Documente Academic
Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
Decriminalisation of Homosexuality
Daniel Healey
INTRODUCTION
In the first years of Soviet power, the Bolsheviks adopted a legal reform
which catapulted Russia into the vanguard of sexual politics: they
decriminalised homosexual sex between consenting men. With the
economy in chaos and with famine only just at bay, in a society scarred
by revolution and civil war, where did this unlikely change come from?
Was it an accident? And what of the people it affected - homosexual
m e n - did the change in the law change their lives? Did lesbians benefit
from the reform at all?
Few people have attempted to write histories of homosexuality in
Russia: sources were assumed to be scarce, many of them considered
unsatisfactory for various reasons, and the most illuminating material
was presumed, until very recently, to be in closed archives and therefore inaccessible to students of lesbian and gay history. The authority
on Russia's gay past, Simon Karlinsky, has relied primarily on literary
sources, biographies and memoirs, to trace the fate of individuals as
they coped with Imperial and then Soviet approaches to homosexual
behaviour.
Karlinsky's two survey articles on homosexuality in Russia (1976,
1990)1 are ground-breaking and exciting; but they are limited in their
basically literary focus, and in their cold war tone. The events of
homosexual significance are presented against a backdrop of Soviet
history which presumes a seamless framework of totalitarian intent.
The advance represented by decriminalisation, established in 1922, is
noted without any effort to ask why it occurred at all. Medical attention
paid to homosexuality is dismissed as Bolshevik 'morbidisation'.
Stalin's recriminalisation in 1933, and the subsequent repression of
homosexuals, are shown to be the consequence of Marxism-Leninism.
There is little attempt to trace the influence of factors other than the
ruling ideology on Soviet approaches to homosexuality.
The present article will examine recent work in legal, medical and
religious history, in gender studies and histories of the women's
Revolutionary Russia, Vol.6, No.1, June 1993, pp.26-54
PUBLISHED BY FRANK CASS, LONDON
27
movement, in an attempt to establish why the Bolsheviks decriminalised homosexual sex. Where documentation is apparently not available,
events and contexts will be examined to determine what might have
been the intent of the legal reform. The paper will look at developments
in medical models of homosexuality, in pre- and post-revolutionary
Russia, to provide a context for the change in the law. In conclusion,
the paper will examine the fate of the law reform, its consequences for
Soviet homosexuals, and offer some comparisons with the experience
of other nations.
ORTHODOXY, AUTOCRACY AND HOMOSEXUALITY
28
REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA
29
30
REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA
31
dence of lesbians and bisexual women in the literary life of this period:
Anna Evreinova, Polyksena Solov'eva, Lidiia Zinov'eva-Annibal, Sofiia
Parnok, Marina Tsvetaeva, and so on.19 Despite the new consciousness
and public personalities being adopted by women of the period, there
were apparently no Russian calls for lesbian emancipation. In
Germany, a radical section of the women's movement, New Morality,
promoted the idea of the 'Uranian woman', free of the burden of
marriage to pursue her own identity; but even in this vanguard nation
lesbian voices for social transformation were scarce, and usually on the
fringes of the feminist or homosexual emancipation movements.
Women's sexuality and gender identity were considered by political
activists to be maximalist demands in a struggle which had first to
address issues of natality, family law and women's participation in the
industrial economy.20
The Bolsheviks thus inherited a range of attitudes about homosexuality which had been undergoing a rapid transformation in the
decades preceding the 1917 Revolution. Religion, while still dominant
in the peasant hinterland, had been supplanted by science and in
particular psychiatric medicine, as the chief interpreter of homosexual
acts. Among those who sought to modernise Russian society whether
by reform or revolution, the case for reform if not repeal of Russia's
statute against consenting homosexual acts was understood.
THE REVOLUTION AND HOMOSEXUAL EMANCIPATION
32
REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA
they wrote that 'the Bolshevik government did away with all laws
against homosexual acts per se in December 1917'. They contended
that the Soviet people desired 'that the walls which separated the
homosexuals from the rest of society' be demolished.21 They cited
Wilhelm Reich, the radical German sexologist who visited the USSR in
1929, as the source of this claim. Reich however was merely repeating
the language he later found in the 1930 Great Soviet Encyclopedia's
article on 'gomoseksualizm''. This article was a programmatic statement
aimed at a plurality of audiences, and not a faithful account of historical
events. To rely on it to prove assertions about Soviet opinion in 1917, as
Lauritsen and Thorstad did, is unsound. Their chief contribution to
this chapter of lesbian and gay history is in situating Russian achievements in the context of European progressive thought, and in stimulating the interest of a new generation of scholars. In his 1976 and 1990
survey articles, Simon Karlinsky criticised Lauritsen and Thorstad for
the thinness of their scholarship, which he attributed to their apparent
lack of awareness of Russian conditions, coupled with a New Left
ideological agenda.22
Professor Karlinsky regards the Bolshevik decriminalisation of
homosexuality as, at best, a benign oversight, the result of having
dispensed with all law during the Civil War. He cites the reaction of
Chaikovskii's biographer, Nina Berberova, to the proposition that
decriminalisation was intentional: 'But in that case, the abolition of the
old Code had also legalized murder, rape and incest. . . We had no
laws on the books against them in 1917-22 either.'23 This mischievous
construction fails to recognise that efforts were being made by the
Bolsheviks, even during the violent and chaotic conditions of the Civil
War, to lay down the fundamentals of a new legal order, and that
crimes against the person were being defined by the new regime.
Murder was not legalised by the October 1917 putsch; People's
Commissar of Justice Kurskii acknowledged forthrightly that crimes
against the person were dangerous to social welfare and in a 1919
article listed four pages of Soviet decrees against such crimes, laid out
like chapters of a criminal code.24 Moreover, the Commissariat issued
the 'Leading Principles of Criminal Legislation of the RSFSR' in
December 1919, which while very brief, acknowledged that criminal
justice could not exist without a foundation of standards for defining,
judging and punishing crime.25 Draft Criminal Codes were developed
33
34
REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA
from the old Article 995. It is not so anomalous, then, to see this legislative reform as evidence of a genuine advance won by a 'modernist
consensus' of progressive opinion in scientific, juridical and cultural
circles. Perhaps, as Karlinsky maintains, it was a consensus fostered
more by liberals under the last years of the Tsarist regime than by
Marxists. But the fact is that the Bolsheviks implemented the reform.
Soviet experts displayed a wide range of attitudes toward homosexuality in the wake of decriminalisation. Jurisprudence, criminology,
social hygiene, psychiatry and sexology all took up the issue and
different pronouncements on the phenomenon may be found in
various sources during the 1920s. Unfortunately for Soviet homosexuals, decriminalisation did not mean an immediate end to criminal
prosecution, nor did it lead to an era when 'the walls which separated
the homosexuals from the rest of society' were demolished.
While the 'modernist consensus' had been strong enough to achieve
decriminalisation, it was either not strong enough, or not sufficiently
inclined, to protest against the prosecution of a 'den' (pritori) of homosexual men uncovered by the Cheka quite soon after the promulgation
of the new Code in 1922. Indeed, Russia's foremost psychiatrist and
arguably the nation's expert on homosexuality, V.M. Bekhterev, testified at the trial of these homosexuals that while homosexuality per se
was not illegal, there was a social danger to suggestible persons from
those afflicted with authentic homosexuality (that is, an organic
abnormality). The state had relinquished the instrument of the antisodomy law by which to limit public and private displays of homosexuality, but it soon found a new instrument by convicting the men
for disorderly conduct. This trial was reported in the weekly journal of
the People's Commissariat of Justice, only months after the adoption of
the 1922 Code; such prominent discussion of this apparently slight
offence against public order suggests a high degree of sensitivity
around the issue of homosexual emancipation.32
Criminologists apparently retained their antipathy toward the
homosexual after decriminalisation, although developments in the
discipline held the potential to transform this attitude. A1923 study of
Soviet prisons confirmed the prevalence of homosexual activity as part
and parcel of prison life: 'Abnormal sexual relations in prison develop
inevitably as a result of prison confinement... loathsome in all their
unnaturalness, they are to be found in complete accordance with the
35
36
REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA
37
of the fact that no Russian version has ever been uncovered, despite a
note in the German edition stating it is a translation from a 1923
Russian version. This has led Simon Karlinsky and Wayne Dynes to
infer that the Russians never printed a 'home' version, and therefore
the Bolsheviks did not endorse Batkis's views.43 Such an endorsement
was probably unlikely given Batkis's radical position on tolerance; but
this does not mean his point of view was suppressed by the Communists. (He is on record as having expressed the same opinions in
Copenhagen in 1928. )" Karlinsky and Dynes concluded that Batkis was
writing solely for foreign consumption; if this were true then perhaps
this occurred in the context of exchanges of information between
professionals. Soviet legislation in family and sexual matters was an
accomplishment incorporating the most advanced ideas of European
experts. Russian social hygienists, familiar with these developments,
would want, with some justice, to point to a Russian rationalising 'leap
forward' while more economically advanced societies like Britain and
Germany were still bound by unscientific moral strictures.45
Another arena which provided frequent discussion of Russia's
decriminalisation of male homosexuality was the World League for
Sexual Reform (WLSR), where Russian sexologists enjoyed a preeminence thanks to the radical legislation of the Soviet government.
The WLSR brought together scientists, rationalisers and reformers
from Europe and America, and was the projection into the international
sphere of Magnus Hirschfeld's work in his Berlin Institute for Sex
Research, founded in 1919. Hirschfeld organised the League at an
international conference in 1921, and it held its own gatherings in 1928
(Copenhagen), 1929 (London), 1930 (Vienna), and 1932 (Brno).46
Grigorii Batkis presented major papers at the 1928, 1929 and 1930
congresses of the WLSR. The 1928 paper was a wide-ranging survey of
Soviet progress in social hygiene as it touched on sexual issues:
maternity and marriage, venereal disease, education and homosexual
law reform. The Vienna Congress heard his assessment of 'Sex Problems in Soviet Russia at the Time of Socialistic Reconstruction', and this
paper acknowledged the praise received by the Soviets for their
legislation, especially in the field of socially harmless activity like
homosexuality.47
The tendency of social hygiene to look for causes of illness in macrolevel, class-based environmental factors gave it a much broader and
more critical outlook than previous attempts at defining environmental
health in Russia. Thus it enjoyed an enthusiastic following in the years
immediately after the Civil War; when revolutionary elan sagged its
38
REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA
novelty-value faded and students looked for disciplines which guaranteed more upward mobility like conventional medical research and
practice. The critical approach to social problems inherent in the social
hygienists' work did not endear it to a regime with an appetite for good
news; in the 1930s, social hygiene fell under the same Stalinist pall
which silenced other critical disciplines. The Cultural Revolution
claimed the cause of sex reform as an early victim: the old Bolshevik
Semashko was removed as Commissar of Public Health in 1930, and by
the year's end, his Institute of Social Hygiene had been renamed and
given a more pragmatic and bureaucratic brief. Medical schools were
partitioned into faculties with purely practical objectives and the
teaching of social hygiene was dropped or subsumed into other disciplines. The 'sex question' soon ceased to exist in Russia.48
While Russia's social hygienists took a relatively progressive and
benign stance on homosexuals following decriminalisation, more
interventionist strategies were adopted by psychiatric medicine.
Russia's foremost psychiatrist in the 1920s was V.M. Bekhterev, who
had published much prior to the Revolution and after it about sexual
deviations. His testimony at the 'trial of homosexuals' of 1922, and a
1926 article on the possibilities of curing homosexuality, demonstrate
the difficulties for homosexuals inherent in the mdicalisation of their
condition. On the one hand, as in the 'trial of homosexuals', designating 'authentic' homosexuality a psychiatric illness represented a
progressive advance on the previous practice of regarding it as a crime
(although this did not save the men in question from being convicted).
On the other hand, science demands that illness be explained and
where possible cured, and in 'On perversion and deviation of sexual
attraction',49 Bekhterev sought to analyse homosexuality along these
lines. He insisted that homosexual desire is the unhappy result of
environmental influences experienced at a crucial moment of one's
sexual development. Bekhterev concluded that the majority of homosexuals recognise the abnormality of their condition, and wish to find a
way out of it. He advanced a formula for curing homosexual desire
which consisted of hypnosis combined with an enormous effort of will
on the part of the patient. The key to eliminating a tragic abnormality
was, in Bekhterev's view, the application of preventive measures,
and in particular a proper sexual upbringing. That homosexuals like
Bekhterev's subjects would submit to such therapy indicates the low
level of self esteem they felt, and the unlikeliness of any social value for
the homosexual identity in Russia at the time. That psychiatry saw
social engineering as its mission (a goal which dovetailed neatly with
39
40
REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA
41
42
REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA
the 1920s. While it is credible to accept that a large body of Soviet public
opinion wanted sterner rules on such things as marriage, divorce and
child support, it is more difficult to ascribe the recriminalisation of
homosexuality to a groundswell of public outrage. There are strong
indications that male homosexuality became a nexus for a range of
obsessions as diverse as Stalin's homophobia, his fear of Germansponsored subversion, his drive to suppress remnants of bourgeois
culture, and even emulation of Hitler.
A most intriguing argument has been made to explain recriminalisation of homosexuality as a very personal example of Stalin's
admiration for German totalitarianism. Daniel Rancour-Laferriere
posits that Stalin not only admired and identified with Hitler, but
actually experienced a latent homosexual attraction for the German
dictator. Following the psychoanalytic tradition whereby homosexual
desire and paranoia are linked as cause-and-effect, Rancour-Laferriere
suggests that Stalin moved against homosexuals in Russia for motives
that mixed fear of subversion with a visceral loathing of his own
homosexual impulses.64
Rancour-Laferriere's contentions about Stalin's personal motivation
in this matter rely largely on the testimony of various memoirists, as
interpreted by classical Freudianism. The result is compelling but
problematic. Even if one allows for the highly speculative nature of this
interpretation of history, the question of the memoirists' reasons for
wanting to suggest Stalin might be homosexual (or merely have
tendencies) is side-stepped by Rancour Laf erriere. Only one memoirist,
Alexander Orlov, is cited as claiming Stalin had an affair with another
man (Stalin's chief bodyguard, K.V. Pauker); and Orlov is repeating
hearsay from an NKVD operative. Among the other memoirists,
Khrushchev and Medvedev are noted for chronicling Stalin's all-male
drinking parties, when the dictator often made his lieutenants dance
together. These authors most probably never conceived of Stalin as
anything but heterosexual. They reported these events in order to
degrade Stalin's prestige, to embellish his depravity and criminality,
and to intensify the impression of Stalin's mental illness. The memoirists' use of the smear was but a continuation of a practice which had its
origins in the rhetorical war between fascism and communism of the
1930s.
The chief value of Rancour Laferriere's chapter is in chronicling an
aspect of this war of words which others have noticed, but which he
was the first to attempt to explain: the peculiar consonance in moves to
suppress homosexuals in both Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia during
43
the mid 1930s. Events proceeded as though each dictator was trying to
outdo the other. For both Hitler and Stalin, homosexuality was never
merely an offence against morality, but a crime of political subversion.
Hitler's ritualised destruction of Hirschfeld's Institute of Sex Research
in Berlin, and the closure of the city's homosexual bars in May 1933
were consistent with the Nazis' belief that the German homosexual
emancipation movement was a threat to both the stern image of the
militarised Nazi male, and to the 'battle for the birthrate' which would
determine German military strength.65
In Russia, the decision to recriminalise muzhelozhestvo was preceded
by a period of dstabilisation in German-Soviet relations. Military cooperation, based on the Rapallo Treaty, had abruptly ceased in June
1933. By autumn, rumours were circulating in Moscow that Soviet
homosexual circles were being infiltrated to acquire military intelligence, by German agents under the command of the homosexual
leader of the SA, Captain Ernst Rhm. Such rumours may have been of
dubious veracity. Their flimsiness did not stop the crackdown on male
homosexuals which was the consequence of the decree of 17 December
1933.66
The first attempt to publicly justify the repression of homosexuals
soon followed. Maksim Gor'kii's article, 'Proletarian Humanism',
appearing in Pravda and Izvestiia in May 1934, proposed the thesis that
homosexuality was an essential attribute of fascism - Gor'kii's essay
used lurid language to attack homosexuals as the helpmates of violence,
racism and capitalist exploitation. 'Homosexuality, which corrupts
youth, is designated a social crime and a punishable offence [in the
USSR], but in the "civilized" nation of the great philosophers, scientists
and musicians, [Germany] it flourishes unpunished. A sarcastic saying
has already appeared: "Eliminate homosexuals - fascism will disappear".'67 This passage represents a radical shift in the way homosexuality was treated in Soviet rhetoric; from a benign condition or
unfortunate illness it became a form of depravity peculiar to fascism, the
marker in Stalinist terms of a profoundly anticommunist orientation.
June 1934 brought the consolidation of Hitler's revolution in
Germany with the elimination of Rhm and his allies in the SA. In the
Reichstag, Hitler justified this step beyond the bounds of legality with
the claim that Rhm was planning a putsch. Hitler embellished this
explanation with much emphasis on the notorious immorality and
homosexuality of Rhm and his circle, an audacious reversal of his
previous inclination to overlook this aspect of the SA's reputation.68 To
Stalin, who admired Hitler's success, and who continued to see in Nazi
44
REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA
45
46
REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA
CONCLUSION
47
of homosexuality which might have existed before Peter the Great (for
example, in the Orthodox tradition) were overladen with German legal
definitions (Peter's Military Code of 1716, and the 1832 Legal Code of
Nicholas I) and, ultimately, Germanic sexological analysis.75
In the 1920s, Soviet Russia was an overwhelmingly agrarian society
especially by comparison with the industrial powers of Europe. After
the wars of 1914-1921, Russian cities were depleted, and the proportion
of urban population to rural remained very low. (The percentage of the
population which was urban dwelling was 18 per cent in 1914; it
dropped to 15 per cent in 1920, and only recovered pre-war levels in
1926.)76 Moreover, the changes in the character of Russia's cities
wrought by war and by the influence of the massive peasant hinterland
made them very different from those of Germany or France. This was
not propitious for the emergence of a Soviet homosexual community. If
a homosexual identity is adopted more readily by city dwellers, then
on a demographic basis alone there were fewer people likely to do so in
1922 than there had been in 1914.
Poverty, and the limitations placed on private businesses, also
contributed to the strangulation of homosexual community life. The
privations of War Communism, and the rationing or total absence of
luxury goods and services under NEP, were not conducive to the
establishment of a subculture based on leisure and social interaction. It
is conceivable that bars, nightclubs or restaurants which had a homosexual clientele did exist in NEP Russia; a lively environment of
(apparently heterosexual) nightclubs existed where the latest trends in
European and American music, dance and fashion were avidly
pursued. Indeed, some of this 'decadent culture' found pockets of
official support; the Commissariat of Enlightenment funded an expedition to America for research into jazz music.77 What has not emerged is
whether there were public places for female or male homosexuals to
meet and socialise in Moscow or Leningrad at the time. Memoirs (such
as Mikhail Kuzmin's diaries which until recently have not been accessible) may yet change the current impression that such spaces did not
exist.
Another consequence of the apparent lack of private businesses
catering to homosexuals would be the lack of spin off capital to finance
other aspects of community life: self help groups, special interest
groups, publications and so on. Successful lesbian and gay communities in the West have usually enjoyed some recycling of 'pink profits'
from the leisure industries supported by homosexuals (particularly
where ownership has been in the hands of homosexuals).78 The lesbian
48
REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA
poet Sofiia Parnok's experience in co-operative publishing from 192628 demonstrates how fragile and hemmed-in the private economy was
under the much-vaunted freedoms of NEP: between the censor's
mistrust of Parnok's elitist output, and the financial constraints placed
on the co-op's members, the business was unsustainable before it
published a single volume.79 Parnok was forced to turn to statesponsored translation to earn a living - an alternative which robbed her
of her unique voice. A similar fate befell Mikhail Kuzmin who was in
demand asa critic and essayist until gathering criticism of his bourgeois
sensibilities curbed his access to freelance work.80
At the root of these economic problems was the fundamental
insecurity of NEP society. For all but the uppermost circles of the
Communist Party, autonomy was to become a rationed luxury as the
1920s came to a close. Freedom was constrained by a Party which was
attempting to establish its control over a fractious and scarred nation.
Urban dwellers with the funds to set up a business were very few in
number (there were but 75,000 NEP entrepreneurs in the entire Soviet
Union in 1926).81 The political disenfranchisement of these NEPmen
and others with resources, the former bourgeoisie and aristocracy,
coupled with the propaganda against them, rendered their behaviour
very cautious indeed. In such circumstances, publishing a homosexual
newspaper, or opening a homosexual dance club, would have been a
risky undertaking. Those who might have taken such risks must also
have been well aware of the Party's reaction to radical impulses for
reform of gender roles and sexuality after the silencing of Kollontai in
1923. The linking of sexual radicalism with bourgeois and aristocratic
tastes was widespread, and homosexuals were seen as part of this
spectrum of politically incorrect ef feteness. (The contemporary Russian
word for a gay man, goluboi (blue) retains a hint of this link in its
connotations of blue-blood.)
It is worth noting that the large homosexual community which
emerged in Germany after the Great War came out almost in spite of its
earliest leaders. Hirschfeld's reliance on scientific and medical arguments to justify tolerance of homosexuals was only partially accepted
by a popular wave of homosexuals who effectively emancipated themselves. The construction of a community based on leisure industries
and self-help or political groups was achieved by a new generation of
citizens who accepted that 'nature had made them homosexual' but
who rejected suggestions that they were therefore 'inverted' or
'arrested' in their development as human beings. The most vociferous
supporters of the ideal of homosexual community mistrusted the
49
NOTES
1. 'Russia's Gay Literature and History', Gay Sunshine, No.29/30, 1976; 'Russia's Gay
Literature and Culture: The Impact of the October Revolution', M.B. Duberman,
M. Vicinus and G. Chauncy. Jr. (eds.), Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and
Lesbian Past (London, 1990).
2. Eve Levin, Sex and Society in the World of the Orthodox Slavs, 900-1700 (London, 1989),
pp.9, 13, 46, 69.
3. Levin, pp. 199-203.
4. Levin, pp.203-4, 281-3.
5. Karlinsky, 1990, pp.349-50.
6. Jeffrey Weeks, Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain from the Nineteenth Century
to the Present (London, 1990), p.12. An attempt to criminalise 'Acts of Gross Indecency
by Females' was passed by the British House of Commons in 1921, but failed to win
support in the Lords, where it was believed that lesbians were ill and not responsible
for their actions; see Weeks, p. 106.
7. 'Muzhelozhestvo', Brokgauz i Efron (eds.), Entsiklopedicheskii slovar' (St Petersburg,
1897), Vol.39, 110-11.
8. Karlinsky, 1990, p.358.
9. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume I An Introduction (London, 1990),
contains a discussion of this transformation in Part 3, 'Scientia Sexualis'.
10. The term 'homosexual' was coined by Dr Karoly Maria Benkert in 1869; it had passed
into general usage among the medical professions of Europe and America by the
1890s.
11. Laura Engelstein, 'Lesbian Vignettes: A Russian Triptych from the 1890s', Signs
Vol.15, No.4 (1990), discusses I.M. Tarnovskii's study of three lesbians from different
50
REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA
51
25. Decree of the People's Commissariat of Justice, 12 Dec. 1919, Sobranie uzakonenii i
rasporiazhenii rabochego i krest'ianskogo pravitel'stva, (1919), No.66, item 590; cited in
Harold J. Berman, Soviet Criminal Law and Procedure: The RSFSR Codes (Cambridge,
MA, 1966), p. 19.
26. Ivo Lapenna, Soviet Penal Policy (London, 1968), p.32.
27. John N. Hazard, 'Soviet Law: The Bridge Years, 1917-1920', W.E. Butler (ed.),
Russian Law: Historical and Political Perspectives (1977), p.248.
28. Peter H. Solomon, Jr., 'Soviet Penal Policy, 1917-1934: A Reinterpretation', Slavic
Review, Vol.39, No.2 (1980), p.197.
29. People's Commissar of Justice Kurskii said of the newly-drafted Criminal Code that
it was 'a synthesis of all precedents, of all norms derived from the socialist consciousness of the workers and peasants and of the most progressive trends in science' (my
emphasis; Ezhenedel'nik sovetskoi iustitsii, No.18 (1922). 'The Criminal Code is presented for the consideration not only of delegates [i.e. operatives of Narkomiust],
but of scientific experts', declared Cherliunchakevich when introducing the draft
code to the 4th All-Russian Congress of Justice Workers, Ezhenedel'nik sovetskoi
iustitsii, No.5 (1922), p.9.
30. Timasheff, p.458.
31. Intent to retain as crimes homosexual acts with minors or using coercion, G. Batkis
and L. Gurwitsch, 'Einiges Material uber die Sexualreform in der Union der Sozialistischen Sowjetrepubliken', WLSR Proceedings of 2nd Congress (Copenhagen, 1928)
(Copenhagen, 1929), pp.60-1. I am grateful to Natasha Kuhrt for her translation of
all WLSR materials cited in German in this article,
32. Timasheff, p.458, citing 'Protsessy gomoseksualistov' (Trials of Homosexuals'),
Ezhenedel'niksovetskoiiustitsii, No.33 (1922), pp.16-17.
33. M. Gernet, 'Ocherki tiuremnoi psikhologii', Pravo i zhizri', No.4 (1923), cited in
V. Kozlovskii, Argo russkoi gomoseksual'noi subkul'tury (Benson, VT, 1986), p.93.
34. Peter H. Juviler, Revolutionary Law and Order (London 1976), pp.31-2.
35. The 1926 RSFSR Criminal Code implemented changes resulting from the formation
of the USSR; on Ferri's influence on its draughtsmen, see H.J. Berman, p.30, n.5; on
Fern's disinclination to juridically punish anti-social or immoral acts unworthy of
being considered criminal, see E. Ferri, Criminal Sociology (Boston, MA, 1917), p.81.
36. N. Pasche-Oserski, 'Sexualgesetzgebung in der Sowjet Union', WSLR Proceedings of
2nd Congress (Copenhagen, 1928) (Copenhagen, 1929), pp.230-1.
37. Anna J. Haines, Health Work in Soviet Russia (New York, 1928), p. 162.
38. Ella Winter, Red Virtue (London, 1933), pp.149-50,
39. I. Gel'man, 'Anketnyi list dlia sobiraniia svedenii po polovomu voprosu', Sotsial'naia
gigiena, No.2 (April 1923), p.111.
40. Susan G. Solomon, 'Social Hygiene and Soviet Public Health, 1921-1930', in S.G.
Solomon and J.F. Hutchinson, Health and Society in Revolutionury Russia (Bloomington
and Indianapolis, IN, 1990), pp.178-9.
41. Solomon, p. 183.
42. Cited in James Steakley, The Homosexual Emancipation Movement in Germany (New
York, 1975), p.97, n.2.
43. Karlinsky, 1990, p.556, n.23; Wayne R. Dynes, Homosexuality: A Research Guide (New
York, 1987), p. 141.
44. WLSR Proceedings ofthe2nd Congress (Copenhagen, 1928) (Copenhagen, 1929), pp.60-1.
45. That the Russians were aware of the advance their homosexual legislative reform
represented on the international stage is clear from the article on 'gomoseksualizm' in
Bol'shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia (Moscow, 1930), which makes reference to Hirschfeld's campaign for decriminalisation in Germany.
46. Adam, p.24; Weeks, pp.138-41.
47. World League for Sexual Reform: Proceedings of the 2nd Congress (Copenhagen, 1928)
(Copenhagen, 1929), pp.31-63; Proceedings of the 3rd Congress (London, 1929) (London,
52
48.
49.
50.
51.
52.
53.
54.
55.
56.
57.
58.
59.
60.
61.
62.
REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA
1930), pp.249-51; Proceedings of the 4th Congress (Vienna, 1930) (Vienna, 1931),
pp.345-6.
Solomon, pp.189-92.
V.M. Bekhterev, 'Ob izvrashchenii i uklonenii polovogo vlecheniia', Polovoi vopros v
svete nauchnogo znaniia, (Moscow, 1926), pp.293-325.
Winter, p.165.
The lesbians in Zinovieva-Annibal's Tridtsat' tri uroda (33 Freaks) are an actor and a
model; Kuzmin's young protagonist in Kryl'ia (Wings) has as his mentor an older
Russian with foreign associations, who instills a love of Mediterranean culture in his
protege; in Kamenskii's Zhenshchina (The Woman) a man takes advantage of the city's
anonymity to dress as a woman and all but has an affair with another man before
abandoning the charade.
Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams (Oxford, 1989), p.117. Examples of linkage
between homosexuality and bourgeois sensibilities may be found in I. Ehrenberg,
Burnaia zhizn' Lasika Roitshvantsa (Leningrad, 1928/29), pp.94-6, in which the hero
must compose a Marxist review of a French novel in which boys sleep with boys and
girls sleep with girls - the marker par excellence of decadence. The very mention of the
word 'gomoseksualizm' is treated as a similar token of bourgeois outlandishness in
Il'f and Petrov, Dvenadtsat' stul'ev (Moscow, 1934), p.181 (first published 1928).
World League for Sexual Reform, Proceedings of the 2nd Congress (Copenhagen, 1928)
(Copenhagen, 1929), pp.9-10; and WLSR, Proceedings of the 3rd Congress (London,
1929) (London, 1930); Weeks (1990), p.137.
'Pis'ma k trudiashcheisia molodezhi. Dorogu krylatomu Erosu!', Molodaia gvardiia,
No.3, (May 1923): Liubov' pchel trudovykh (Petrograd, 1923). Zhenshchina naperelome
(Moscow and Petrograd, 1923) (cited from B.E. Clements, Bolshevik Feminist
(Bloomington and London, 1979), pp.226-31).
Clements, pp.226-35.
Hazard (1968), p.457.
Reich, p.209.
These were Ukraine, which appears to have ignored the second decree; the Tajik
republic which retained the 17 December 1933 prohibitions against homosexual
prostitution and public displays, but enacted the new minimum sentences; and the
Uzbek republic, which kept both the 1933 prohibitions and its 1929 statute against
'schooling of youth into homosexuality' (Hazard, 1968), p.458. Hazard speculates
that Stalin recriminalised homosexual practices because of reports of their spread
'beyond the Muslims of Central Asia' (Hazard, 1968), p.457. Great Russian chauvinism, mixed with European fears of the 'exotic Asian homosexual' as evidenced in
pre-Revolutionary Russian scientific studies of this sexual 'type' (see n.12 above),
appears to have determined Soviet legal regimes governing homosexual acts: the
Bolsheviks re-imposed anti-homosexual statutes in Azerbaijan, Georgia, Turkmenia
and Uzbekistan during the 1920s, while in Russia and Ukraine homosexuality was
not a crime (Chalidze, 1977), p.227.
Whether in fact other forms of sexual intercourse between men were subject to
prosecution after 1933 is not known. De Jong (p.345) cites two commentaries on the
law which offer narrow (that is, anal intercourse only) interpretations; yet he also
notes that young male Pioneers were used by Moscow police in the 1970s to entrap
homosexuals, presumably without regard for a strict construction of the crime.
Stites (1978), p.366.
Stites (1978), p.370. The 1926 Family Code consolidated the radical measures of the
divorce provisions of the 1918 Code it replaced, while attempting to address the
problems of desertion and non-payment of alimony which the first Code had produced; decrees in 1936 gave the courts jurisdiction over divorce and imposed fees to
deter the frivolous, while abortion was made illegal.
S. Fitzpatrick, 'Sex and Revolution: An Examination of Literary and Statistical Data
63.
64.
65.
66.
53
on the Mores of Soviet Students in the 1920s', Journal of Modern History, 50 {June
1978), pp.274-76.
K. Zetkin, Reminiscences ofLenin (London, 1929), pp.52-60.
D. Rancour-Laferriere, The Mind of Stalin: A Psychoanalytic Study (Ann Arbor, ML,
1988), p.104.
D.J.K. Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition and Racism in Everyday
Life (London, 1989), p.219.
Rancour-Laferriere (1988), p. 105; rumours about homosexual subversion are cited
from B.I. Nicolaevsky, Power and the Soviet Elite: 'Letter of an Old Bolshevik' and Other
67.
68.
69.
70.
71.
72.
73.
74.
75.
Essays (London, 1966). The apparent military origins of the new anti-homosexual
decree could account for the lack of attention paid in this period to lesbianism in
Soviet criminal legislation.
Maksim Gor'kii, 'Proletarskii gumanizm', Sobranie sochinenii v 30-i tomakh (Moscow,
1953), vol.27, p.238.
Alan Bullock, Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives (London, 1991), p.383.
Sovetskaia iustitsiia, No.1 (1936), pp.3-4, as cited in De Jong.
The second edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1952) presents the most refined
Stalinist interpretation of homosexuality. It dismisses Western scientific studies of
the phenomenon as too heavily weighted toward biological explanations (citing only
studies by Steinach which were by then over 20 years old). It contends that environment is the chief determinant of homosexualtiy, and claims that the majority of
homosexuals exposed to a favourable social environment will become heterosexual.
Soviet society 'with its healthy morality' offers the model of such an environment.
Both feudal and capitalist societies are condemned for the way in which homosexuality flourishes among the ruling classes ('Gomoseksualizm', Bol'shaia sovetskaia
entsiklopediia, Moscow 1952, Vol.12, p.35).
S.V. Shumikhin, 'Dnevnik Mikhaila Kuzmina: Arkhivnaia predystoriia', G.A. Morev
(ed.), Mikhail Kuzmin i russkaia kul'tura XX veka: tezisy i materialy konferentsii 15-17 maia
1990 g. (Leningrad, 1990), pp. 140-41. On Kuzmin's poverty and ill-health, see
Malmsted (1977), p.306.
Shumikhin, p.141.
Shumikhin, pp.142-3. On Kuzmin and Chicherin's schooldays together and friendship, see Malmsted, pp.24-6; Chicherin's homosexuality and the distress it caused
him are mentioned in A. Meyendorff, 'My Cousin, Foreign Commissar Chicherin',
Russian Review (April 1971). Chicherin's homosexuality was no doubt viewed by
Stalin as consistent with his aristocratic origins and intellectual achievements, qualities detested by the General Secretary; see T.E. O'Connor, Diplomacy und Revolution:
G.V. Chicherin and Soviet Foreign Affairs, 1918-1930 (Ames, IA, 1988), p.166.
Shumikhin, pp. 144-5.
For the debate on 'essentialist' (inherent, biological) versus 'constructionist' (social)
etiologies of homosexuality, see Weeks, p.281, 'Further Reading'; Foucault's History
of Sexuality (Vol.1) is regarded as a landmark text for constructionists; L. Faderman,
Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America
(New York, 1991), p.309, n.4 offers a useful summary of recent scientific attempts to
pinpoint a genetic basis for homosexuality. On creative tension between sexologists
and homosexuals, see Steakley, p.74 (for Germany), and Faderman, Chapter 2 (for
America).
76. Moshe Lewin, The Making of the Soviet System (London, 1985), pp.211, 218.
77. S. Frederick Starr, Red and Hot: The Fate of Jazz in the Soviet Union (Oxford, 1983),
pp.56-60.
78. The relative weakness of the British lesbian and gay movement compared with North
America's might in part be traced to the fact that lesbian and gay pubs in the UK are
owned by breweries. Canadian and US bars are frequently owned by gay entrepreneurs, some of whom support community activity and politics. Berlin bars
54
79.
80.
81.
82.
REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA
between the wars apparently attracted a readership for some 30 different publications
which served homosexuals, and one bar even gave space for a gay theatre company
(Steakley, pp.78, 81).
S. Poliakova 'Poeziia Sofii Parnok', in Sofiia Parnok, Sobranie stikhohtvorenii (Ann
Arbor, ML, 1979), pp.29-30.
Malmsted, pp.287-94.
Lewin, p.214.
Kurt Hiller's famous declaration, 'The liberation of homosexuals can only be the
work of homosexuals themselves' embodied this spirit: see Adams, p.23. Hans
Kuhnert organised the German Friendship Association to provide social opportunities for ordinary lesbians and gays, and explicitly rejected the academic elitism of
Hirschfeld's Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, see Steakley, p.74.