Russian Gay History
"We've waited long enough!" This was handed out at a gay disco
in May 1993, when Article 121, which criminalized gay sex, was eliminated
from the Russian criminal code.
Medieval Russia was apparently very tolerant of homosexuality. There
is evidence of homosexual love in some of the lives of the saints from Kievan
Rus dating to the 11th century. Homosexual acts were treated as a sin by
the Orthodox Church, but there were no legal sanctions against them at the
time, and even churchmen seemed perturbed by homosexuality only in the monasteries.
Foriegn visitors to Muscovite Russia in the 16th and 17th centuries repeatedly
express their amazement at the open displays of homosexual affection among
men of every class. Sigismund von Heberstein, Adam Olearius, Juraj Krizhanich,
and George Turberville all write about the prevalence of homosexuality in
Russia in their travel and memoir literature. The 19th century historian
Sergei Soloviev writes that "nowhere, either in the Orient or in the
West, was this vile, unnatural sin taken as lightly as in Russia."
The first laws against homosexual acts appeared in the 18th century,
during the reign of Peter the Great, but these were in military statutes
that applied only to soldiers. It was not until 1832 that the criminal code
included Article 995, which made muzhelozhstvo (men lying with men, which
the courts interpreted as anal intercourse) a criminal act punishable by
exile to Siberia for up to 5 years. Even so, the legislation was applied
only rarely, especially among the upper classes. Many prominent intellectuals
of the 19th century led a relatively open homosexual or bisexual life. Among
these were the memoirist Philip Vigel, the explorer Nikolai Przhevalsky,
the critic Konstantin Leontiev, and the composer Peter Tchaikovsky.
The turn of the century saw a relaxation of the laws, and a corresponding
increase in tolerance and visibility. In 1903 Vladimir Nabokov, father of
the writer and a founder of the Constitutional Democrat party, published
an article on the legal status of homosexuals in Russia in which he argued
that the state should not interfere in private sexual relationships. The
period between the revolutions of 1905 and 1917 was the Silver Age in Russian
literature, but something of a golden age for Russian homosexuals. Many
important figures led open gay lives, including several members of the Imperial
Court. Sergei Diaghilev and many of the members of the World of Art movement
and the Russian ballet were gay. In 1906 Mikhail Kuzmin published his semi-autobiographical
coming out novel Wings, which became the talk of the literary world in Russia.
Scholars disagree about the effect of the Bolshevik Revolution on homosexual
rights. Some argue that the Soviets were at the forefront of humanity in
decriminalizing gay sex; others that the Bolshevik asceticism and distaste
for sexuality of any kind set the movement back. In fact, the October Revolution
of 1917 did away with the entire Criminal Code, and the new Russian Criminal
Codes of 1922 and 1926 eliminated the offence of muzhelozhstvo from the
law. Unfortunately, decriminalization in the early Soviet period did not
mean an end to persecution. The modern Soviet fervor for science meant that
homosexuality was now treated as a subject for medical and psychiatric discourse,
an illness to be treated and cured. Furthermore, in the popular mind, homosexuality
was still associated with bourgeois and aristocratic values, with the pre-revolutionary
The sexual liberation that accompanied the Revolution was to be short-lived.
The egalitarian and pro-women policies that had liberalized divorce and
marriage laws and promoted abortion gave way by the early 1930s to Stalinist
pro-family policies. It was in this context that the Soviet Union recriminalized
homosexuality in a decree signed in late 1933. As an article by the writer
Maxim Gorky demonstrates, it was also a context in which homosexuality was
connected with Nazism at a time when German-Soviet relations were strained;
Gorky writes, "eradicate homosexuals and fascism will disappear."
Of course, the Nazis themselves criminalized homosexuality only a year later.
The new Article 121, which punished muzhelozhstvo with imprisonment
for up to 5 years, was followed by raids and arrests at the height of the
Stalinist terror. The numbers of men arrested are not known, but by the
1980s there were about 1000 every year. The Soviet Union had the largest
population of incarcerated men in the world, and given the importance of
prison culture for Soviet culture as a whole, it is likely that prison homosexuality
played a part in forming Soviet gay culture. In Soviet prisons there was
a class of men called opushchennye (degraded) who were required to fulfill
the sexual needs of the rest. On the one hand, they were at the lowest rung
of the social ladder, but they were sometimes protected by their lovers.
And not only men charged with Article 121 were opushchennye: any prisoner
could be degraded by ritualized rape -- for losing at cards, over an insult,
or even because his beauty made him an attractive sex object.
Article 121 was often used throughout the Soviet period to extend prison
sentences and to control dissidents. Among those imprisoned were the film
director Sergei Paradjanov and the poet Gennady Trifonov. Threat of prosecution
was also used to blackmail homosexuals into informing for the police and
the KGB. Needless to say, gay men in Russia kept a low profile in the Soviet
period, many restricting their gay activities to small circles of proven
friends. Still, there were some public cruising areas in the larger cities
and one or two bars known to be popular with gay men, though the threat
of arrest or blackmail always loomed. Another threat by the 1980s was the
gangs of gay-bashers who robbed and beat gay men, often with the encouragement
of the police. They knew that if they were brought to court, it was their
victims who would be put in prison.
In 1984 a handful of gay men in Leningrad attempted to form the first
organization of gay men. They were quickly hounded into submission by the
KGB. It was only with Gorbachev's glasnost that such an organization could
come into existence in 1989-90. The Moscow Gay & Lesbian Alliance was headed
by Yevgeniya Debryanskaya, and Roman Kalinin became the editor of the first
officially registered gay newspaper, Tema. Organizations and publications
proliferated. The summer of 1991 saw the first international conference,
film festival, and demonstrations for gay rights in Moscow and Leningrad.
This was followed almost immediately by the attempted coup. Reversion to
a more conservative regime would clearly have threatened their recent gains,
and legend has it that many gay activists manned the barricades protecting
the Russian White House and that Yeltsin's decrees were printed on the xerox
machines of the new gay organizations.
The collapse of the Soviet Union that soon followed the failed coup
only accelerated the progress of the gay movement. Occasional gay discos
were held, more gay publications appeared, gay plays were staged. In 1993
a new Russian Criminal Code was signed -- without Article 121. Men who had
been imprisoned under the article began to be released. Gay life in Russia
today is in the process of normalization. Capitalism has brought the first
gay businesses--bars, discos, saunas, even a travel agency. While life in
the provinces remains hard for gay men, Russian gays in the cities are beginning
to create a community.
This text was prepared for The Encyclopedia of Homosexuality,
2nd Edition, Garland Press.
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