LGBTQ history in the Soviet Union

The government of the Russian Soviet Republic (later the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic) decriminalised homosexuality in December 1917, following the October Revolution and the discarding of the legal code of the Russian Empire. The legalisation of homosexuality was confirmed in the penal code of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic in 1922 as well as in its redrafting in 1926. According to Dan Healey, archival material that became widely available following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 "demonstrates a principled intent to decriminalize the act between consenting adults, expressed from the earliest efforts to write a socialist criminal code in 1918 to the eventual adoption of legislation in 1922". The legalisation of private, adult and consensual homosexual relations applied exclusively to the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Homosexuality or sodomy remained a crime in the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic, having been officially criminalised there in 1923, as well as in the Transcaucasian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic and the Central Asian republics throughout the 1920s. Similar criminalising laws were enacted in the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic in 1926 and in the Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic the following year. Despite decriminalising homosexuality in 1917, wider Soviet social policy on the matter of wider homosexual rights and the treatment of homosexual people in the 1920s was often mixed. Official policy in both the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and the wider Soviet Union in the 1920s on homosexuality fluctuated between toleration and support, attempts at legal equality and social rights for homosexual people, examples of open state hostility against homosexuals, and state attempts to classify homosexuality as "a mental disorder to be cured". During the 1920s, such divergences of opinion and policy on Soviet treatment of homosexuality were also common within the Communist Party, ranging from positive, to negative, to ambivalent over views about homosexuals and homosexual rights. to homosexual emancipation "as part of the [sexual] revolution" and attempted such reforms for homosexual rights in the area of civil and medical areas. According to Wayne R. Dynes, some sections of the Bolsheviks of the 1920s actively considered homosexuality a "[social] illness to be cured" or an example of "bourgeois degeneracy" while other Bolsheviks believed it should be legally/socially tolerated and respected in the new socialist society. The Bolsheviks also rescinded Tsarist legal bans on homosexual civil and political rights, especially in the area of state employment. In 1918, Georgy Chicherin, a homosexual man who kept his homosexuality hidden, was appointed as People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. In 1923, Chicherin was also appointed People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs of the Soviet Union, a position he held until 1930. In the early 1920s, the Soviet government and scientific community took a great deal of interest in sexual research, sexual emancipation and homosexual emancipation. In January 1923, the Soviet Union sent delegates from the Commissariat of Health led by Commissar of Health Semashko to the German Institute for Sexual Research as well as to some international conferences on human sexuality between 1921 and 1930, where they expressed support for the legalisation of adult, private and consensual homosexual relations and the improvement of homosexual rights in all nations. Such delegations and research were sent and authorised and supported by the People's Commissariat for Health under Commissar Semashko. == Under Stalin (1927–1953) ==

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Soviet policy and attitudes shifted against homosexuality and homosexual rights, as did wider social backlash. Alongside increased repression of political dissidents and non-Russian nationalities, LGBT themes and issues faced increasing government censorship and uniformly harsher policy across the entire Soviet Union following Joseph Stalin's rise to power. Homosexuality was officially labelled a disease and a mental disorder in the late 1920s (specifically over a period from 1927 to 1930). In this climate, Commissar Semashko reduced his support for homosexual rights and Dr. Batkis and other sexual researchers repudiated (in 1928) their own earlier scientific reports of homosexuality as a natural human sexuality. This followed earlier Soviet tendencies in sections of the medical and health communities, even in the early 1920s, to classify homosexuality, if not as a crime, then as an example of mental or physical illness. Earlier examples of this type of hardening Soviet attitude towards homosexuality include the 1923 report from the People's Commissariat for Health entitled The Sexual Life of Contemporary Youth, authored by Izrail Gel'man, which stated: "Science has now established, with precision that excludes all doubt, that homosexuality is not ill will or crime but sickness. The world of a female or male homosexual is perverted, it is alien to the normal sexual attraction that exists in a normal person". The official stance from the late 1920s could be summarised in an article of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia of 1930 written by medical expert Sereisky (based on a report written in the 1920s): Under Joseph Stalin, the Soviet government recriminalised sex between men through a decree that was signed in 1933. Some historians have noted that Soviet propaganda during this time began to depict homosexuality as a sign of fascism and that Article 121 may have been a political tool to use against dissidents, irrespective of their true sexual orientation, and to solidify Soviet opposition to Nazi Germany, which had broken its treaty with the Soviet Union. In a famous article in Pravda on 23 May 1934, Maxim Gorky said: "There is already a sarcastic saying: Destroy homosexuality and fascism will disappear." In 1993, declassified Soviet documents revealed that Stalin had personally demanded the introduction of an anti-gay law in response to a report from deputy secret police chief Genrikh Yagoda, who had conducted a raid on the residence of hundreds of homosexuals in Moscow and Leningrad in August 1933, about "Pederast activists" engaging in orgies and espionage activities. Beyond expressed fears of a vast "counterrevolutionary fascist homosexual conspiracy", there were several high-profile arrests of Russian men accused of being pederasts. In 1933, 130 men "were accused of being 'pederasts' – adult males who have sex with boys. Since no records of men having sex with boys at that time are available, it is possible this term was used broadly and crudely to label homosexuality". Stalin did not reply to the letter, but ordered it to be archived, and added a note describing Whyte as "An idiot and a degenerate." A few years later in 1936, Justice Commissar Nikolai Krylenko publicly stated that the anti-gay criminal law was correctly aimed at the decadent and effete old ruling classes, thus further linking homosexuality to a right-wing conspiracy, i.e. Tsarist aristocracy and German fascists. At a secret trial on 14 May 1938, Yakovleva was convicted of sabotage, terrorism and membership in a "Trotskyite-fascist diversionary terrorist organization", and was sentenced to 20 years in prison. She was held in solitary confinement at Oryol Prison, where she was executed on 11 September 1941 in the Medvedev Forest massacre, together with 156 other inmates. The Medvedev Forest massacre came less than three months after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, and 26 days before Nazi troops invaded Oryol. On 4 February 1940, Yezhov was shot in the basement of a small NKVD station on Varsonofevskii Lane (Varsonofyevskiy pereulok) in Moscow. The basement had a wall made of logs and a sloping floor so that it could be hosed down after executions, and had been built according to Yezhov's own specifications near the Lubyanka. The main NKVD execution chamber in the basement of the Lubyanka was deliberately avoided to ensure total secrecy. == Under Khrushchev (1953–1964) ==

When Stalin came to power, homosexuality had become a topic unfit for public depiction, defense or discussion. Homosexual or bisexual Soviet citizens who wanted a position within the Communist Party were expected to marry a person of the opposite sex, regardless of their actual sexual orientation. A notable example was the Russian film director Sergei Eisenstein, who despite his homosexuality managed to survive by leading a double life, having affairs with men while married to a woman, producing films that were politically pleasing to Stalin. After Stalin died in 1953, he was replaced by Nikita Khrushchev, who proceeded to liberalise Stalin-era laws regarding marriage, divorce, and abortion, but the anti-gay criminal law remained. The Khrushchev government believed that absent of a criminal law against homosexuality, the sex between men that occurred in the prison environment would spread into the general population as they released many Stalin-era prisoners. Whereas the Stalin government conflated homosexuality with pedophilia, the Khrushchev government conflated homosexuality with the situational, sometimes forced, sex acts between male prisoners. Although the topic of homosexuality was practically unmentionable, some references to homosexuality could be found in Soviet sex education manuals for young people and their parents. These manuals were published from the early 1950s to the early 1960s in the hope of restricting the sexual activity of Soviet people and to raise their awareness of venereal diseases. These manuals mentioned homosexuality to prevent Soviet children and youth from engaging in it. The first Khrushchev-era sex education manual to mention homosexuality was The Youth Becomes a Man (1960) and described homosexuals as child molesters: "...homosexuals are aroused by and satisfy themselves with adolescents and youngsters, even though the latter have a normal interest towards girls. Homosexuals go all out to gain the affection of the youngsters' society; they buy sweets and cigarettes for youngsters, tickets to the cinema, give them money, help to do home assignments and generally pretend that they unselfishly love youngsters. However, after such preparation, they sooner or later proceed to act. Do not let them touch you! Do not be shy about reporting them to your parents or educators, do not hesitate to report such attempts aimed at you or other young men! Both parents and educators will willingly help: homosexuality is a punishable crime, homosexuals are perfectly aware of that: that is why it is not difficult to get rid of them..". In the late 1950s some Soviet jurists attempted to decriminalise consensual sodomy. On 23 July 1959, a committee of Soviet jurists convened to discuss and propose changes to the new criminal code of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. Two members of the committee proposed to eliminate the law penalising consensual sodomy, yet their proposal was not supported by other members of the committee. In 1958, the Interior Ministry sent a secret memo to law enforcement ordering them to step up enforcement of the anti-gay criminal law. Despite this, Aline Mosby, a foreign reporter in Russia, attributed in 1962 to the more liberal attitude of the Khrushchev government the fact that she did see some gay couples in public, as well as the fact that seeing men waiting outside of certain theaters looking for dates with male performers was not uncommon in the Soviet Union during the late 1950s and early 1960s. == Under Brezhnev (1964–1982) ==

Discussions between Soviet legal scholars on the value of the anti-sodomy law continued under Brezhnev. Those legal scholars, who believed that consensual homosexuality should not be a crime, argued that it was a disease, which had to be dealt with by medical knowledge. They also contended that homosexuality was a congenital condition and therefore gay people were not guilty of being different from others. Finally, these scholars argued that investigating sodomy cases, where both partners had consensual sex, was not only pointless, but technically difficult. Other legal scholars, mainly those who worked for the Interior Ministry educational institutions, opposed the idea of decriminalising consensual homosexuality. They criticised their pro-decriminalisation colleagues and argued that such propositions were ill-timed and dangerous, since homosexuality could easily spread if not controlled by the law. Likewise, they believed that homosexuality was inconsistent with the Communist Morality. Thousands of people were imprisoned for homosexuality and government censorship of homosexuality and gay rights did not begin to relax until the early 1970s, allowing for brief statements. Kozlovsky was permitted to include a brief interior monologue about homosexuality in Moscow to the End of the Line (1973). Perhaps the first public endorsement of gay rights since Stalin was a brief statement, critical of Article 121 and calling for its repeal, made in the Textbook of Soviet Criminal Law (1973). These references were characterised as being brief statements in a novel or textbook and were made by heterosexuals. Vicktor Sosnora was allowed to write about witnessing an elderly gay actor being brutally murdered in a Leningrad bar in The Flying Dutchman (1979), but the book was only allowed to be published in East Germany. If an author were gay and in particular if they were seen as supporting gay rights, the censors tended to be much harsher. Russian gay author Yevgeny Kharitonov illegally circulated some gay fiction before he died of heart failure in 1981. Author Gennady Trifonov served four years of hard labour for circulating his gay poems and upon his release was allowed to write and publish only if he avoided depicting or making reference to homosexuality. Despite sodomy being a punishable crime, the practitioners of new sexological science ("sexopathology"), which emerged in the 1960s, argued that homosexuality should be treated with psychotherapy. They provided such treatment to homosexual men in the privacy of their consultation rooms and went to great lengths to preserve their patients' anonymity. Some of these doctors even went as far as to suggest that the sodomy law should be abolished altogether so that homosexuals could resort to medical help without fear of prosecution. Their calls, however, fell on deaf ears. In 1960s and 1970s the emerging sexopathology (up to this point concerned with sexual orientation and intersex conditions) encountered its first trans patients seeking sex reassignment surgeries. In 1960s Moscow psychiatrist met a patient from Tashkent named Rakhim, who desired a sex change to female, while having no intersex conditions. Rakhim was the first patient of Institute of Endocrinology to receive a diagnosis of transsexualism. Belkin didn't permit surgery on his transsexual patients, fearing making irreversible mistakes, but it is known that by 1974 Rakhim had undergone a vaginoplasty and an official name change outside of Moscow. In 1968 another Soviet doctor, Latvian surgeon met a suicidal patient named Inna, looking for a sex change from female to male. After obtaining verbal consent from Minister of Health of the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic , Kalnbērzs performed nine operations on the patient, now named Innokenty, over the span of 1970–1972. After that, Minister of Health of the Soviet Union Boris Petrovsky threatened Kalnbērzs with a criminal process and a Gulag sentence, citing Article 108 of the Soviet Criminal Code (premeditated infliction of serious bodily injury). Kalnbērzs was spared this by Kaņeps, but central authorities decided that sex reassignment surgeries were mutilations and unfit to Soviet ideology, silencing Kalnbērzs and regional Ministries of Health from talking and writing about them and carrying them. Despite the order, Kalnbērzs performed several more similar operations. == Final years (1982–1991) ==

In 1983, following the 1980 adoption of the ICD-9 by the Soviet Union, the Scientific Center for Social and Forensic Psychiatry published a separate edition of the fifth section of the ICD-9 (“Mental disorders”), adapted in accordance with "the theoretical principles of Soviet science". From that moment on, the diagnosis of "transsexualism" officially appeared in Soviet medicine, though instructions for managing patients with such a diagnosis would not appear until 1991, when Aron Belkin and A. S. Karpov published “Transsexualism. Guidelines for gender reassignment”. Public discussion about re-legalizing private, consensual adult homosexual relations was not permitted until later in the glasnost period. A poll conducted in 1989 reported that homosexuals were the most hated group in Russian society and that 30 percent of those polled felt that homosexuals should be "liquidated". From 1989 to 1990, the Moscow gay rights organisation «Ассоциация сексуальных меньшинств» ("Association of Sexual Minorities"), led by Evgenia Debryanskaya, was permitted to exist, with Roman Kalinin given permission to publish a gay newspaper, Tema. In 1993, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Article 121 was removed from the criminal code of Russia, The highest estimate is 250,000 convictions, but LGBT rights groups in the Russian Federation tend to estimate 60,000 convictions. The first official information was released only in 1988, but it is believed to be about 1,000 convicted a year. According to official data, the number of men convicted under Article 121 had been steadily decreasing during the glasnost period. In 1987, 831 men were sentenced under Article 121; in 1989, 539; in 1990, 497; and in 1991, 462. == See also ==