Daniel Healey, 'The Russian Revolution and The Decriminalisation of Homosexuality', Revolutionary Russia, 1993, Vol. 6, No. 1, Pp. 26-54

The Russian Revolution and the
Decriminalisation of Homosexuality
Daniel Healey
Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:34 18 February 2013
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
THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION AND HOMOSEXUALITY
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
In Orthodoxy, the Russians acquired a religious tradition which was

hostile toward male and female homosexual activity. Indeed, all sex
was regarded from the earliest Christian times by Slavic Church fathers
as dangerous. Until the time of Peter the Great, the Orthodox Church
was largely responsible for the regulation of sexual activity, and its
penalities for various forms of homosexual activity reflect a concern for
the preservation of stability in a kinship-based society.2
The records of ecclesiastical courts, commentaries by Church fathers,
and catechistic guides for lower clergy demonstrate a sophisticated
level of differentiation between various forms of sexual transgressions,
based on the degree to which these challenged the established order.
Slavic penitential texts drew on Christianity's two opposing traditions
regarding male homosexuality to arrive at a distinction between forms
of intercourse. One tradition, derived from Mosaic law and neoplatonism, condemned homosexuality and exalted the ascetic life.
The other, derived from classical Athenian culture and transmitted
to the Slavs through Byzantine canon law, regarded anal intercourse
as an insult to the masculinity of at least the passive partner, but
saw little harm in non-penetrative homosexual activity. Accordingly
muzhelozhestvo (sodomy, a term with a long history of ambiguity, but in
this context, anal intercourse between men), attracted penalties as
severe as heterosexual adultery. Other, non-penetrative forms of
sexual contact between men were regarded as aggravated forms of
masturbation. Orthodoxy sought to preserve the integrity of the male
gender role, which was thought to be endangered if one man were
willing to submit to another in anal intercourse. This role-based
distinction between forms of male homosexual activity lingered in the
Russian consciousness and became the basis for legal definitions of
muzhelozhestvo in the nineteenth and twentieth Centuries.3
28
REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA
Orthodox penances for mutual masturbation between women were

somewhat harsher than those imposed on men for the same offence,
but not as harsh as the penalties for male anal intercourse. In general,
lesbian behaviour attracted less attention from the Church; there was,
for example, a large body of penitential codes devised to deal with the
problem of male homosexuality in monasteries while no comparable
set of texts regarding lesbianism among nuns was elaborated. With the
separation of society into distinctly male and female arenas, with less
status for the feminine, lesbian love was able to pass unnoticed and
unstigmatised.4
The Russian state first turned its attention to the regulation of
homosexuality in 1716, when Peter the Great employed German
advisers to draft a military legal code. Sodomy between men became an
offence only within the military, carrying the penalties of corporal
punishment for the simplest cases, and hard labour for life, or the
death penalty in aggravated circumstances.5 It was Nicholas I who
extended the criminalisation of male homosexual activity to the population at large in his Legal Code of 1832. Patterned on codes from
German principalities, Article 995 prohibited tnuzhelozhestvo, which
was understood to mean anal intercourse between men (Lesbian sex
was not prohibited - as indeed it was ignored by European criminal
codes generally.)6 Few people seem to have fallen foul of this Article,
for while the Code contained no definition oimuzhelozhestvo, commentators and legal practice determined that it refered solely to anal
penetration, which had to be proven in court; the penalty prescribed
was exile in Siberia with the additional imposition on Christians of
religious penances. Sodomy with minors, the feeble-minded or in
conjunction with the use of force, was made a crime in Article 996, and
was punished by ten to twelve years' exile with hard labour.7
Simon Karlinsky pillories the Bolsheviks for 'morbidising' homosexuality in the 1920s8 that is, moving the arena of homophobic oppression from the law to medicine - when in fact this process began in
Russia well before the Revolution. And while it is tempting from the
perspective of the late twentieth century to regard all medical attention
accorded to homosexuality as sinister, a less anachronistic approach
would acknowledge the progressive and compassionate nature of this
medicalising trend. Indeed, the mdicalisation of homosexual acts was
an international phenomenon, part of the process by which scientists
supplanted clerics in Western nations as the interpreters of sexual
normality.9 Russian scientists imported a range of new sexual
categories, including eventually the characterisation 'homosexual'
29
(gomoseksual'nyt) to describe same-sex erotic behaviour.10 The term

appeared in Russian medical literature as early as 1895, in a study of
three lesbians by I.M. Tarnovskii." Following the work of their French,
German, Italian and other European colleagues, Russian forensic
specialists, physicians, and psychiatrists turned their attention to
same-sex love, attempting to impose various European medical
models on the diverse patterns of behaviour they observed.
Professional respect for homosexuality as a way of life was generally
low. Early attention in Russia focused on finding ways of physiologically proving the commission of homosexual acts for the benefit of the
courts. In the 1880s, attention shifted to scientific study of the origins
and characteristics of homosexuals. At the turn of the century,
psychologists were publishing case histories steeped in exotic detail
which established a scientific distance from homosexuality for their
readership. Homosexuality in males was usually associated with the
'disease' of masturbation; in females it was viewed as one of the
attendant evils of prostitution. Further distance between a respectable
European Russian audience and exotic homosexuals was achieved
with a spate of studies ascribing deviant sexuality to other nationalities
in the Empire. On the eve of the Great War, this substantial body of
research into homosexuality had projected Imperial Russia rapidly to
the top rank of those countries engaged in such study.12
Russian forensic and medical professions were greatly influenced
by their European counterparts, and the inspiration of the Germanspeaking nations, which were most active in creating a medical
discourse around homosexual acts, was particularly prominent. St
Petersburg psychiatrists of the 1870s and 1880s were predominantly
German and wrote up their cases in that language.13 Freudianism
attained a larger following in the Russian capitals in the years between
the Revolutions of 1905 and 1917 than in any other non-German
speaking nation. Russian translations of Freud's texts appeared briskly
during this period; Russian psychiatrists had frequent and close
contacts with their German colleagues; and by 1912 the University of
Moscow's Freudian colloquia ('little Fridays') were attracting dozens of
academics from fields as diverse as pedagogics and criminology.14
If the Germans were responsible in some measure for encouraging
the Russians to criminalize and eventually to medicalize homosexuality,
they also had a strong influence on moves to revise social attitudes
toward the homosexual. Attendant with the view of the homosexual as
victim of nature, as not responsible for his or her inclinations, came the
notion that behaviour which took place in private and did not harm
30
society's interests ought not to be punished in law. In an earlier era,

social critics had noted the cruelty and futility of such punishment
(Jeremy Bentham, for example, wrote at great length on this theme). It
took the mdicalisation of the homosexual, however, to pacify homophobia sufficiently to make law reform a possibility. In Germany, a
homosexual emancipation movement emerged among urban male
professionals and intellectuals, pursuing a concrete political goal: the
repeal of German legislation against male homosexual acts. The Berlinbased Scientific Humanitarian Committee, founded in 1897 by the
physician, Magnus Hirschfeld, campaigned for law reform, while
publishing a large body of scientific literature on what the Committee
called the 'third sex'.15
This secularising, rationalising approach to homosexuality had its
proponents in Imperial Russia, although the emancipationist emphasis
(which sprang from the Western insistence on the primacy of the
individual) never achieved more than fleeting hints of promise in the
Russian political environment. In 1903, Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov,
leading Constitutional Democrat, published an article in Hirschfeld's
scholarly journal outlining the history of homosexuality in Russian law.16
At around the same time, as part of the continuing efforts by the liberal
legal establishment to modernise and Westernise Russia's system of
justice, Nabokov proposed the decriminalisation of muzhelozhestvo.
The Draft Criminal Code, partially adopted in 1903, which was widely
regarded as the best distillation of Western European experience in
criminal law up to that time nevertheless retained the crime.17
The period of Duma politics was a time of social ferment which saw
the emergence of a number of lesbian and gay voices in Russian
literature. The emergence of individuals, consciously and publicly
identifying themselves as homosexuals, among the cultural elite of the
Westernised Russian capitals represented the nearest Russia would
come to achieving a movement for homosexual emancipation, virtually
until the collapse of the Communist Party 80 years later. This flowering
of self-awareness remained individual, unpoliticised and unfocused;
Russia's homosexual artists left it to legal experts to criticise the
injustice of the law against muzhelozhestvo.
Simon Karlinsky and Richard Stites have described in great detail
the imaginative literature of this period and the reaction it received
from critics and journalists. It was during the last years of the Imperial
regime that Mikhail Kuzmin, symbolist and surrealist poet, published
his Kryl'ia (Wings), a novel about a boy coming to terms with his
homosexuality.18 Karlinsky has noted the careers and growing confi-
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
With the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, Lenin dispensed with the

Imperial Criminal Code and judges were instructed to act on the basis
of their 'revolutionary consciousness'. There was no new codification
of crime until 1922. During the so-called "bridge years', crimes against
the person were prohibited more by exhortation from the Commissar
of Justice than by written codes. Was muzhelozhestvo a crime during this
hiatus? What were the intentions of Soviet jurists vis- vis the old
Article 995 - how did it square with their revolutionary consciousness?
In the absence of any clearly documented evidence, it is necessary to
rely on an examination of events and their contexts.
To date, serious discussion of whether the Bolsheviks actually
intended to decriminalise male homosexual activity has been of a very
limited nature. Despite the emergence of lesbian and gay studies in
Western universities in the last twenty years, and despite a percolating
interest among lesbian and gay students of Soviet history, only two
attempts to deal with the question have appeared. The first was
32
produced by John Lauritsen and David Thorstad in 1974, in a slim

volume addressed primarily to gay liberation activists in North America
and Europe. In The Early Homosexual Emancipation Movement 1869-1935,
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
in 1920 by the Commissariat, and by the Institute of Law in late 192126

The extreme legal nihilism of the first blush of revolution, with its
minimalist vision of legality defined by 'revolutionary consciousness'
and references to the 'programme-minimum' of the Russian Social
Democratic Labour Party rapidly yielded to the pressure for explicit
codification.27 Before the end of the Civil War the Bolsheviks had
decided to codify criminal law and procedure; they had also determined that crimes against the person would be proscribed. That this
activity took place simultaneously with the instigation of the Cheka,
the red terror, and the tumultuous violence of the Civil War, does not
diminish its significance. Indeed, Peter H. Solomon, Jr. has argued that
it illustrates the depth of the jurists' commitment to a complete overhaul of the Tsarist legal system.28 At very least it indicates that those
who acted for the new Bolshevik state shared a concern to create a legal
system (and a society) predicated on more than revolutionary terror
and manifestos.
By underrating the desire for radical change in all areas of life which
the Revolution unleashed, and by viewing all Soviet behaviour as
inherently suspect, Professor Karlinsky's interpretation of events fails
to illuminate our understanding of the context for the reform of Russia's
anti-sodomy law in the 1922 Criminal Code. For four decades prior to
the elaboration of this Code, medical science in Russia had declared
that homosexuality was in all likelihood an illness more susceptible to
therapy rather than a crime or a sin which might be corrected by prison,
exile or prayer. The framers of the new Code were determined to
incorporate the most advanced and (in their perception) most scientific
principles in their work.29 They were expressing the revolutionary elan
of the era, a desire to modernise backward Russia through the application of a secularising, scientific worldview to her problems.
This modernism was reflected in the way the unnamed jurists who
compiled the 1922 (and later the 1926) Russian Criminal Code deliberately sought to hive off homosexuality between consenting adults and
shield it from penalty. The offence of voluntary tnuzhelozhestvo was
removed from the law.30 Articles 151 and 153 of the RSFSR Criminal
Code retained provisions specifically aimed at the imposition of homosexual acts on the underage or with the use of violence or abuse of
privileged position over the victim.31 The jurists went to the bother of
eliminating consensual sodomy from the Code, while retaining provisions against homosexual coercion; this must be evidence enough of
their deliberate intention to reform the law on homosexuality. It would
have been a far simpler matter to retain the tsarist prohibition deriving
34
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.
AFTER DECRIMINALISATION: ONE STEP FORWARD, TWO STEPS BACK
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

33
35
prison regime itself.' The author subsequently discussed how new

arrivals in prison are coerced into sexual relations with older prisoners
using a combination of threats, temptations and violence. (It is interesting to note the elaboration of two 'types' of homosexuality - one
'acquired' by malleable persons in a particular environment like the
homosexual 'den' or the prison - in contrast to that 'authentic' homosexuality attributable to benign, biological origin). Changes in the
discipline of criminology in the post revolutionary era suggest two
potential approaches which might have developed in relation to homosexuality. One strand, looking for biological causes of crime, suggested
an analysis of the 'authentic' homosexual as not responsible for his or
her abnormality, and therefore due sympathy, not punishment.
Another, more authoritarian, strand derived from the fashion for social
engineering strategies which gained currency in the discipline; it saw
the environment as the chief determinant of sexual deviance and
sought to identify social changes which might eliminate it.
The first Soviet centres for crime studies were set up in 1921, attached
to provincial courts or intriguingly, to health departments; these
tended to examine criminality as mental illness. A unified authority for
criminology, the State Institute for the Study of Crime and the Criminal,
was created in 1925 under the RSFSR NKVD. This Institute had an
influential Biopsychological Section, where studies of biological
influences on the criminal personality were converging with research
into environmental factors, to produce a critique of social conditions
which promoted crime.34 (A strikingly similar analysis of public health
issues - including the sex question - was being conducted by Soviet
social hygienists, under the Commissariat of Public Health. ) One of the
key sources upon which Soviet criminologists built their discipline was
the work of sociologist and socialist Enrico Ferri. Ferri traced criminality
to both biological and environmental disorders, and argued that some
anti-social or immoral acts might best be addressed outside the criminal
justice system. The framers of the 1926 RSFSR Criminal Code are on
record as having acknowledged a debt to Ferri; they acted in accordance with it in retaining the decriminalisation of male homosexuality
introduced in the 1922 Code.35 Support for this policy was voiced by
Dr Nikolai Pasche-Oserski of Kiev, at the World League for Sexual
Reform's Copenhagen Congress of 1928, when he explicitly articulated
the reasons for reform: either the citizen's homosexuality was a natural
inclination, or the result of mental illness; in neither case would legal
repression serve society.36 Despite the reasoned arguments of the
'modernist' camp for decriminalisation, hostility toward homosexuality
36
lingered. Soviet criminology's increasing tendency to view radical

intervention 'from above' as the answer to individual deviance, and
the eventual Stalinist decision to reject theories of rehabilitation in
favour of economic exploitation of the criminal, were trends which
would be utilised during the reaction against homosexuals in 1933-34.
In medicine, the scientific, rationalist approach to sex questions
found fertile ground in post-revolutionary Russia. The Revolution,
Russia's collision with modernity, would apply the best and the
brightest of human achievements to the problems of impoverished,
religion-befuddled Rus'. Such was the dream of educators and health
practitioners in the 1920s. They pursued this dream with an exuberance
which even sympathetic visitors found overpowering. Anna Haines
noted that exhibitions of sexual education propaganda included
models of the female body 'in meticulous, almost too realistic detail'.37
Ella Winter conveys the flavour of this revolutionary vision when she
remarks that such models, displayed in the salons of the former
nobility to peasant women, were 'more affecting than visions of the
saints'.38 A 1923 questionnaire on the sex lives of students began with
the appeal, 'The sex question is the most complex question in human
life. Comrade, help to resolve it!'39 Science would decide everything.
During the 1920s in the Soviet Union, the fledgling discipline of
social hygiene claimed the sex question as its own. Susan Solomon has
shown how this branch of medicine, deriving from pre-revolutionary
'general hygiene', applied a Marxist coloration to the study of various
environmental influences on disease. Under the patronage of the
Commissar for Public Health, N.A. Semashko, social hygienists
acquired their own Moscow-based research institute and journal.
Semashko underlined the discipline's links with German social
hygienists; significantly, there were frequent contacts and joint publications with the Germans during the 1920s.40
It is perhaps within the context of these links that the origin of a
mysterious pamphlet might be traced. In 1925, a social hygienist with
an interest in the sex question, Grigorii Batkis, a 'young hothead
Bolshevik doing his graduate studies at Moscow University',41 wrote a
pamphlet, 'The Sexual Revolution in Russia', which appeared in 1925,
in a German edition in Berlin. In this tract, Batkis trumpetted the
superiority of the Soviet view of homosexuality - that as a private
matter, it was to be treated like so-called natural intercourse over the
general European dispensation which still suppressed homosexuals
with morals legislation.42
In gay historiography, the mystery of Batkis' pamphlet has consisted
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
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
the Stalinist revolution) is reflected in the views of another Russian

psychiatrist, Lev Rosenshtein. In a conversation about homosexuals,
this Moscow psychiatrist declared to Ella Winter, 'We are not so interested in individual misfits as such. We are interested in making a life
that will not produce misfits'.50
If the consensus which fostered the decriminalisation of male homosexuality in 1922 might be labelled 'modernist', the popular conception
of homosexuals in Russia at the time was that they were a bourgeois,
Western phenomenon. In avantgarde and boulevard literature
between the Revolutions of 1905 and 1917, homosexuality was almost
always depicted as an attribute of urban dwelling, sophisticated or
foreign influenced characters.51 The public mind linked homosexuality
with bourgeois culture of the late Imperial period: the ballet, the Mir
isskustva group, the salons of Gippius and Ivanov. The very category of
homosexuality itself was an import, the creation of German medicine;
among Russian psychiatrists discussion of the phenomenon had
largely been limited to case histories of well-to-do European Russian
males. The first Russians to identify themselves as homosexuals and
speak about this identity were of this bourgeois, westernised layer of
Russian society: the poet Mikhail Kuzmin, the author Lidiia ZinovievaAnnibal, Sergei Diagilev, even arguably the peasant poet Nikolai
Kliuiev (because of his reliance on an urban audience for his rustic
themes) may stand as examples.
The dilemma for Russian homosexuals in the post decriminalisation
environment was the negative political effect of this long-standing
association with bourgeois sensibilities. The 1917 Revolution accompanied by the privations of War Communism and the exigencies of the
Civil War set off an ideologically-motivated toughening of manners.
The levelling of manners was the result of the squeezing of effeteness
out of everyday life, the scrutinising of nteshchanstvo (bourgeois mores)
and attempts to eradicate the values and tastes of the former upper
classes.52 The attack on these values extended to the sex question, in the
form of a press campaign against the Bolsheviks' own sex radical,
Aleksandra Kollontai. The campaign against the ideas of Aleksandra
Kollontai, which extended through most of 1923, demonstrated the
Bolsheviks' discomfiture with radical challenges to the familiar heterosexual family and its roles for men and women. Kollontai had long
been a proponent of free sexuality for women, and had persistently
tried, before the Revolution, to incorporate this demand into a Marxist
worldview. (She does not appear to have written anything explicitly
supporting homosexual emancipation, but in the 1920s she did serve
40
on the International Committee of the World League for Sexual Reform

which listed among its aims homosexual emancipation; as did the
British Sexological Society, on whose Honorary Committee she held a
post.)53 Kollontai's publications in 1923 included her article addressed
to young workers on 'Winged Eros' and two collections of short fiction
more celebrated for their ideas than their literary merit. These ideas
have enjoyed considerable recent attention; from a lesbian perspective,
their interest lies in Kollontai's promotion of an independent sexuality
for women, based on comradely feeling and communal responsibility
for the burdens of children and housework.54
Kollontai came under attack from Krupskaia and Trotskii's wife
Sedova, when the two women gave a joint interview to the New York
Times in February, 1923; they pilloried her for bourgeois feminism.
Similarly, a Communist critic, Arvatov, denounced Kollontai's insistence on differentiating women's experience of work and love from that
of humanity in general. He effectively denied that gender was in any
way a significant determinant of economic and political life. Another
Soviet publicist, Vinogradskaia, characterised questions of sexuality as
trivial and saw Kollontai's interest in them as un-Marxist.55 Naturally,
the scarcely hidden agenda of Kollontai's critics was to chastise a heretic
who had already strayed by supporting the Workers' Opposition
movement in 1921. In doing this they relegated her demands for radical
re-evaluation of gender roles, which had been part of the revolutionary
tide, to the sidelines. Homosexuals in Russia, sensitive to these issues
and certainly aware of Aleksandra Kollontai's notorious postulations,
could hardly have failed to take note of this development.
THE RECRIMINALISATION OF HOMOSEXUALITY:
FROM ILLNESS TO POLITICAL CRIME
In a Union-wide decree of 17 December 1933 the offence of muzhelozhestvo

was restored to the Criminal Codes of those Soviet republics which had
previously eliminated it. The decree augmented the enumeration of
aggravating circumstances by adding the commission of the act for
payment, as a profession, or in public places. This extension of
criminality to public and prostitution-related homosexual activity was
later withdrawn, in a decree of 1 March 1934. The second decree, while
simpler, also established minimum sentences for muzhelozhestvo.56 By
this date, raids on circles of homosexuals known to the OGPU had
been conducted in Moscow, Leningrad, Khar'kov and Odessa,57 and
presumably the extended provisions had either served their purpose
41
or proved unnecessary. Minimum sentences were perhaps required to

impress judges and lay assessors with the seriousness of the new
crime. Three republics failed to adopt in full the measures of 1 March
1934 in their Criminal Codes for reasons as yet unknown.58 Lesbian acts
were once again ignored; significantly, the one act between males
considered by the Orthodox Church to be most repugnant was the one
which was penalised.59
In analysing the trend toward more conservative positions on the
family and sexual matters which marked the years of Stalin's rise to
absolute power, Richard Stites has advanced the concept of a 'Sexual
Thermidor', part grassroots reaction and part reactionary policy. The
chief villains of this Thermidor were the sexual radicalism and sexual
licence which had accompanied the Revolution. Stites skilfully traces
the origins of the Sexual Thermidor to determinants both from below
and from above. At the grassroots level, the social landscape had been
severely damaged by the years of war and revolution. The most visible
legacy were the besprizornye, seven million orphans who roamed the
cities and villages, an unloved ocean of youth which the Soviet government could not afford to house nor care for.60 Concern for this demographic disaster fused with dissatisfaction in other fields of the
personal life to encourage a social reaction. Abuse of the greatly
liberalized divorce provisions left women extremely vulnerable to allbut-legalised desertion and economic privations. The Revolution's
failure to eradicate prostitution bred disillusionment, as did the new
Soviet man's reliance on abortion as a form of birth control.61 Among
Soviet students, whose sexual activities and beliefs had been widely
canvassed by social hygienists, there emerged a bemused and cautious
approach to matters of sexuality. Some actually called for sexual
'norms' to be laid down by the government.62
Ideologically, Sexual Thermidor looked back to the puritanical
revolutionary tradition derived in Russia from Nihilism. That tradition
held that the personal life was not politically relevant, that the sex
question was a bourgeois distraction. Lenin articulated his disdain for
such preoccupations among socialists in a well-known conversation
with Klara Zetkin; the fact he attacked such sexual radicalism so
vigorously points to the co-existence of two opposing camps on
sexuality in the international socialist movement.63
The gathering Sexual Thermidor offers but one context in which to
place the events surrounding the recriminalisation of male homosexual
relations in 1933-34. Legalised homosexuality, unlike liberalised
divorce, had resulted in little if any reported harm to Soviet society in
42
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
Germany a potential ally against the capitalist democracies, these

events would have appeared to justify the precaution of recriminalising
homosexuality at home.
It was but a small step from the association with the foreign threat of
fascism which Russian homosexuals suffered, to the link with internal
enemies of the revolution. The link in the public mind between
homosexuality and the bourgeoisie was exploited to offer a second
justification for the recriminalisation and the ensuing repressions.
People's Commissar of Justice Krylenko clearly articulated this myth of
the depraved declasse undermining the pure working class in a 1936
speech:
It is for doctors to decide in each specific case whether the accused
is a sick man or not. But if we have no reason to think he is sick,
and he nonetheless commits these acts, then we say to him: 'My
good fellow, there is no place for you here. Among us workers,
who believe in normal relations between the sexes and who are
building up a society on healthy principles, there is no room for
gentry of this sort.' Who in fact are our chief customers in this
line? Are they working men? Of course not - they are either the
dregs of society, or remnants of the exploiting classes. [Applause]
They don't know what to do with themselves, so they take to
pederasty. [Laughter] And besides them, there is another kind of
work that goes on in little filthy dens and hiding places, and that
is the work of counterrevolution. That is why we take these
disorganizers of our new social system, the system we are
creating for men and women and working people we put these
gentlemen on trial and we give them sentences of up to five
years.69
With this commentary on the recriminalisation of male homosexuality,
Russian jurisprudence returned to a view of the homosexual which in
some ways shared parallels with the Tsarist attitude. Before the
Revolution, Christians convicted under Article 995 were required to do
penance for their crime - in effect to seek reconciliation with the
universe and its temporal order. Decriminalisation had introduced a
secular, modern and scientific view of homosexuals. They were no
longer assumed to be at odds with nature; if they experienced illness
because of their condition, science would address this problem. Moreover, nature would someday be mastered to make 'a life that would not
produce misfits.' Recriminalisation in the Stalinist context brought a
return to the view of homosexual as heretic, as one with no part to play
45
in the new Soviet order. Homosexuality became the exclusive ambit of

the byvshie liudi, the 'former people', remnants of the bourgeoisie and
nobility who were now alien elements in society. The secular, scientific
worldview which had underpinned decriminalisation was radically
altered: homosexuality was now a class condition, a challenge to
Stalinist society. Men who freely chose to engage in it would be dealt
with as enemies of the people.70
A recent note on the fate of the diaries and papers of openly homosexual Mikhail Kuzmin, the symbolist and surrealist poet, personalises
these developments. Forced by poverty and illness to sell his archive
for funds, Kuzmin concluded a transaction with V.D. Bonch-Bruevich,
the director of the State Literary Museum. In November 1933, Kuzmin
received 25,000 roubles for his papers, comprising a daily record of his
personal and literary life from August 1905 to December 1931. It contained frank and frequent references to his and others' homosexuality.71
On 1 February 1934 (that is, after Stalin's anti-homosexual decree,
and during the period of raids on homosexual circles in Moscow,
Leningrad and elsewhere) an official from the OGPU demanded and
received from Bonch-Bruevich the complete Kuzmin archive. In April
of 1934, Bonch-Bruevich was subjected to an investigation by a special
commission of the Cultural Enlightenment Department of the Party's
Central Committee. The commission's chief finding against the Literary
Museum's director was his purchase of the Kuzmin papers, which
were cited for their unacceptable homosexual content. Bonch-Bruevich
bravely defended the worth of the archive and its homosexual themes,
which he noted were essential to an understanding of 'bourgeois left
symbolism', in letters to Commissar of Internal Affairs Iagoda and
Commissar of Enlightenment Bubnov, in May 1934.72
Three days after Bonch-Bruevich wrote his letter to Bubnov, the
article by Maksim Gor'kii mentioned above appeared in Pravda and
Izvestiia. Bonch-Bruevich fell silent on the issue of the Kuzmin archives.
He only took up the case again after the Great Terror had subsided and
the Museum control commission pressured him to request news of the
documents from NKVD Commissar Beriia, in 1939. Most of the archive
was returned to the Museum in March 1940; among the items retained
and presumed still to be held by the Russian successor to the KGB
today are personal papers and sketches by G.V. Chicherin, (Soviet
Foreign Minister, 1918-1930).73
Thus the security apparatus had six years to use Kuzmin's diaries to
collect evidence against putative homosexual subversives. Who
precisely these were is not yet known, but it is known that Kuzmin's
46
companion, Iu. Iurkun, was arrested and disappeared in 1938. Iurkun's

wife (the Kuzmin household was as complex as his poetry) informed
Bonch-Bruevich that among Iurkun's papers confiscated by the NKVD
were memoirs and musical compositions by Kuzmin. None of these
were later returned despite enquiries by the State Literary Museum
director, and they are presumably still in security service archives.74
CONCLUSION
In 1922, Soviet Russia devised a legal disposition for male homosexuals

which was the envy of German emancipationists. Russian jurists and
sexologists articulated an underlying philosophy based at least in part
on according some latitude for both male and female homosexuals to
be themselves. In the following years, no homosexual community
emerged to build on these advances. (In fact, there appears to have
been less public homosexual presence after the Revolution than before
it.) Nothing like the German community which sprang up after the
1918 Revolution, with its commercial venues, social and political
organistions, newspapers, journals, and cultural groups, appeared in
Moscow or Leningrad. What were the reasons for this? Was the legal
reform a failure?
The question of whether homosexuality exists in every society has
been widely debated, but the homosexual identity as we think of it is a
recent cultural construct. In Western societies men have only been
identifying themselves as homosexual since the eighteenth century,
and women, since the late nineteenth century. Such self-identification
was frequently trimmed with ambiguity. Many led lives divided into
homosexual and heterosexual spheres. It has been argued that the
sexologists who invented the category of homosexuality contributed to
the emergence of homosexual subcultures in Western societies: between
the name-givers and the named a creative tension is discernible, such
as that exploited by Hirschfeld's Scientific-Humanitarian Committee.
Historically, those who have internalised an exclusively homosexual
identity have tended to be city dwellers, taking advantage of the
anonymity and increased autonomy that comes with urban life. (This
is not to say that no homosexual activity took place in the countryside, but rather, to suggest that Russians who understood themselves
to be homosexual - who adopted the category as an identity during the
first three decades of this century, would normally have been city
dwellers.) In a Russian context, it must also be noted that the homosexual identity appeared as a European creation. Any 'native' notions
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
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
medical model of homosexuality, and saw the question as one of

human rights. In Weimar Germany, the campaign against anti-homosexual laws lasted until a provisional victory was won in 1929. By then
the political battle had stimulated the growth of a community by
encouraging homosexual self-identification among a population which
enjoyed material and educational advantages far greater than Russia's.82
Soviet homosexuals, few in number, economically weak, and politically disempowered, were less able than their German counterparts to
organise. With legal reform already achieved, a major focus for such
organisation was absent. Political action autonomous of state sponsorship was becoming increasingly difficult as Stalin's power grew;
homosexual advocacy was in any case regarded as promoting oldregime sensibilities. The medical model of homosexuality, so instrumental in securing the decriminalisation of male homosexual activity,
continued to suggest to those hostile to same-sex love the means by
which it might be cured or eliminated through therapy and social
engineering. In these circumstances, homosexuals in early Soviet
Russia were not encouraged to remake themselves into a lesbian and
gay community.
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
backgrounds, Izvrashchenie polovogo chuvstva u zhenshchin, St Petersburg, 1895.

12. Laura Engelstein, 'The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Finde-siecle Russia', ms to be published by Cornell University Press, 1992. Chapter 4,
'Female Sexual Deviance and the Western Medical Model', cites Ministry of Internal
Affairs circular by Zuk, 'O prorivozakonnom udovletvorenii polovogo pobuzhdeniia
i o sudebno-meditsinskoi zadache pri prestupleniiakh etoi kategorii', Arkhiv sudebnoi
meditsiny, No.2, Part 5 (1870); and forensic scientist V. Merzheevskii, Sudebnaia
ginekologiia: Rukovodstvodliavrachei i iuristov (St Petersburg, 1876/1878); Chapter 6,
'Eros and Revolution: the Problem of Male Desire', cites later scientific studies and
case histories: Veniamin Tarnovskii, Izvrushchenie polovogo chuvstva: sudebnopsikhiatricheskii ocherk alia vrachei i iuristov (St Petersburg, 1885); V.M. Bekhterev,
'Lechenie vnusheniem prevratnykh polovykh vlechenii i onanizma', Obozrenie
psikhiatrii, No.8 (1898); S. Liass 'Izvrashchenie polovogo vlecheniia' Obozrenie
psikhiatrii, No.6 (1898); A. Uspenskii 'K kazuistike anomalii polovogo chuvstva',
Obozrenie psikhiatrii, No. 12 (1898); for exotic Asian homosexuality, E.V. Erikson,
'O polovom razvrate i neestestvennykh polovykh snosheniiakh v korennom
naselenii Kavkaza', Vestnik obshchestvennoi gigieny (Dec. 1906); A. Shvarts 'K voprosu
o priznakakh privychnoi passivnoi pederastii (iz nabliudenii v asiatskoi chasti g.
Tashkenta)', Vestnik obshchestvennoi gigieny (June 1906). I am grateful to Laura
Engelstein for permitting me to cite from an early version of her ms, and to Steven
Smith for bringing her work to my attention.
13. V.M. Bekhterev, 'Sluga i drug bol'nogo rassudkom (pamiati Professor I.M.
Balitskogo)', Vestnikznaniia, No.24 (1927), p.1511.
14. M. Ljunggren, 'The psychoanalytic breakthrough in Russia on the eve of the First
World War', in D. Rancour Laferriere (ed.), Russian Literature and Psychoanalysis
(Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1989), pp. 173-9; a photograph of attendees of the last
'little Friday', p.184, includes I. Gel'man, who would become a social hygienist in
the 1920s with a particular interest in sexuality, E. Krasnushkin, who later became
a proponent of environmental factors in shaping the criminal mind, and Lev
Rosenshtein, who would head up the Moscow Neuro-Psychiatric Institute.
15. Barry Adam, The Rise ofa Gay and Lesbian Movement, (Boston, MA, 1987), pp.17-22.
16. V.D. Nabokoff, 'Die Homosexualitt im russischen Strafgesetzbuch', Jahrbuch fr
sexuelle Zwischenstufen, Berlin, No.5, 1903.
17. N.S. Timasheff, 'The Impact of the Penal Law of Imperial Russia on Soviet Penal
Law', American Slavic and East European Review, Vol.12, (1953), No.4, pp.443, 458.
18. Karlinsky (1990), pp.354-6; (1976), pp.3-5; 'Death and Resurrection of Mikhail
Kuzmin', Slavic Review, Vol.38, No.1, March 1979; 'Gay Life before the Soviets:
Revisionism Revised', The Advocate, No.339, 1 April 1982. For Kuzmin's career see
John Malmsted, 'Mixail Kuzmin: A Chronicle of His Life and Times', M.A. Kuzmin,
Sobranie stikhov (Munich, 1977), Vol.3; Stites, The Women's Liberation Movement in
Russia (Princeton, NJ, 1978), pp. 185-90.
19. Karlinsky (1990), pp.351-2, 354-6.
20. This analysis of gender issues relies in part on research by Linda Edmondson
presented at the University of London School of Slavonic and East European Studies
(13.2.91), 'Pre-revolutionary Feminism and Gender'. For developments in Germany,
see Adam, p.21.
21. John Lauritsen and David Thorstad, The Early Homosexual Rights Movement (18641935) (New York, 1974), pp.62-3.
22. Wilhelm Reich, The Sexual Revolution (New York, 1969), p.208; M. Sereiskii, 'Gomoseksualizm', Bol'shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia (Moscow, 1930), Vol.11, col.595. For
Karlinsky's assessment of Lauritsen and Thorstad, see Karlinsky (1990), p.556, n.23.
23. Karlinsky (1990), p.355.
24. D.S. Kurskii 'Novoe ugolovnoe pravo', Proletarskaia revoliutsiia i pravo (1919), pp.2-4,
cited in John N. Hazard, Communists and their Law (Chicago, IL, 1968), p.454.
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.
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.
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.

Daniel Healey, 'The Russian Revolution and The Decriminalisation of Homosexuality', Revolutionary Russia, 1993, Vol. 6, No. 1, Pp. 26-54

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The Russian Revolution and the

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THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION AND HOMOSEXUALITY

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In Orthodoxy, the Russians acquired a religious tradition which was

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Orthodox penances for mutual masturbation between women were

THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION AND HOMOSEXUALITY

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(gomoseksual'nyt) to describe same-sex erotic behaviour.10 The term

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society's interests ought not to be punished in law. In an earlier era,

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THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION AND HOMOSEXUALITY

With the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, Lenin dispensed with the

produced by John Lauritsen and David Thorstad in 1974, in a slim

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and Europe. In The Early Homosexual Emancipation Movement 1869-1935,

THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION AND HOMOSEXUALITY

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in 1920 by the Commissariat, and by the Institute of Law in late 192126

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AFTER DECRIMINALISATION: ONE STEP FORWARD, TWO STEPS BACK

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prison regime itself.' The author subsequently discussed how new

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lingered. Soviet criminology's increasing tendency to view radical

THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION AND HOMOSEXUALITY

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THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION AND HOMOSEXUALITY

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the Stalinist revolution) is reflected in the views of another Russian

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on the International Committee of the World League for Sexual Reform

In a Union-wide decree of 17 December 1933 the offence of muzhelozhestvo

THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION AND HOMOSEXUALITY

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or proved unnecessary. Minimum sentences were perhaps required to

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THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION AND HOMOSEXUALITY

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Germany a potential ally against the capitalist democracies, these

THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION AND HOMOSEXUALITY

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in the new Soviet order. Homosexuality became the exclusive ambit of

companion, Iu. Iurkun, was arrested and disappeared in 1938. Iurkun's

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In 1922, Soviet Russia devised a legal disposition for male homosexuals

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THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION AND HOMOSEXUALITY

medical model of homosexuality, and saw the question as one of

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backgrounds, Izvrashchenie polovogo chuvstva u zhenshchin, St Petersburg, 1895.

THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION AND HOMOSEXUALITY

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THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION AND HOMOSEXUALITY