In her 2017 book, The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, the journalist Masha Gessen describes how Russia’s antigay, antifeminist university agenda emerged out of a 1997 conference in Prague called the World Congress of Families, organized by Allan Carlson, an American historian at the “ultraconservative Hillsdale College in Michigan.” The conference had a large turnout. Gessen writes, “Inspired by the turnout, the organizers turned the World Congress of Families into a permanent organization dedicated to the fight against gay rights, abortion rights, and gender
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