Soviet and Post-Soviet Sexualities

Richard C.M. Mole

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781317224914
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Asiatisch-Amerikanische Studien

Despite Soviet Russia having been one of the first major powers to decriminalise homosexual acts between men, attitudes towards lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people in contemporary Russia and the other post-Soviet states have become increasingly hostile, with the introduction of laws restricting their rights and an increase in homophobic violence. This book explores how this situation has come about. It discusses how meanings attached to non-heteronormative sexualities have been constructed for specific socio-political purposes by elites in line with Marxist-Leninist or nationalist thought, explores how attitudes to non-normative sexualities developed historically and examines the current situation in the post-Soviet space, including Russia, Transcaucasia, Central Asia and the Baltic States. The book provides a wealth of detail on this understudied subject and assesses how LGBT subjects are responding to this state of affairs.

1Constructing Soviet and post-Soviet sexualities

Richard C.M. Mole

Introduction

In June 2013 the issue of sexuality in Russia came under the global media spotlight, when President Vladimir Putin signed into law the bill banning the spreading of ‘propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations’. While the law was justified by Putin as a means to boost Russia’s falling birth rate and uphold traditional Russian values, it was understood by critics as an attempt to shore up support among nationalist and conservative voters and discredit his political opponents. While the ‘gay propaganda law’ triggered an immediate international outcry, for queer Russians the politicisation of ‘non-traditional’ sexualities was nothing new. Throughout the Soviet Union and post-Soviet space, the legal status of and social attitudes towards non-heterosexuals have always been strongly influenced by political discourse, with homophobia repeatedly instrumentalised to serve political goals. While sexual desire can be understood as being biologically driven, sexual categories and the meanings assigned to them are constructed by institutions that ‘produce and/or reproduce ideologies and norms, which define social expectations’ with regard to acceptable sexual mores and behaviours (Štulhofer and Sandfort, 2005, p. 5). The aim of the introduction to this edited volume is thus to show how homosexuality has been constructed and reconstructed in the Soviet Union and in the states of the former USSR in a bid to provide the historical, social and political context for the chapters that follow.

The first section will analyse the impact of the Bolshevik revolution on non-normative sexualities in the USSR and how the legal situation for gay men and attitudes towards non-homosexuals in general became more negative as the Party’s priorities changed. The second section will look at the situation for LGBT people following the collapse of the USSR in 1991. As an analysis of the situation in each of the 15 former Soviet republics is beyond the scope of this chapter, I will identify general social and political trends which have shaped attitudes towards non-normative sexualities throughout the post-Soviet space but will pay particular attention to developments in Russia, as it is the focus of most chapters in the volume and as the Russian response to homosexuality was often taken as the blueprint for equivalent responses in the other Soviet successor states.¹

Constructing Soviet sexualities

Immediately after the October Revolution, the free expression of sexuality was encouraged by the Bolsheviks to demonstrate that Soviet Russia was entering a new age, liberated from centuries of tsarist oppression. Rejecting the religious morality underpinning Romanov-era legislation on sexuality and insisting that the new order would be ‘based on scientific and rational principles’, the Bolsheviks repealed the tsarist laws banning male homosexuality, making Russia only the second major power, after France, to do so (Healey, 2002, p. 352). More significantly, the new regime refrained from introducing equivalent articles in the first Soviet Russian Criminal Code of 1922 (Hazard, 1965).² Consequently, as Ira Roldugina discusses in Chapter 2, the 1920s was a period in which working-class queer Russians had, for the first time, the freedom to construct their sexual subjectivities and make sense of their sexual desires and behaviours with reference to the legal, political and, in particular, medical discourses circulating in Russia at that time.

Although sexual relations between men were not illegal, Bolshevik intellectuals nevertheless prioritised ideology over sexuality, insisting on the ‘wholesale subordination of sexuality to the proletariat’s class interests … for the sake of the Soviet state and Communist Party’ (Kon, 1999, p. 208). Indeed, sexuality was largely understood in ideological terms. As Lenin himself explained:

It seems to me that these flourishing sexual theories … arise from the personal need to justify personal abnormality or hypertrophy in sexual life before bourgeois morality, and to entreat its patience. The masked respect for bourgeois morality seems to me just as repulsive as poking about in sexual matters. However wild and revolutionary the behaviour may be, it is still really quite bourgeois. It is, mainly a hobby of the intellectuals and of the sections nearest to them.

(Healey, 2001a, p. 113)

Despite the insistence that Soviet rule would be based on scientific and rational principles, despite the fact that Lenin was clearly aware of scientific sexological theories³ and despite homosexuality having been the focus of research by the Russian medical and psychological professions for some years, the acceptability to the Soviet regime of an individual’s sexuality was largely determined by political, not scientific, considerations (see Healey, 1993). As the example of the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs Georgy Chicherin demonstrated, the homosexuality of certain members of the Party could be tolerated and even accepted ‘if they performed politically valued functions’ (Healey, 2002, p. 358); at the same time, accusations of ‘pederasty’ were used to attack ‘class enemies’, such as Orthodox priests (ibid., p. 356). In other words, the oppression of sexual minorities in the USSR often had ‘as much to do with their class backgrounds (as perceived by the regime) as with their homosexuality’ (Karlinsky, 1989, p. 360). So, while homosexuality had now been decriminalised, ‘transgressive sexual behaviour’ was still generally seen as the decadent predilection of the bourgeoisie and thus had, according to Lenin, no place ‘in the class-conscious, fighting proletariat’ (Healey, 2002, p. 358). The regulation of homosexuality was also instrumentalised by the regime as a means to facilitate its broader political objectives: in the 1920s, for example, homosexual acts between men were criminalised in the Soviet Socialist Republics of Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, as it was believed such ‘primitive customs’ were endemic in Islamic societies and would undermine the Soviet modernisation project (Healey, 2001b, p. 258).

Following the death of Lenin in 1924, the political goals of the regime shifted from bringing about the Bolshevik revolution to ensuring absolute control over society and fostering mass industrialisation and collectivisation of agriculture, with these new objectives bringing with them a hardening of attitudes towards sexuality, in general, and homosexuality, in particular. Intolerance towards homosexuality intensified under Stalin in part due to the changing nature of Party elites, whereby intellectuals and urban Marxists were replaced by peasants, resulting in increased anti-intellectualism. In terms of the regime’s economic objectives, the policy of mass industrialisation announced by Stalin at the XIV Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in December 1925 required a major expansion of the labour force, with a number of social engineering strategies introduced to increase the pool of available workers. Considerable effort went into boosting the birth rate and this was supported by the institutionalisation of a much more conservative gender order and by endorsing ‘the nuclear heterosexual family as the founding unit of Soviet society’, whose purpose was ‘to serve the needs of the socialist state, rather than being championed as a private commitment or source of personal fulfilment’ (Stella, 2015, pp. 28–29). In a society in which citizens were expected to put the collective interest above their individual desires, homosexuality was reconceived as abnormal, decadent and – in that it could not produce children – contrary to the public good (Attwood, 1996, p. 102).

A further strategy to satisfy the increased demand for industrial labour which had an impact on the lives of Soviet queers was to convert so-called ‘social anomalies’ (female prostitutes, beggars, alcoholics and homeless adults) into ‘legitimate factory labor’, whereby they were ‘taught trades and socialist values and then funneled into ordinary factories’ (Healey, 2002, p. 360). While homosexuals were not themselves considered ‘socially anomalous’, the control by the police of the marginal public spaces in which not only ‘social anomalies’ but also gay men would congregate inevitably meant ‘the male homosexual subculture … would come under scrutiny’ (ibid., pp. 361–362). Indeed, it was as a result of their encounters with male homosexuals as part of their attempts to rid the socialist city of ‘socially harmful elements’ that ‘the secret police initiated the 1933 proposal to recriminalize sodomy’ (ibid., pp. 361–362).

The law recriminalising male homosexuality – Article 121 of the Soviet Penal Code – entered into force on 7 March 1934. Punishment for muzhelozhestvo (literally, ‘man lying with man’) was set at ‘five years of hard labor for voluntary sexual acts and eight years for using force or threats and for sex with a consenting minor’ (Karlinsky, 1989, p. 361). Sex between women, meanwhile, had never been criminalised and was not criminalised under the terms of Article 121. In general, lesbianism and bisexuality among women were not seen as a crime but as a mental illness, and women were thus often subjected to medical and psychiatric interventions rather than criminal prosecutions (see Essig, 1999, p. 29; Healey, 2001a; Stella, 2015, pp. 30–31).

As homosexuality was constructed as a form of ‘decadent bourgeois morality’ (Pollard, 1995, p. 186) which would disappear with the establishment of communism, its recriminalisation was hailed as a ‘triumph of proletarian humanitarianism’, with Nikolai Krylenko, the Soviet Commissar of Justice, proclaiming in 1936 that after two decades of socialism ‘there was no reason for anyone to be homosexual’ and anyone continuing to do so must be ‘remnants of the exploiting classes’ (Karlinsky, 1989, pp. 361–362).⁴ According to Lynne Attwood, lesbians often reported facing greater hostility than gay men. While the latter could be excused for not controlling their sexual urges – in whatever direction – lesbians had no excuse, because the existence of female sexuality was all but denied (Attwood, 1996, p. 104). Moreover, as the identity of women was tied so closely to motherhood, any woman putting her sexual interests before the interests of her family was considered an outrage. In any case, the Soviet regime was hostile to sexuality in general because it sought ‘to ensure absolute control over the personality’ by attempting ‘to deindividualise it [and] to destroy its independence and its emotional world’ (Kon, 1999, p. 208).

Given its construction in ideological terms, the continued existence of homosexuality in the USSR could have been taken as a sign of the failure of socialism to eradicate the lingering influence of the bourgeoisie, and it was thus imperative not just for (male) homosexual sex to be illegal but also for homosexuals to be rendered invisible. References to same-sex desire were all but absent in the Soviet press and removed from all translations of foreign literature, while gatherings of gays and lesbians in the public sphere were forbidden (Baer, 2013, p. 37). While Brian Baer suggests that, as a result, ‘Soviet culture offered little ontological basis for the representation of homosexuality as an identity, as a stable subject position through which one might assume a voice in the Russian public sphere’ (ibid., p. 38), this view is not shared by Arthur Clech in Chapter 3. While taking into account the effects produced by ideology and medical and penal discourse, Clech argues that non-heterosexual men and women in the USSR were nevertheless able to construct homosexual subjectivities that were not reduced to either sickness or criminality but were rather created through language, irony and solidarity.

While the 1960s and 1970s saw homosexuality decriminalised elsewhere in the communist bloc – in Czechoslovakia and Hungary in 1962, in the German Democratic Republic and in Bulgaria in 1968 and in Yugoslavia in 1977 – calls for the decriminalisation of consensual sex between men in the USSR were rejected. In Chapter 4 Rustam Alexander analyses the debates between academics and Soviet criminologists in the period from 1960 to 1975 and shows how the case for decriminalisation made by scholars on the basis of sexuality research was rejected for reasons of communist morality by criminologists affiliated with the Interior Ministry.

Homosexual acts between men thus remained a crime until the collapse of the Soviet Union. While some gays, lesbians and bisexuals did succeed in living their lives on their own terms in the private sphere, there were few, if any, positive representations of homosexuality in the public sphere to counter the state-fuelled homophobia that shaped the opinions of generations of citizens, who were used to being told what to think by the regime. As one of the Russians whom I interviewed as part of my project presented in Chapter 7 commented with reference to the Soviet era:

The state decided what was normal and what was abnormal and, in the case of homosexuality, it was abnormal, it was a punishable offence. The ability of the people to decide for themselves what should be considered normal or abnormal was taken away from them.⁵

Constructing post-Soviet sexualities

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, consenting sexual acts between adult men were decriminalised in all post-Soviet states, with the exception of Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, where they remain illegal to this day. However, even in the other 13 states, decriminalisation was agreed on the understanding that homosexuals would remain out of sight. In all societies, even socially liberal ones, ‘most people feel that sexuality belongs to the private space of the home’ and thus ‘most public spaces are coded to be heterosexual’ (Valentine, 1993, p. 396). While heterosexuals can express their sexuality publicly and thus ‘transcend the so-called public-private dichotomy’, homosexuals have historically been expected to remain invisible by performing traditional understandings of masculine and feminine behaviour and keeping to their own spaces, such as gay bars (ibid.). In the early years of the...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Contributors
• Acknowledgement
• 1 Constructing Soviet and post-Soviet sexualities
• 2 ‘Why are we the people we are?’ Early Soviet homosexuals from the first-person perspective: new sources on the history of homosexual identities in Russia
• 3 Between the labour camp and the clinic: tema or the shared forms of late Soviet homosexual subjectivities
• 4 Soviet legal and criminological debates on the decriminalisation of homosexuality (1965–1975)
• 5 A Cold War for the twenty-first century: Homosexualism vs. Heterosexualism
• 6 ‘That’s not the only reason we love him’: Chaikovsky reception in post-Soviet Russia
• 7 Identity, belonging and solidarity among Russian-speaking queer migrants in Berlin
• 8 ‘National anxiety’ and homosexuality in post-Soviet Armenia: national identity through trauma and the memory of genocide and war
• 9 Narratives of exclusion: observations on a youth-led LGBT rights group in Kyrgyzstan
• 10 Negotiating non-heteronormative identities in post-Soviet Belarus and Lithuania
• Index