Her sister saw the message and outed Zarema to the rest of the family.

“They beat me so bad … I couldn’t get out of bed,” she told BuzzFeed News via the secure messaging app, Telegram. Her girlfriend’s family moved away then and Zarema, after finishing her exams, was barred from leaving the house for a year. Then her parents forced her to go to an Islamic school in neighboring Dagestan.

“They taught us there was no other religion except Islam,” she said. “There was a lot of propaganda."

"It was like a prison," she added.

Zarema started thinking about an escape plan and began saving what little remained from the small monthly allowance her family gave her in order to buy a passport. Then she started searching for a way out of Chechnya. But she didn’t get far — her family found the passport, confiscated it, and beat her again.

Zarema was determined to leave and found a contact for LGBTQ activists in a different Russian city while doing research online. They helped put her plan into action.

In late April, she got into a taxi in the dead of the night and headed for the airport in Chechnya, where she caught a flight to Moscow and then flew to what was meant to be a transit country. This secret location has been her home for the past three months. But it’s dangerous for her to remain there — Russians don’t need visas to travel to the country where she is now, so if her family discovers her whereabouts, they can come after her. And there is little doubt they would. Zarema is currently on Russia’s missing persons list.

Zarema’s escape was timely. She said in the days leading up to her departure, she found out her family planned to marry her to a Chechen man.

“So that I would have no freedom,” she said.

Every person from the North Caucasus who spoke to BuzzFeed News said their relatives have at some point attempted to force them into marriage or set them up with men.

“I met him once and the next time I saw him, I was his wife,” said Marina, a 23-year-old lesbian from Chechnya. Her husband was abusive, 11 years older, and had a drug habit. She made several attempts to leave, but her brother brought her back to her husband every time.

When the marriage ended about six months later, Marina’s family confined her to the family home.

Her only salvation was sneaking access to her mother’s mobile phone. She found a group for LGBTQ people online, made a blank profile, and wrote a post about how awful it was having to suppress her identity.

She eventually met someone who put her in touch with activists from the Queer Women of the North Caucasus Project, who then helped her flee the region.

“When I was [leaving], I thought it was some kind of setup, that someone would just kill me,” Marina said. “But I didn't care at that point because if I would have stayed there or if they’d given me to another husband, it would have been worse than death.” ●

[londontheatre]

The legendary Maly Drama Theatre of St. Petersburg – described by Peter Brook as ‘the finest ensemble theatre in Europe’ – returns to London this spring for a strictly limited engagement for the first time in over a decade. They will present the UK première of Vasily Grossman’s epic novel, Life and Fate, and reprise their celebrated production of Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya at London’s Theatre Royal Haymarket. Press nights will be held for Life and Fate on Tuesday May 8th and Wednesday 9th and on Tuesday May 15th for Uncle Vanya. Both productions will be performed in Russian with English surtitles.

Under the artistic directorship of Lev Dodin – one of the most celebrated theatre practitioners working today – the Maly Drama Theatre of St. Petersburg has become one of the greatest theatres in the world. During his 35 year tenure many of Dodin’s shows have won international awards including state prizes of Russian and the USSR, Golden Mask Awards and a Lawrence Olivier Award (becoming the first international company to do so for Stars in the Morning Sky, 1989). In 2000 he received the European Theatre Award.

LIFE AND FATE (UK PREMIÈRE) 7.00pm May 8th & 9th (Press Nights), 11th, 12th, 18th, 19th – 2.30pm May 20th “Big, frightening, merciless yet incredibly touching, tortured and beautiful… a requiem of a performance.” Kommersant, Moscow

It’s early 1943. Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia are in a bitter struggle for their very survival. Adapted for the stage for the very first time from Vasily Grossman’s celebrated novel, banned because of the parallels it drew between Nazism and Soviet Communism, Life and Fate is a sweeping panorama of Soviet Society, an epic tale of a country told through the fate of a single Jewish family, the Shtrum’s.

From Nazi concentration camps to the Gulags of Siberia and the Soviet nuclear programme, as the battle of Stalingrad looms large the characters must work out their destinies in a world torn by ideological tyranny and war.

This critically acclaimed production, winner of the Golden Mask for best play, has toured around the world since its première in 2007, shining a light on the heart of 20th-century darkness.

On presenting a draft prior to publication, Grossman’s magnum opus, Life and Fate, was seized by the KGB. The former Red Army newspaper war correspondent, (championed by his fellow soldiers for the honesty of his writing) was told by the Communist Party’s chief ideologist Mikhail Suslov that the novel would be unpublishable for at least 200 years. Its astonishing act of wartime truth-telling and the parallels it drew between the Soviet Union and the Third Reich were deemed unacceptably anti-Soviet. Grossman became in effect a persona non grata.

The KGB raided Grossman’s flat and seized manuscripts, notes and even the ribbon from the typewriter on which the text had been written. Unbeknownst to authorities, Grossman had smuggled two copies to acquaintances in the literary world. He died in poverty, forgotten and ignored in 1964, but his masterpiece would live on. Microfilmed and smuggled to the West, it was first published in 1980 to critical acclaim. France’s Le Monde hailed it ‘the greatest Russian novel of the 20th Century.’ Military historian Antony Beevor described it as the War and Peace of the Stalinist era.

Lev Dodin discovered the novel in 1985 whilst guest directing in Helsinki. He says: “I still remember vividly that I ‘gulped down’ the novel in two nights and that I was in absolute shock. I didn’t even think before reading it was possible to write about our life in such a way.” Before its world première in Paris in spring 2007 the company spent three years rehearsing the piece, researching the period in great detail, visiting Auschwitz, and eventually premiering the piece in Norilsk, a city in the very heart of Gulag territory.

Dodin continues: “Grossman’s Life and Fate is in fact a simple family story, and it presents us with a vast panorama of the events and problems of the 20th and 21st centuries. In our everyday lives we still encounter the modern guises of fascism, communism, nationalism, totalitarianism, extremism, cruelty and lack of freedom. In spite of everything, people still continue to live, love and hope.

“Suffering has no nationality – I think this is why Grossman’s novel is becoming so popular – again – in Europe and across the world.”

UNCLE VANYA 7.00pm May 15TH (Press Night), 16th and 17th Vanya, together with his niece Sonya, has sacrificed his life managing the estate of Professor Serebryakov, his former brother-in-law and Sonya’s father. But when the Professor returns from the city with his glamorous young wife Yelena, tensions spiral as their world is thrown upside down.

Chekhov’s tragicomic masterpiece of dashed dreams and thwarted and eternal love returns to London in Lev Dodin’s definitive interpretation of this classic play.

Maly Drama Theatre of St. Petersburg’s Royal Theatre, Haymarket season is presented by Oliver King and Ekaterina Kashyntseva for Belka Productions with the support of Roman Abramovich, Sir Leonard Blavatnik , Yuri Shefler & Alexander Machkevitch.

For more information visit Maly2018.com. Follow on Twitter #Maly2018

MALY DRAMA THEATRE OF ST. PETERSBURG

LONDON 2018 SEASON LISTINGS Theatre Royal Haymarket, Haymarket, London, SW1Y 4HT

LIFE AND FATE Tue 8th May – 7.00pm Wed 9th May – 7.00pm Fri 11th May – 7.00pm Sat 12th May – 7.00pm Fri 18th May – 7.00pm Sat 19th May – 7.00pm Sun 20th May – 2.30pm

UNCLE VANYA Tue 15th May – 7.00pm Wed 16th May – 7.00pm Thur 17th May – 7.00pm

http://ift.tt/2mNEMrq London Theatre 1