On a chilly summer night, members of an ultra-right nationalist group attacked a gay club in Moscow. Although the police intervened and no one was seriously harmed, witnesses recalled that within the roaring crowd that surrounded the club, old Russian women in headscarves held aloft religious icons as they cheered on the mass assault.

That attack on May 1, 2006, was when an alliance between a politically insurgent Russian Orthodox Church Christian and violent homophobia got its start, a partnership between icons and clubs that would continue to resonate in Russian politics a decade later.

In the years since that first attack, an eruption of a pro-Church hooligans and militant babushkas wielding iron crosses has metastasized into an organized movement promoted by the highest reaches of the Russian Orthodox Church, sanctioned by the state, and supported by growing ranks of Russian Christian laity.

In the months following the nightclub attack, a neo-Nazi group known as RONS (the Russian abbreviation for Russian National Union) rose to prominence through a series of attacks on gay parades. An Orthodox presence was increasingly visible in these attacks, and in a 2007 street assault two Orthodox priests were captured by cameras literally ordering far right activists to inflict bodily violence against the well-known journalist Roman Super, reportedly because one of the priests disapproved of his earring. Foreign activists were also beaten, including the British musician Richard Fairbrass.