The Belarusian Dissident Behind Lady Gaga’s Biggest Fan Site

For two years, hundreds of thousands of Lady Gaga fans wondered why a major news platform dedicated to the American superstar had gone completely dark. The answer recently came to light: its creator had been thrown behind bars in Belarus. Between February 2024 and April 2026, 32-year-old Kiryl Navin was held in a prison in the authoritarian Eastern European nation after participating in protests against the regime of ruler Alexander Lukashenko, until he completed his sentence. In late September, in a viral post on X, he revealed his identity as the administrator behind the Gaga Daily platform and wrote, "Sorry for the lack of updates, I was just in prison."

Navin founded the Gaga Daily project in 2009 when he was just 14 years old and living in a small village in Belarus. Since then, it has grown into the world's largest hardcore Lady Gaga fan community, boasting over 4 million followers across social media, including 1.4 million on X and half a million on Instagram. In conversations with Western media from an EU country to which he recently fled and which remains unnamed for security reasons, Navin shared his extraordinary story—one that the Viasna human rights organization, which documents political repression in Belarus, confirmed it had verified.

Navin, the son of a Vietnamese father and a Belarusian mother, ran Gaga Daily alone for 15 years in English, covering every development surrounding the pop icon, who herself has publicly praised his work on several occasions. But then politics intervened. In August 2020, Belarusian President Lukashenko, who has ruled the country since 1994 and is considered by many to be "Europe's last dictator," announced his victory in an election that international observers reported was plagued by severe fraud, rigging, and irregularities designed to secure his win.

For weeks afterward, tens of thousands of citizens took to the streets of Belarus demanding his resignation, a popular uprising unlike any seen since the country gained independence in the 1990s. Backed by his primary ally, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Lukashenko brutally suppressed the uprising with unbridled force, including mass arrests, severe violence against protesters, and torture of political dissidents in prisons. Navin was one of the protesters who participated in the demonstrations.

At first, he managed to evade the authorities because when the crackdown on ordinary citizens began, he was living in Moscow, working as an English translator. However, following the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, he returned to Belarus. At that time, after arresting prominent dissidents and public figures, Lukashenko's forces moved on to ordinary citizens who had participated in the protests against him. In February 2024, Navin was arrested in Minsk and sentenced to 18 months in prison. In March 2025, his sentence was extended by an additional year, and he vanished completely into the machinery of repression.

Following Navin's arrest, the Gaga Daily platform abruptly fell silent, and its loyal followers began to wonder. "I hope Gaga Daily is okay," one user wrote in an anxious message on X. "At what point do we actually start worrying?" another replied, adding, "Gaga Daily hasn't tweeted in almost a month... and no one has heard from him. It's really weird."

In an interview with Britain's The Daily Telegraph, Navin said that at first, he did not know whether he would be gone for days, weeks, or years. However, a few months into his imprisonment, he passed the passwords for the Gaga Daily accounts to his close friends Christian and Anthony through his lawyers, fearing the accounts would be hacked. Navin recounted that his great love for Lady Gaga, alongside life among prison thugs, provided surreal experiences. During his time in the Belarusian penal colony, he did not openly discuss his social media activity or his love for the pop star's music, but he dropped occasional hints.

"I am not blind to the ridiculousness of this entire situation," he told the Telegraph. "The whole story is just bizarre. I was a normal prisoner; it's not like I walked around the prison talking to everyone about Lady Gaga. In the building where we lived, the radio played almost constantly, and when a Gaga song started playing, people would say, 'Oh, I love this song.' And I would say, 'Yeah, this girl, Lady Gaga, I think she's really good.' We did watch the movie 'Joker' (in which Lady Gaga appeared), but it seemed like everyone hated it. I think it mostly had to do with the fact that it was a musical, and all the men were serving sentences for violent crimes. They didn't know a word of English, so they just couldn't connect with it at all."

He told the British newspaper that his cellblock mates had no idea he was not just a fan, but a professional community manager with millions of social media followers. Out of concern for his safety, he kept silent about his massive online presence. He told Agence France-Presse (AFP) that during his imprisonment, he received letters from friends in the spring of 2025 announcing that Lady Gaga had released a new song called "Abracadabra." When he learned of its release, he spent days listening intently to the prison radio until the song was finally played, savoring every single second.

Navin noted that in Belarus and Russia, where public sentiment remains overtly homophobic, English-speaking pop stars who receive a broad embrace from the Western LGBTQ+ community—like Lady Gaga—paradoxically enjoy massive popularity. In his view, this stems from three factors: limited English proficiency among the general public, a lack of awareness that these stars promote LGBTQ+ rights, and dance beats that sound remarkably similar to "estrada," a particularly popular local pop genre. Inside the penal colony where he was held, surrounded by buzz-cut inmates, Navin frequently heard Troye Sivan's hit "Rush," in which he sings quite explicitly about love between men, alongside a regular rotation of Lady Gaga songs.

"Listening to the radio in prison was insanely funny; it was essentially the same playlist you would hear in a gay club," Navin chuckled. Navin shared that over the years, he had the opportunity to connect with Lady Gaga herself. "She took the time to record a video saying hello to me and thanking me for running the site," he told the Telegraph. "I lived in some remote shithole in Belarus, so getting that kind of recognition from the most famous woman in the world was totally crazy."

Now, as he tastes freedom once again, Navin is gradually getting Gaga Daily back on its feet and catching up on the music he missed while in prison. At the same time, he emphasizes that his warm and relaxed demeanor does not betray just how truly traumatic the experience within the Belarusian penal system was. According to Viasna data, 884 political prisoners are still held in this system.