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Daniel Healey, 'The Russian Revolution and The Decriminalisation of Homosexuality', Revolutionary Russia, 1993, Vol. 6, No. 1, Pp. 26-54 PDF
Daniel Healey, 'The Russian Revolution and The Decriminalisation of Homosexuality', Revolutionary Russia, 1993, Vol. 6, No. 1, Pp. 26-54 PDF
Revolutionary Russia
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The Russian Revolution and the
Decriminalisation of Homosexuality
Daniel Healey
INTRODUCTION
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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 there-
fore 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
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
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from the old Article 995. It is not so anomalous, then, to see this legis-
lative 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.
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 Commu-
nists. (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
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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 German-
sponsored subversion, his drive to suppress remnants of bourgeois
culture, and even emulation of Hitler.
A most intriguing argument has been made to explain recriminali-
sation of homosexuality as a very personal example of Stalin's
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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
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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. More-
over, 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
THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION AND HOMOSEXUALITY 45
CONCLUSION
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
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NOTES
1. 'Russia's Gay Literature and History', Gay Sunshine, No.29/30, 1976; 'Russia's Gay
Literature and Culture: The Impact of the October Revolution', M.B. Duberman,
M. Vicinus and G. Chauncy. Jr. (eds.), Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and
Lesbian Past (London, 1990).
2. Eve Levin, Sex and Society in the World of the Orthodox Slavs, 900-1700 (London, 1989),
pp.9, 13, 46, 69.
3. Levin, pp. 199-203.
4. Levin, pp.203-4, 281-3.
5. Karlinsky, 1990, pp.349-50.
6. Jeffrey Weeks, Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain from the Nineteenth Century
to the Present (London, 1990), p.12. An attempt to criminalise 'Acts of Gross Indecency
by Females' was passed by the British House of Commons in 1921, but failed to win
support in the Lords, where it was believed that lesbians were ill and not responsible
for their actions; see Weeks, p. 106.
7. 'Muzhelozhestvo', Brokgauz i Efron (eds.), Entsiklopedicheskii slovar' (St Petersburg,
1897), Vol.39, 110-11.
8. Karlinsky, 1990, p.358.
9. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume I An Introduction (London, 1990),
contains a discussion of this transformation in Part 3, 'Scientia Sexualis'.
10. The term 'homosexual' was coined by Dr Karoly Maria Benkert in 1869; it had passed
into general usage among the medical professions of Europe and America by the
1890s.
11. Laura Engelstein, 'Lesbian Vignettes: A Russian Triptych from the 1890s', Signs
Vol.15, No.4 (1990), discusses I.M. Tarnovskii's study of three lesbians from different
50 REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA
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 conscious-
ness 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 pre-
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sented 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 Sozialist-
ischen 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 Hirsch-
feld'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 REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA
1930), pp.249-51; Proceedings of the 4th Congress (Vienna, 1930) (Vienna, 1931),
pp.345-6.
48. Solomon, pp.189-92.
49. V.M. Bekhterev, 'Ob izvrashchenii i uklonenii polovogo vlecheniia', Polovoi vopros v
svete nauchnogo znaniia, (Moscow, 1926), pp.293-325.
50. Winter, p.165.
51. 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.
52. Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams (Oxford, 1989), p.117. Examples of linkage
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on the Mores of Soviet Students in the 1920s', Journal of Modern History, 50 {June
1978), pp.274-76.
63. K. Zetkin, Reminiscences ofLenin (London, 1929), pp.52-60.
64. D. Rancour-Laferriere, The Mind of Stalin: A Psychoanalytic Study (Ann Arbor, ML,
1988), p.104.
65. D.J.K. Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition and Racism in Everyday
Life (London, 1989), p.219.
66. 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
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.
67. Maksim Gor'kii, 'Proletarskii gumanizm', Sobranie sochinenii v 30-i tomakh (Moscow,
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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).
79. S. Poliakova 'Poeziia Sofii Parnok', in Sofiia Parnok, Sobranie stikhohtvorenii (Ann
Arbor, ML, 1979), pp.29-30.
80. Malmsted, pp.287-94.
81. Lewin, p.214.
82. 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 opportuni-
ties for ordinary lesbians and gays, and explicitly rejected the academic elitism of
Hirschfeld's Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, see Steakley, p.74.
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