This chapter explores the historical scholarship on sexualities in post-Soviet Russia, drawing on extensive archival research and scholarly experience on the history of homosexuality in Russia, both pre-revolutionary and Soviet, including the Federal Security Service (FSB) archive. It also reflects on the past and present choices made by Russian and Western historians in relation to the almost untouched history of Russian sexuality . While the scholarship on post-socialist non-heterosexuals is growing extensively, homosexuality in Soviet Russia, despite the availability of plentiful archival materials, continues to be greeted with silence and repression, both by the Russian academic community and by civil society. The only notable publication on the subject is Dan Healey’s Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia, written more than a decade ago. I argue that the repressed memory of homosexuals living through the Soviet era is deeply connected with the Stalinist gender and sexuality policies of the 1930s, as well as with the ambiguous and inconsistent process of democratisation in the 1990s. The policy concerning access to sources relating to homosexuality in the Russian archives will also be analysed.
When I told a professor at one of Moscow’s liberal universities, where I was studying to become an historian, that I wanted to write my diploma on the topic of homosexuality in Russia in the eighteenth century, she did not respond with open disapproval or homophobic rhetoric. What she did say, in a friendly manner, was: ‘All of the archives that contain information on this phenomenon are located at monasteries, and that’s the main difficulty’. There was no reason not to believe a professor with many years of experience. I wrote my thesis on a different topic, which was also related to sexuality and the transgression of social norms in Russia in the eighteenth century.1 That work was based on unpublished and mostly unknown archive documents. The history of sexuality and corporality simply could not appear within the Marxist historiography, because such subjects were outside the official list of topics which Soviet historians could work on. Perhaps mainly due to inertia, in the 1990s, when it would have been possible to work on this subject, there was no apparent interest in doing so. This began to change in the 2000s, though the subject was still only a minor element in the huge amount of translated work on the history of everyday life, corporality and urban history. Later, after becoming an experienced archive researcher, I discovered that sources on the topic of homosexuality were scattered across federal and municipal archives, that they are numerous and that they have never been the focus of historians’ attention.2
Why has the history of homosexuality , one of the most ambitious topics in the world’s historiography, remained so underdeveloped in Russia? Which factors have contributed to the lack of knowledge and scientific interest in this field? What is the connection between this and the present-day homophobic rhetoric and archive policy of the state? In this chapter I will aim to explain, based on my own experience of academic work in Russia, why scholars have not made the ‘choice’ of addressing these topics, despite the lifting of formal restrictions on the work of historians after the collapse of the USSR; how this is related to the specific circumstances of the transition from socialism to capitalism in Russia; and the role which gender ‘policy of identities ’ has played in this process.
I would argue that one of the main reasons why homosexuality in Russia is not considered a promising sphere of study for academic research is not just homophobia , but the absence of a notion of homosexual subject/historic actor. In addition, there is a specific division between ‘private’ and ‘public’ which was forcefully established in the 1930s and prevented a dynamically developing discourse on homosexuality from taking shape and moving into the spotlight of academic attention.3
Producing (Non-)Knowledge
Soviet humanities were characterised by a range of censorship restrictions and omitted subjects. The history of homosexuality cannot even be included amongst these subjects, because it was not only prohibited, but had never been formulated as a subject for research. Russian scholars before the revolution were actively trying to comprehend the phenomenon of homosexuality , but exclusively in terms of medicine and law. This was firmly in line with the European trend of this time, as in the pre-Foucauldian era the topic of homo/sexuality was almost never singled out as a subject for historical research. As David Halperin has put it:
Sex has no history. It is a natural fact, grounded in the functioning of the body, and, as such, it lies outside of history and culture. Sexuality , by contrast, does not properly refer to some aspect or attribute of bodies. Unlike sex, sexuality is a cultural production: it represents the appropriation of the human body and of its physiological capacities by an ideological discourse. Sexuality is not a somatic fact; it is a cultural effect.4
However, the period of the 1930s, and specifically of Stalin’s repressive policies—the recriminalisation of the ‘sodomy’ article (1934), which was preceded by a secret campaign against homosexuals in Moscow and Leningrad,5 and the ban on abortion (1936)—is extremely important for understanding present-day Russian homophobia and the specific features of Soviet humanities. It was not just homosexuality , but any subjects concerning intimacy and sexuality , which were not covered in the humanities field. Dan Healey describes the Soviet gender and sexuality regime as being characterised by three distinctive features: ‘discursive silence about sexuality , beskonfliktnost’ (conflictlessness) in gender relations and zhizneradost’ 6 in physiological arena’.7 These features had a damaging influence on scholarship. For example, a revolutionary anthropological work by Soviet historian Boris Romanov, People and Morals of Ancient Rus, published in 1947 in Leningrad, provoked a heated debate within the academic community.8 The author was rebuked for ‘pushing forward the problems of sex more than was necessary’.9 His response was that he had ‘never aspired to the fame of Bocaccio’10; and in any case, his book did not touch upon matters of sexuality in any way.
In fact, in the Stalin era, consideration of intimate human experience was completely absent from the humanities and could be found only in the practical fields of knowledge, such as forensic medicine, and even then, only in a considerably reduced form. After recriminalization of homosexuality in 1934, the term ‘homosexualism’ appears only in The Great Soviet Encyclopedia in 1952.11 In the Thaw period this discursive silence was to some extent overturned, but the subject was still addressed only in a limited way, and exclusively for practical reasons. The slight opening of the Soviet borders to Western tourists and the first organised foreign trips for Soviet citizens puzzled the Soviet leadership, as ‘sexual morality’ never reached the level desired by the authorities.12 They believed that Soviet tourists were coming back to the USSR with ‘damaged’ morals, bringing in ‘perverted forms of behavior’, such as homosexuality , that they had glimpsed in the West. In contrast to the Stalinist concept of ‘discourse silencing’,13 which was meant to ensure both an absence of knowledge about undesirable carnal practices, and the possibility of carrying them out, the Khrushchev era offered a new understanding of ‘perverted behavior’, which supposedly emerged precisely because of this previous lack of knowledge, and therefore an educational literature on sexual morality emerged to fill this gap.14 Accordingly, a large number of textbooks on sex education appeared, in very large editions, and an expertise on the subject emerged which would have been unthinkable in the Stalin era.15 ‘It is necessary to talk with young people about questions of love, of the relations between guys and girls. We need to talk with youth about sexual hygiene, and we would like these questions to be at the center of Komsomol groups’ attention’.16
Soviet textbooks which referred to homosexuality at all did so in a homophobic and extremely moralistic manner, which was very far removed from the medicalised appro...