About the text
This was written in November 2018 as a response to critical reception of the new Camarilla setting book, which was one of three publications by White Wolf Entertainment on the rules and stories of Vampire 5th Edition. It's an expression of my own perspective on the intentions and thoughts that went behind the Camarilla book and the decision to include the chapter which came to be much discussed, "The Abrek Blight." The chapter took the form of a fictitious report on 'the vampire state Chechnya' and the horrors inflicted on its people by its rulers. It was eventually removed after causing (very different kinds of) outrage in both Russia and the west. I was the main editor on the book during the last phase of development and although I did not write a lot of the content, I hold most of the responsibility for the final result.This is my defense:
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In April 2017, the Russian opposition newspaper Novaya Gazeta was first to report that gay and bisexual men were being arrested and killed in the Russian region Chechnya.1 The report was confirmed by Human Rights Watch, based on information from sources in the area, who the NGO would not reveal for fear of their safety, stating that “The climate of fear is overwhelming and people have been largely intimidated into silence.”2 A statement that is not difficult to believe considering that the official response from Ramzan Kadyrov’s press secretary was to declare that “If there were such people in Chechnya, law-enforcement agencies wouldn’t need to have anything to do with them because their relatives would send them somewhere from which there is no returning.”3
Clearly, the people directly affected did not have the choice to stand forward. But the spring and summer of 2017, they didn’t have to. International news were thick with reports on the situation. During the month of April, The Guardian and The New York Times were some of the first major Western newspapers to petition the public to act. By late May three French LGBT rights groups had filed a complaint against Kadyrov at the International Criminal Court (ICC),4 the Russian LGBT Network had set up a hotline and helped nearly 40 people escape Chechnya,5 and Human Rights Watch had published their more extensive report “‘They Have Long Arms and They Can Find Me,’” detailing how the abductions of Chechen citizens had been carried out by local authorities. In June, The United States House of Representatives passed resolution 351, condemning the violence and persecution in Chechnya.6 In July, Amnesty International ran their campaign urging higher authorities in Russia and Chechnya to investigate the situation and bring those responsible to justice.7 And then we slowly stopped talking about what was happening.
All the press coverage and international outrage made a difference. It helped, and a lot of people escaped. But the overall silence that has followed since the summer of 2017 doesn’t mean that there isn’t more to be done in Chechnya. It doesn’t mean that there isn’t anything to talk about.
We wanted to talk about it.
The vampire
The setting for Vampire, World of Darkness, is built on the fundamental will to engage with the horrors of this world. In the introduction and afterword to the first edition of Vampire, the game is positioned as an exploration of social and personal evil. In dedicating the game to (then) Polish opposition leader Václav Havel, and in including several quotes from him, the writers broke an unspoken rule of gaming and attached their work to real world politics. The game itself was presented as a way to explore and expose the complex nature of evil, using the vampire as a personification of human weakness, greed, and corruption. In this, Vampire builds on such works as John William Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819), where the vampire doubles as a less-than-flattering portrait of Lord Byron, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), where the count’s blood lust has been interpreted both a metaphor for capitalism an as an expression of repressed sexuality. Historically, the vampire has always signified something more than just a blood drinker; it is a person who has lost part of their humanity or given in to something that makes them akin to a monster. And so it is in Vampire, as signified by the Beast on one end and Golconda on the other. In Vampire 5th Edition, especially, a large part of the struggle for the player characters consists of maintaining their humanity and keeping the Beast under control.We hide by ignoring the Beast, by pretending it is not real, by expelling it completely from our lives, and by organizing and sanitizing everything we touch.8
The Mission of the World of Darkness
Since then, the two World of Darkness supplements for Vampire 1st and 2d Edition and the many city and region source books in particular have dealt with atrocities of the past and present. Sometimes with great elegance and humanity, sometimes with less, but they were unified in their aim of giving the game a relevance and an identity of its own.The world [of darkness] is more corrupt, more decadent, and less humane than our world. Simply emphasize all that you see wrong in our world, and you've got the Punk half of it.9
There are plenty of games and fictional universes that offer escapism far from the problems we face in reality. Our game can also be used to create fantasy, and that's fine, but Vampire, and The World of Darkness as a whole, was never primarily intended for that. It was designed to provoke, to question and to inspire critical perspectives on the world we live in. Doing that relies on artistic freedom to explore, to challenge, to negotiate with the horror stories we come across in media, and to inspire readers and storytellers to wonder how differently we might write the narratives that surround us, if we could.
The Chechnya chapter
“The Abrek Blight” was not intended to be an escapist text, but was an attempt to look at what is monstrous in our reality: the way a nation’s strong persecute those who do not conform to the governing ideology and how this is denied, covered up, and silenced. It was written based on extensive research, including, I believe, conversations with a Chechen refugee and other experts on the problems of the region. For obvious reasons, identity is a sore subject in this case. As the book was written in the voice of character narrators, it was intended to be read in two ways: in character, by a fledgling vampire, learning about her new reality and out-of-character, by the real reader.To the in-character reader the chapter offers a warning of how far monstrosity unchained can go. The pro-Camarilla narrator behind the "Official Report", that takes up most of the space in the chapter, warns his vampire readers against the level of monstrosity that he has seen in Chechnya. As most of the narrators in the Camarilla book, he talks the talk of a cold politician, representing a sect that is oppressive and totalitarian in its own ways. He is no hero, and he doesn't speak like he is, but even he can see that there is such a thing as too much evil.
Out-of-character the texts were intended to serve as a reminder that there is still a battle to fight in reality. It was meant as nothing but critique of a system that persecutes innocents and as a call for action. We were too fast, too inelegant in our critique of the situation in Chechnya, and to some it seemed like we were making a game of reality. But what we tried to do was make the game more real - to give it power to affect and challenge real life horrors, by informing and angering the people who are players today, but may be activists tomorrow.
We’ve been told it was too soon. Perhaps this is true, but the texts had to be written now to have any chance of helping the Chechens who are still in danger. And in a way, they have. The controversy created by our overly-political narrator, who dared not speak out clearly against a regime with so much power, did get more attention for the cause and made some people aware who were not otherwise.10 It didn't happen the way we wanted it to, but at least it made a difference. If the outrage we caused saved even one life, I am very okay with the consequences it has had for each of us personally. (You can donate right here if you want to help!: https://www.rainbowrailroad.com/donate)
It's perhaps worth noting that while we were shaken by the critique from fans who read the chapter as insensitive or directly homophobic, it was not until the Chechen government threatened White Wolf's Russian distributors with legal action that the chapter was withdrawn. Kadyrov's press secretary even went on live TV to defend the country against our accusations (if you speak Russian, watch this). If we caused offense among our core readers in the West, at least we offended the Chechen regime as well.
I am so, so sad that we didn't do a better job making sure that the chapter clearly conveyed what we were trying to do. But I don't regret that we tried. Reality is complicated, and too often in history has humanity let inhuman things happen because they were done politely, slowly, in the right way. When we get so afraid of raising our voices, of breaking the polite silence, that we remain quiet in the face of evil, we have lost. We have become, if not vampires ourselves, then knowing ghouls. As long as talking about the wrongs of our world is an option, we should take it, or it may one day not be.
- Freja
Addition: In December 2018, a new round of persecutions began (you can keep up to date on the Russian LBGT Network). This time, it barely got any coverage. Let's try not to forget about the people who need our help. Maybe WoD is only a game, but the darkness, as I understand it, has always been united in being against real-life fascism, oppression, and other vampiric tendencies. We may leave those things out of our games, but let's continue to fight them in reality.
1 In this article: https://www.novayagazeta.ru/articles/2017/04/01/71983-ubiystvo-chesti↩
2 Tanya Lokshina, “Anti-LGBT Violence in Chechnya: When Filing ‘Official’ Complaints Isn’t an Option”, Human Rights Watch, April 4, 2017. https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/04/04/anti-lgbt-violence-chechnya↩
3 Andrew E. Kramer, “‘They Starve You. They Shock You’: Inside the Anti-Gay Pogrom in Chechnya”, The New York Times, April 21, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/21/world/europe/chechnya-russia-attacks-gays.html↩
4 Josh Lowe, “French LGBT Groups Take Chechnya to Court over ‘Gay Genocide’”, Newsweek, May 16, 2017. https://www.newsweek.com/chechnya-lgbt-rights-gay-genocide-icc-court-case-610056↩
5 Kyle Knight, “Gay men in Chechnya are being tortured and killed. More will suffer if we don’t act.” The Guardian, April 13, 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/apr/13/gay-men-targeted-chechnya-russia ↩
6 https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-resolution/351?q=%7B%22search%22%3A%5B%22hres351%22%5D%7D&r=1 ↩
7 https://www.amnesty.org.uk/files/2017-06/Chechnya_0.pdf?rUfdwujzxWOjwlBgoA3aCrvS5WIV1DGV=↩
8 Mark Rein o Hagen, Lisa Stevens et.al, Vampire: The Masquerade, 1991, pg. 258↩
9 Mark Rein o Hagen, Lisa Stevens et.al, Vampire: The Masquerade, 1991, pg. 167↩
10 Not least thanks to initiatives such as Happy Jacks RPG Podcast: https://www.givemn.org/story/Rainbowrailroading↩
