How did the Russian Revolution affect gays and lesbians?
The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 brought radical changes to every aspect of life in the former Russian Empire, including the decriminalization of homosexuality. For unlike the old tsarist law, the first Soviet legal code, issued in June 1922, made no mention of sex between men. Western advocates for sex-law reform hailed Soviet Russia as a model of enlightenment, but did the revolution really improve conditions for the country's gays and lesbians?
Law has always been a relative thing in Russia. Tsarist law condemned men to four or five years of penal servitude for consensual homosexual sodomy, but the statute was seldom applied, perhaps due to the general inefficiency of the legal system. And although Soviet law made no mention of homosexuality, jurists found other means to prosecute both gay men and lesbians. (Lesbian sex had not been prohibited under tsarist law nor mentioned in the 1922 code.)
In fact, soon after the new code took effect, a Soviet legal magazine reported on two trials in which homosexuals were charged with disorderly conduct: One case involved a group of gay men, mostly sailors, who gathered regularly in a private Petrograd apartment, where some of them dressed in drag. The other concerned two women who lived as a married couple in a provincial town; one of them had changed her name from the female Yevgeniya to the male Yevgeny and dressed as a man. The author of the report complained that there was no specific law on the books to deal with such cases and warned, "Homosexual behavior spreads not only among people obviously afflicted with organic abnormality, but also by attracting suggestible people,... who accidentally succumb to perverted urges."
Other commentators expressed similar concerns about dangers to public morality. Nonetheless, homosexuality remained legal when the code was revised in 1926. Marxist-Leninist theory, after all, rejected religion and bourgeois morality as the basis for its new social order, which should be constructed on principles of "scientific materialism." Same-sex attraction was seen not as a crime, but as a psychological and biological abnormality that was probably genetic and certainly difficult to cure. This was the view expressed in the entry on "homosexualism" in the first edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1930), which ridiculed pre-Revolutionary and Western European sodomy laws as "absurd" and even harmful in their psychological effect on homosexuals.
But it would be difficult to argue that life was easier for gays in Soviet Russia. For one thing, gays and lesbians had enjoyed a relative tolerance in the tsarist regime, especially after the Revolution of 1905 forced Tsar Nicholas II to adopt a constitution and ease censorship restrictions. In these years, gay and lesbian culture blossomed, with the appearance of books openly celebrating queer love such as Mikhail Kuzmin's Wings (1906), a gay coming-of-age novel, and Lidiya Zinovyeva- Annibal's Thirty-three Abominations (1907), about a torrid lesbian love affair. Gays also found ardent defenders in such figures as the parliamentarian Vladimir D. Nabokov (the father of the Russian-American novelist) and the mystical philosopher Vasily Rozanov.
But if homoerotic culture seemed fashionably daring to forward-thinking Russians in the early 20th century, in the years after the Bolsheviks seized power, gay issues were thought to be not so much immoral as irrelevant in a society building socialism. Kuzmin and other queer writers continued to be published in the 1920sthough with increasing difficultybut their works were largely ignored by reviewers and their gay themes never discussed.
But even this semi-benign official indifference was not to last. Life became more and more precarious for Russian gays, especially as the political struggle after Lenin's death in 1924 made any expression of nonconformity suspect. When Joseph Stalin consolidated his hold on power in the late '20s, respect for individual privacy, always tenuous at best in Russia, vanished entirely. On Dec. 17, 1933, the Communist Party announced a law re-criminalizing consensual sodomy between men, with a punishment of three to five years of incarceration. The law, which came to be known as Article 121, viewed homosexuality not merely as moral or psychological debility, but as a bourgeois, counterrevolutionary crime against the state and the working class.
The new measure came into effect March 7, 1934, but the Soviet police had already taken action two months earlier, rounding up gay men in Moscow, Leningrad, Odessa, and Kharkov. The repression was brutal. According to one report, there were some 3,000 Muscovite gay men imprisoned in a labor camp in the far north by the late 1930s.
Kuzmin died in early 1936, before he could be arrested, but his lover, the writer Yury Yurkun, was arrested in the fall of 1937 and secretly executed a year later after a 15-minute trial. In his case, as in many others, the charges were based not on homosexuality per se but on suspicions of anti-Soviet activity, with which homosexuality was often linked.
The state's persecution of gaysoften involving forced confinement in psychiatric hospitalscontinued until the late 1980s, when Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of glasnost allowed the birth of a new Russian gay and lesbian movement. In 1993, two years after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Article 121 was finally repealed, and homosexuality was once more decriminalized in Russia.
Rawley Grau has won four Vice Versa Awards for his writing on gay and lesbian culture. He can be reached at GayNestor@aol.com.