Whose pride? Whose shame?

Twenty feet away, a right-wing member of the Duma was roaring into a microphone: "Russia is not Sodom! Gays and lesbians to Kolyma!" - a region of Siberia notorious for Stalinist labor camps. Volker Beck, a gay German member of parliament, and some people around him opened small rainbow flags and waved them with desperate bravado. A collective bellow of rage came from the nationalists around us. They charged, and the violence began.

That was Moscow on May 27 - a vicious melee in which hundreds of nationalist and religious demonstrators attacked a few dozen peaceful supporters of lesbian and gay rights. Weeks of homophobic pronouncements by the city's mayor preceded the onslaught. Gays and lesbians were trying to mount a public display of pride. Russia was left with little to be proud of.

Threats and bullying

In the run up to last week's Equality March in Warsaw, the situation was threatening to repeat itself. After weeks of threats and bullying, the deputy leader of the League of Polish Families, Wojciech Wierzejski, was engaged in a last-ditch campaign to have the march banned. Meanwhile the government, equally on the defensive in Europe and at home, gave permission for the right-wing youth group Młodzież Wszechpolska (MW) to organize an anti-gay parade on the same day. Homophobic rhetoric filled the headlines and violence was a grim possibility, the threat of which was not entirely allayed by MW's last-minute cancellation of their demonstration.

In the past weeks, Wierzejski, whose party is a coalition partner in the government, has called gays and lesbians "cowards by definition" who should be "beaten with batons." Officials have unleashed a torrent of menacing slurs, claiming that homosexuals are pedophiles, linked to drug dealers and the mafia, and their supporters should be driven off the streets. The state prosecutor has called for investigations of gay and lesbian organizations. All this follows violent attacks on marchers in Warsaw, Kraków, and Poznań in previous years. The Prime Minister has warned that if a homosexual "tries to infect others with their homosexuality, then the state must intervene in this violation of freedom."

Warping the language

Such noxious vilification is spreading across Eastern Europe, from Moscow to Kraków, from Bucharest to Riga. It is accompanied, like most big lies, by a warping of the language. Suddenly, words such as "equality" and "tolerance" are suspect, accused of being harbingers of perversion. That in itself should set democrats' alarm bells ringing. What happens when crucial terms that describe a just, inclusive society become lightning rods for hate?

Double task

Today's violent rhetoric has implications that go far beyond a single march or a single minority. Twenty years ago, as Eastern Europe emerged from Soviet authoritarianism, dissidents in the region faced a double task. One was to protect private life from the insistent intrusions of a surveillance state - to give people their homes and time and consciences again, unimpeded. The other was to renovate public life, for decades a realm of compulsory parades and vapid slogans, so that every citizen could feel his or her free participation had meaning.

The work of achieving rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people was part of this transformation. Those campaigns meant establishing that people's bedrooms and their innermost desires were off limits to the police. They also meant opening the public sphere to everyone, regardless of prejudice or stigma - redefining streets and squares not as restricted showplaces of official ideologies but as vivid meeting places of diverse identities and opinions.

These advances are now under attack, and it was these principles that were at stake on Warsaw's streets last week.

Poland's European obligations have been much cited and debated in recent months. European treaties indeed bind Poland to respect equality, and the rights to free expression and assembly. Beyond those examples though, a deeper, if less legalistic, obligation binds Poland to the promises and arduous victories of its own past.

A struggle betrayed

Today, politicians in Poland, like those in Moscow, again brandish the rhetorical truncheon and call for repression on the streets. They betray the decades of struggle for democracy. Throughout Eastern Europe, the dissidents who brought down the Soviet system did not fight for a freedom that would remain the property of the respectable or the politically correct elite. Their successors in power, or they themselves, should remember that.

Scott Long is director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Rights Program at Human Rights Watch