By Elizabeth Kuhr

Nearly 1 in 5 Russians want to “eliminate” gay and lesbian people from society, according to a new survey, a finding that has incited fear and anger among LGBTQ activists in the country.

“There is this feeling you are targeted, and that 18 percent believe I should be eliminated is just awful,” said Svetlana Zakharova, an out lesbian living in St. Petersburg. “It was very emotional.”

The survey, published this week by the Levada Center, a nongovernmental research organization based in Moscow, also found that 32 percent of respondents wanted to “isolate” gay men and lesbians from society, compared to 9 percent who wanted to “assist” them.

One of the researchers, Ekaterina Kochergina, said she and her team wanted to measure the “social distance” — which in this context is unrelated to the global pandemic — between the Russian population and groups considered by some to be “deviant.” In addition to sexual minorities, the survey looked at how ostracized feminists, pedophiles, terrorists and people living with HIV/AIDS are from Russian society.

“The more unfavorable, the more social distance between us and them,” Kochergina explained.

Kochergina acknowledged moral concerns about the phrasing of the questions and the selection of identities included in the survey. She said the use of the word “eliminate” in the survey means “to make something disappear from your reality,” not to physically destroy people, and that the questions were about identity groups as “phenomena.”

“A lot of people in Russia would not want to see gay people existing,” said Kochergina. “Not necessarily to kill them but to have a society where this does not exist as a phenomenon.” Read more NBC