In November 2023, the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation heard a request by the Ministry of Justice to rule the “international LGBT movement” an “extremist organization” that threatened national security and traditional values. While largely affirming the Ministry of Justice’s request, the Court’s decision acknowledged the absence of any centralized leadership or organizational boundaries for the movement. This contradiction forced the Court to articulate a definition of extremism wherein affiliation was established not through formal membership in such a movement, but through symbols, linguistic patterns, and other associative markers. Arguably, the Russian Supreme Court’s designation of extremism in spite of these tensions relies upon semiotic interpretation as a mode of legal reasoning, thus transforming interpretive flexibility from a peripheral feature of legal adjudication into a central mechanism of authoritarianism.

As Lawrence Solan notes in The Language of Statutes, legal interpretation generally presumes a “core of settled meaning,” with ambiguity confined to the boundary cases. The Russian Supreme Court’s ruling on extremism is notable because, here, indeterminacy transcends the margins, and enters into the core categories necessary to identify extremist affiliation: organization, participation, symbolism, and support.

The decision notes that the Ministry of Justice’s request sought to declare the “international LGBT movement” an extremist organization; nonetheless, the Court recognized the infeasible nature of this ask. The Court resolves this tension by enabling liability to be determined by association or as an individual actor: “The Movement on the territory of the Russian Federation has a decentralized character (there is no main leader or coordinator; the leaders of organizations, communities, groups and individual activists are, in fact, leaders of ‘cells’) […]” (Pages 3-4). The ruling further alleges that each sub-community or organization, or “so-called LGBT-cell,” shares a distinctive structure centered around a moderator, who is responsible for planning and organizing functions, arranging financing for the group’s activities, and managing communications (Page 5). The decision goes on to assert that participants can be identified by shared morals, customs, traditions, lifestyles, and specific language (Pages 5-6). Notably, while there were some minimal examples enumerated, such as pride parades, the “peculiarities in choice of sexual partners,” and the use of a grammatical form – feminitives – these were used illustratively rather than comprehensively; thus, the decision contends that “participants” can be identified through shared characteristics while simultaneously failing to expand upon their definitional boundaries of who can be determined a participant (Pages 5-6).

The ambiguity of the ruling also undermines legal notice. The decision offers few stable criteria to identify “participants,” thus leaving individuals uncertain as to what conduct could incur liability. Furthermore, the ruling was never formally published and individuals were charged under the statute before the text was even leaked to the public.

The first cases brought under this expanded definition of extremism revolved around symbolism, particularly social media posts containing the pride flag, which is explicitly referenced under the Court’s decision (Page 3). However, one early and controversial case involved the prosecution of a woman for her earrings. In January of 2024, Anastasia Yershova and her friend were harassed at a café, yet she subsequently found herself charged with extremism. Her earrings, which featured a multicolored frog sitting under a toadstool, were deemed evidence of extremism. Yershova and her lawyer tried to appeal the conviction, arguing that the jewelry did not feature a flag and thus meet the definition of prohibited symbols. The court rejected the appeal, stating that the defendant and her counsel did not meet the evidentiary standards to prove that they were not a pride flag. The earrings, containing the colors of the pride flag distributed between a toadstool and a frog, maintained enough ambiguity to avoid overtly containing the flag, while retaining enough resemblance to enable the association. The ambiguity of the symbol did not weaken the prosecution’s case; rather, it expanded judicial discretion by shifting the burden onto the defendant to disprove the alleged association.

Although international media attention throughout 2025 and 2026 has focused on cases against organizations and publishing houses, enforcement of the ruling has largely focused on symbolic expression. A June 2025 Human Rights Watch report found that 81 of the 101 convictions they had identified under the ruling pertained to the display of prohibited symbols.

Nestled within a set of factors that differentiate and unite “participants of the movement,” is the use of “specific language,” such as feminitives (Pages 5-6). Feminitives refers to grammatically feminine professional nouns — a linguistic variation which is still highly contested societally. Their usage spans feminist, ironic, normative, and even derogatory contexts, and do not map cleanly to any one ideological stance.

The linguists Judith Irvine and Susan Gal theorized a process wherein linguistic forms become socially indexical; by associating linguistic features with a group, those same features stand in as evidence of belonging to the group. The Court’s treatment of feminitives follows this same logic: a contested grammatical practice, used inconsistently across varied ideological and social contexts, is reinterpreted by the court as a stable marker of extremist affiliation. Through iconization, contextual variation in the use of feminitives becomes flattened; variances in usage across distinct contexts are erased. The result is that a contested grammatical form becomes legible to the state as sociolinguistic evidence of wrongdoing.

The ruling’s central – and most troubling – innovation lies not simply in its expansion of the definition of extremism, but in its fundamental revision of how extremist affiliation may be inferred. Because the Court cannot rely on identifiable organizational associations, it instead relies on semiotic interpretation as a proxy for formal membership. The use of semiotics as a surrogate for more stable definitional boundaries both lessens the evidentiary burdens for lower courts and engenders a great deal of opportunity for arbitrary adjudication. The ruling demonstrates how authoritarian legal systems can weaponize semiotic interpretation to criminalize sexual identities. Ambiguity in the statute enables lower courts to exercise functionally unbounded discretion. Arguably, semiotics therefore become not just a peculiarity of the ruling, but plays a critical role in moving from an ordinary legal system that treats interpretation as marginal and into an authoritarian system that weaponizes interpretation itself.