Why we Must View Women’s Liberation in the UK Through a Class

Lens - Kyril Whittacker

Why we Must View Women’s Liberation in the UK Through a Class Lens
- Kyril Whittacker, member of the Communist Party of Britain and a writer who lived in
Vietnam

It is quite often heard in the United Kingdom that women are liberated, they are free. No
longer are women forced by a patriarchal society to take this or that job, no longer are women
expected to remain in the home, and some observers state almost as if to seem degrading in
their analysis women are free because ‘Even a woman can be prime minister’ as some
conservative feminists have put forth. This is bourgeois feminism, feminism in name only and
this can be seen reflected in recent events in Europe.
In the recent Italian elections for example, when Georgia Meloni was elected Prime Minister
of Italy, many newspapers instead of opting to describe the fascist nature of her party and the
certain horrific conditions to come for the oppressed in Italy, many newspapers instead used
headlines such as ‘Georgia Meloni: Italy’s First Female Prime Minister’.

In the UK we have had to listen to years to a Conservative Party which on debates involving
women, constantly bring up the fact that they are the only party in the UK to have elected
female Prime Ministers. Yet even on a shallow observation of these basic arguments one can see
that it is obvious that these actions are not liberation at all, at best they serve to give an illusion
of freedom to the working masses, and at worst they act as the cruellest and shallowest form of
bourgeois propaganda that seeks to increase oppression. The female Prime Ministers in the UK
are not representative of the masses of women in the UK, instead of furthering mass programs
which benefit women, these politicians have perpetuated the most reactionary and acidic
attitudes towards the working class and women in general.
   Margaret Thatcher the infamous union crusher whom perpetuated backwards viewpoints
concerning the family and the LGBTQ+ community, supported apartheid and was pals with
Pinochet. Theresa May, who continued David Cameron’s legacy of increased foodbanks,
increased child poverty and homelessness. Lastly and most recently the laughing stock that was
Liz Truss, a Prime Minister so catastrophically bad she only lasted 45 days in office, who stood
on a platform of crushing the unions. stripping away the right to protest and who sent the
economy into freefall. This electing of women of bourgeois families to the highest offices, who
support in every possible way the capitalist class is the freedom of bourgeois society, and as
such is therefore not freedom at all, but deceit and oppression. It is obvious that from only this

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small analysis that bourgeois society is not giving freedom to women, instead exactly the
opposite, this is why we must analyse the question of women’s liberation from a class
standpoint, only then will we be able to fully break the foundations of women’s oppression in
society, whether that be in the United Kingdom or anywhere else.
 

CLOAKS OF DECEPTION
“Capitalist ‘Democracies’ often claim to give women and girls freedom, the
freedom to education, the freedom to vote, the freedom to work, but are women
really free in these so called ‘democracies’ to partake in these actions? Engels
stated that a fundamental aspect of the bourgeoisie when it argues about the
‘freedom’ of the worker to work ignores one fundamental aspect of the contract,
namely the class dynamics between the one and the other, and therefore the power
exerted on the one by the other when signing an employment contract.”

   In a similar way bourgeois ‘democracy’ too cloaks all of it’s so called democratic aspects with
a veneer of freedom which completely ignores the material reality of society in an effort to
mask exploitation and detract from any criticism of its system. This applies especially to
women’s liberation. In these ‘democracies’ it is often argued that women are afforded the right
to work in capitalist society, but is this really true when capitalist society pays women less than
men for the same job? Does it offer freedom when it ignores women’s reproductive issues as if
they are irrelevant to the workplace? Does it when women are objectified and sexually harassed
by ‘company culture’ (as has happened numerous times in the video game industry), and the
harassers are not brought to justice precisely because of their class position, and are instead
moved to a different department or worse, do not receive any type of action whatsoever. This is
not liberation in work, for work is not guaranteed, it is not free of exploitation and in fact is a
horrific environment for women workers.
   We can also see a similar hypocrisy with the right to education as another example, in the
United Kingdom we are told that education is free for all up to university level. Yet this ignores
again the material reality of the situation. As someone who has been both a poor student from a
working class family and a teacher I have seen this first hand in the United Kingdom. Uniforms
are expensive, classroom equipment is expensive, schools fail to be able to deal sufficiently
with student problems due to woeful underfunding by the government, large class sizes and
long hours with miniscule pay for teaching staff. The fact is if you are a student from a working
class family in a British school you will struggle, and for many things. you will have to rely on
the kindness of your underpaid and over exploited teachers to help you navigate the mess that is
this so called education system of ‘freedom’ and ‘equality’. Consider now on top of this the
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problems young girls have to struggle with in their education, with backwards attitudes towards
them present in every school with the pressures of reproductive health and access to the
required materials to deal with these issues in an underfunded school. On top of this in the UK
there has also been a depressing trend of students being forced into prostitution to pay for their
day to day lives and their tuition in universities, which has even been encouraged by some
educational institutions. The results of all this are not only depressing, they are catastrophic.
 
   Here the capitalist system in covering up its exploitation of the working class and women
keeps working class students from getting a decent education, the one thing the UK’s so called
‘meritocratic system’ is meant to grant everyone regardless of class, race or sex. When this gets
to the university level, with requirements such as textbooks, laptops, transportation,
accommodation, food etc. it is no surprise that many working class students do not go on to
further education or feel forced into prostitution.
 

EXPLOITATION
 
   Even when we ignore all of this false ‘freedom’ (and this is without mentioning issues such as
the two party dictatorship, and the consistent placing into power of unelected figures in the UK)
we still cannot confront the issue of women’s liberation or in fact the liberation of any
oppressed group of we do not look at the root of this oppression, the inherent exploitative nature
of the capitalist system. The capitalist system based on the accumulation of wealth and in its
pursuit of this increasing exploitation of resources and labour. In Labour this is manifested
through lax working conditions, crushing trade unions, low pay and most significantly tied to all
of these the extraction of more and more surplus from the worker, that is, that they give
significantly and increasingly more than they receive in the labour process.
 
   To analyse this we can look at Marx who presented us with the description on this extraction
of surplus as follows:
“If our spinner, for example, by his daily labour of six hours, added three shillings
value to the cotton, a value forming an exact equivalent to his wages, he will in
twelve hours, add six shillings worth to the cotton, and produce a proportional
surplus of yarn. As he has sold his labouring power to the capitalist, the whole
value of produce created by him belongs the capitalist, the owner pro tem of his
labouring power. By advancing three shillings, the capitalist will therefore, realize
a value of six shillings, because, advancng a value in which six hours of labour are

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 crystallised, he will receive in return a value in which twelve hours of labour are
crystallised.”
  In this explanation Marx highlights that from what we discussed earlier concerning the
unequal power relationship conferred by class in the signing of a work contract the capitalist is
free through his ownership of the means of production, his power and wealth to reap profit from
the workers labour. If we compare this spinner to a modern day fast food worker we can see that
a worker whom works a 12 hour shift at minimum wage will earn around £118 with all the food
they have cooked, assembled and packaged generating far much more money than their wage.
Even when we incorporate the cost of materials such as the beef, potatoes, cutlery etc. we can
see there would still be a significant margin of profit there, profit which, does not get given to
the worker, nor covers the costs of the business in acquiring materials.
 
   This surplus instead gets extracted from the workers efforts and is placed directly in the hands
of the capitalist whom enriches his or herself of the hard work of their employees. Employees
whom in the UK are increasingly having to resort to food banks to feed their children.skipping
meals, and forfeiting the use of electricity in their homes.
 
   In the United Kingdom the excessive extraction of surplus is clear in many areas, for example
the recent heightened attempts to crush the ever-growing trade union movement by passing
draconian bills to make protest illegal, by keeping wages significantly below inflation for
almost a decade, and in many large enterprises, láx health and safety implementation in the
workplace and attempts to make workers work for the longest time they can get away with fue
take what was said above.com cermine the extractionoi surplus we can clearly see how exactly
then whilst workers in the UK are struggling to even afford food for their children some
companies are making record profits.

   Applying all of this to the question of women’s liberation in the UK we can see that women
will never be free until capitalism is smashed. A system predicated on the exploitation can never
exist if we are pursuing liberation. As Lenin stated:
“The real emancipation of women, real communism, will begin only where and
when an all-out struggle begins (Led by the proletariat wielding state power)
against this petty housekeeping, or rather when its wholesale transformation into
large-scale socialist economy begins.”
 
   Lenin then, recognises that the oppression inherent in the capitalist system in all its forms is a
road clock to the emancipation of women and as such only when this system is destroyed and
replaced with socialism and communism can progress be made the liberation of women.
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Because capitalism seeks to present backwards attitudes in relation to women, because it seeks
to treat them as an expendable work force, because it seeks to exploit them as much as possible,
because it seeks to use them as mere objects for the creation of capital, no concrete liberation
can be achieved for women without the complete eradication of the capitalist system and its
wholesale replacement with a system of real democracy, real freedom and real equality.
 

APPROPRIATION OF RADICAL STRUGGLES

 
“Lenin stated in the State and Revolution that Capitalism seeks to blunt the
revolutionary force of great thinkers by converting them into ‘harmless icons’,
blunting the revolutionary essence of their message and vulgarising it. Capitalism
does this method today with the revolutionary women of the past. Figures such as
Alexandra Kollontai, Frida Kahlo, Nadezhda Krupskaya, have their massive
contributions to the emancipation of women vulgarised or blunted because of their
class analysis.”

 
   Either that or these women’s contributions are buried and ignored, instead with capitalist
society, (if it discusses these women at all) giving them mere derogatory titles, instead or
revolutionaries, political philosophers, theorists, politicians they are seen as somebodies wife,
or as someone who possessed ‘left wing views’.
 
   In the UK the struggle for women’s emancipation is fought against by liberals who view the
victory of capitalism as a victory for women, when as a matter of fact the victory of capitalism
here is of course a detriment to the majority of women whom are working class and in today’s
United Kingdom find themselves on the receiving end of some of the harshest economic times
in the country’s history. When a woman like Liz Truss becomes Prime Minister of the UK for
only 45 days, in this time plunging the economy to its weakest state in decades, attempting to
enact draconian bills against trade unions and protesters, giving businesses tax cuts when
foodbanks are rising, child poverty is rising homelessness, and fuel poverty are rising, we can
see that having a woman prime minister is of little benent to womenin the UK because they
serve the interests of the bourgeoisie.
 
   As for Rishi Sunak, a Prime Minister who will continue the long line of dracoclan policles of
his predecessors and seeks to make it lacriminal offence to ‘vilify Great Britain’ we che
guarantee that things will not get any better. We can seewith Smak too though, just as liberals
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rejoice in female prime ministers sueco they reloce in Sumak being ‘the first Hindu Prime
Minister’ or the first PM from an Indian family. Liberals then even in comparison to their
radical predecessors serve to blunt the revolutionary force of the movement for women’s
emancipation in the UK and Europe, by not paying attention to the question of class they have
sold out their freedom wholesale to an exploitative system that will only reward them as long as
they are members of the exploiting class. In the United Kingdom then, we must fight back
against this liberal wave of the assumption that first the emancipation of women can be a
separate question from the class question, because as we have seen the former has its
foundations in the latter. We must be on guard as to not have capitalist propaganda make the
movement for women’s emancipation be blunted and vulgarised. Without a class analysis we
will be going in circles.

A POSITIVE OUTLOOK: THE CONCLUSION

 
   Women’s exploitation and its roots in capitalism is a lengthy subject and as such I cannot do
this full justice in this short article, nor can I fully do justice the explana tion of the material
reality of the movement in the United Kingdom, it is and of course as a male I am more
ignorant of women’s issues than my women comrades. Nevertheless I hope my article has
added something of worth to the discussion. I would suggest that we all (men and women) must
improve our engagement with the question of women’s emancipation, and furthermore we must
investi gate the progressive socialist states both past and present have made in this area. from
the progressive views of the family in the former GDR to the amazing rights afforded to women
workers in the Soviet Union, which provided equal pay for equal work, the massive state
programmes for crèches, nurseries, communal kitchens, the legalisation of abortion and many
more rights decades before capitalist states.
 
   In the modern day states like Vietnam for example have highly progressive labour legislation
for women, which includes but is not limited to: companies who employ over a certain number
of people must have adequate breast milk pumping and storage facilities, women having to be a
part of decisions made in the workplace, women who menstruate being entitled to fully paid
leave, or alternatively extra pay if they decide to work alongside longer breaks, and much, much
more. It also has a strong women’s union which has great influence on women’s legislation and
women’s everyday lives in the country through its various programmes and its political power.
Recently we have also seen in Cuba highly progressive legisla tion in the form of the new
family bill, which codifies into it’s constitution the equality of men and women, and the
recognition of various types of family, alongside other progressive legislation for same sex
couples, the elderly and children. This essential piece of legcomplexislation was voted on by the
Cuban people, it was not decided by a bunch of politicians whom only serve the interests of
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themselves or capital, but by a party and people determined to make progressive change and to
improve the conditions of the masses. These are just two examples of legislative change which
was enacted by the masses for the masses and is just one of the many achievements in the
construction of socialism in Cuba and Vietnam, Mary Davis and Angus Reid rightly point out
that such legis lation as the Family Code in Cuba greatly contrasts to the ‘rights’ of capitalist
states whom as Engels alluded to earlier provide a false freedom for the working class, and
withdraw rights as soon as they are seemingly given.
 
“This comprehensive settlement contrasts sharply with the piecemeal and oppor
tunistic way such rights are given (and taken away) in capitalist democracies.”
  We should learn from and be inspired by these socialist states and their massive progress, and
should note that it is by recognising the class basis of women’s emancipation that these societies
have progressed so much. To make significant emancipatory progress in the United Kingdom
for women then, we must too recognise the class basis of women’s oppression. We must in a
phrase, break free of the chains of capital and emancipate the masses for the progression of
society.

Source: The International, 26th Issue, November 2022

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rm1n3v6aHgI8PHWwJpPs6ctdNWnpfjfH/view?
fbclid=IwAR0XacFxJxAGE2PTJb6jUhiAvHF-kodbw8d2Izxu7KvwzCqsCGjlhi_Z2_I

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Pride: A brief revolutionary history
By the LGBTQIA+ Commission of the American Party of Labor.

An Immediate Origin of Modern Struggle, Existence, and Recognition:

On June 28th, 1970 the very first Pride marches were held in New York City, Los Angeles, and
Chicago to commemorate the one year anniversary of the now famous six day confrontation
with police at the Stonewall Inn in June 1969. Stonewall Inn was a bar and nightclub popular
with LGBTQIA+ people in New York City and was one of the few that would openly serve
queer people after a 1966 ruling in New York state that decriminalized serving alcohol to
LGBTQIA+ people. However, homosexuality was still considered a crime by New York state
law. Police would often arrest or harass LGBTQIA+ people due to their own personal
prejudices about gender conforming clothing. This practice tied with the formal outlawing of
homosexuality created a culture which allowed police to often raid queer spaces like the

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Stonewall Inn as they were easy targets for police to fill quotas and few people cared about the
rights and safety of LGBTQIA+ people at the time.
The six day revolt at Stonewall was sparked on the evening of June 28th, 1969 after the police
raided Stonewall and, unsurprisingly, used excessive force to detain and arrest many of the
people gathered there. After years of raids and victimization at the hands of police the
LGBTQIA+ community had finally had enough and began to fight back and struggle for
recognition, equality, and liberation. By the morning of June 29th thousands of queer people
had entered the streets demanding an end to the oppressive laws and violent police raids. The
demonstration lasted for nearly a week and saw much repression and violent attacks from
police. It is important to note that every section of the mutli-ethnic and mutli-national
LGBTQIA+ community were victims to these raids, and likewise, every section of the multi-
ethnic and multi-national LGBTQIA+ community participated in the struggle against them.
There has, in the past, been attempts to mitigate the role played by transgender and gender-
nonconforming people as well as lesbians and drag queens in the events and aftermath of
Stonewall. To let these attempts to mitigate participation and presence does a disservice to the
LGBTQIA+ community overall and cannot be allowed to continue.
Since the Stonewall revolt, June 28th, as well as the whole month of June, has been an
international time for the recognition of the LGBTQIA+ community and, as a time to feel pride
in ourselves and our existence, to honor those who came before us in the struggle for queer
rights and continue the fight until total liberation is reached. Pride has its roots in, and is
intrinsically tied to, the unapologetic struggle for the recognition and equality of LGBTQIA+
people and communities.

The Communist Movement and the Cause of LGBTQIA+ People:

While the communist and Marxist-Leninist movement has not always had the most progressive
stance on LGBTQIA+ communities, there is not a single communist today, worthy of the title,
who does not fully uphold the fight for LGBTQIA+ rights and liberation.

Around the world today communists are actively engaged in and sometimes play leading roles
in the struggle for LGBTQIA+ liberation. It comes as no surprise that LGBTQIA+ people are
predominantly of the working class and the oppression of LGBTQIA+ people is rooted in the
oppressive and exploitative system that is capitalism. It is the duty of every communist, of
every Marxist-Leninist, to stand with and unite all sections of the working class in the struggle
for liberation and socialism. LGBTQIA+ liberation is inseparable from the working class
struggle. We in the American Party of Labor are one of many Marxist-Leninist organizations
that stand in solidarity with and organize among the LGBTQIA+ community. Many of our
international comrades also organize for the rights of LGBTQIA+ workers against social
reaction and the domination of the spiritual idealism/pseudo-scientific rhetoric from all sides of
8
the political spectrum. The Communist Party of Spain (ML) organizes nationally with the Trans
Obrera Sindicalista, a trade union for transgender workers. The Revolutionary Communist Party
of Brazil platforms gender-nonconforming comrades in the video reports of its news organ, A
Verdade and openly celebrates Trans Day of Visibility, and the Communist Party of Labor of the
Dominican Republic also programmatically asserts its demands for the rights of the
LGBTQIA+ community.

The history of LGBTQIA+ rights and the communist movement begins in the year 1898 when
August Bebel, a leading member of the German social democratic movement gave the first ever
political speech in defense of homosexual rights on the Reichstag floor calling for the removal
of German sodomy laws.

The next major step forward was in the aftermath of the Great October Revolution of 1917 in
Russia. With the complete overturning and nullification of the Tsarist criminal code
homosexuality was decriminalized. Today, many people cite Article 121 of the Soviet Criminal
Code as proof of anti-LGBTQIA+ sentiment within the Soviet state. However, the Great Soviet
Encyclopedia is quoted as saying “that Soviet legislation does not recognize so-called crimes
against morality” and Article 121 of the Soviet Criminal Code was intended to only punish
people guilty of abusing children. The Soviet Union, at the time, like much of the rest of the
world, shared the view of leading psychologists in which members of the LGBTQIA+
community were believed to have a psycho-sexual disorder. While it is of the utmost
importance to understand this view as wholly wrong, it was the official position of science and
psychology of the time. What set the Soviet Union apart and ahead of other countries during
this time period was that the Soviet Union aimed at ending the “estrangement” faced by
members in the LGBTQIA+ community in relation to society, and provided them with various
forms of medical care, while other countries criminalized and brutalized queer people. The
Soviets, while incorrect about the nature of LGBTQIA+ people, treated them with some sense
of dignity, a dignity that was absent in most other countries.

However, this view within socialist countries and the communist movement would not remain
stagnant as it did in many capitalist countries. As science and psychology developed and began
to recognize the rights and natural existence of LGBTQIA+ people so did socialist states. East
Germany decriminalized homosexuality in the 1980s when their Supreme Court decreed that
“homosexual people do not stand outside of socialist society.” East Germany was also the first
country to openly allow LGBTQIA+ people to serve in its military by issuing that soldiers
should “deconstruct traditional moral prejudices against homosexuality.” East Germany also
had a remarkable history of allowing sex change surgeries for people who desired them. This
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profound social change is joined by a long progressive history of queer activism and advocacy
in both the German Empire and the Weimar Republic. Physicians like Magnus Hirschfeld
pioneered techniques of gender reassignment/confirmation surgery for transfeminine people in
particular, with a patient at his Institute for Sexual Research, Lili Elbe becoming the first
Transgender woman in history to receive a uterus transplant. Hirschfeld was also an early
organizer in the gay rights movement that grew to be incredibly organized in Weimar Germany,
even if it was heavily influenced by liberal “respectability politics” in its cultural and political
campaigns. This Scientific Humanitarian Committee was also supported by the Communist
Party of Germany. The LGBTQIA+ movement was an early target for the ascendant Nazi Party
as the Brown Shirt gangs burnt down the Institute for Sexual Research in Berlin. Likewise
books of biological, cultural and psychological study of homosexuality and gender-
nonconforming identity were burnt en masse in the book burnings of the Nazi Party, in
particular with the library of the University of Leipzig suffering the loss of its groundbreaking
research.

Today, socialist Cuba is a leading force in the world for LGBTQIA+ rights. In 1979, same-sex
activity was nationally decriminalized 24 years before the United States. Article 42 of the
Cuban Constitution has LGBTQIA+ rights enshrined within it and in 2022 socialist Cuba
passed one of the most progressive family codes in history which acknowledges the rights of
LGBTQIA+ people and established other advancements for women, children, and the elderly. It
should also be noted that since 2008 Resolution 126 was signed into law which allowed for
Cubans seeking sexual reassignment/gender confirmation surgery to receive those surgeries
provided freely by the Cuban government. Cuba was the first country in Latin America to
increase support for transgender and gender-nonconforming people to this level and today
socialist Cuba is celebrated for having one of the world’s most inclusive and LGBTQIA+
friendly medical and health programs.

The presentation of the LGBTQIA+ community and its relation to the communist movement of
the last century has been distorted by capitalist academia in an effort to slander the communist
history of working people and to demoralize the working masses. We must not allow the
capitalists to tell us who our enemies are, or what we can and cannot believe or know. At this
moment in history, all the progress made by the LGBTQIA+ community has made for itself
under liberal capitalist regimes is facing a vicious attack of the reactionary bourgeoisie, our
freedom, our culture and our very lives are being attacked with legislation and terrorists of the
far-right in alarming intensity. Vile and baseless accusations are launched against LGBTQIA+
people, and in particular the transgender community, in order to justify their policies of popular
division and the genocide of queer people. The working class in general, and of course
LGBTQIA+ people are not ignorant to this backhanded campaign, not foolish enough to be
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divided or silent when our very rights and lives are threatened once again with the death throes
of a decaying ruling class. If the reactionaries of the USA believe they will succeed where their
fascist predecessors failed, they are sorely mistaken. The Marxist-Leninist movement, with the
LGBTQIA+ movement firmly supported in our revolutionary solidarity, holds up the banner of
Pride, of socialism, to the ending of a society built on division, discrimination and
dehumanization. The LGBTQIA+ Commission of the American Party of Labor calls all workers
and queer people to struggle and advance our rights, and to remember the meaning of Pride.
Source: https://redphoenixnews.com/2023/06/04/pride-a-brief-revolutionary-history/?
fbclid=IwAR1Kzwf41wPdpaK3b4CpHNfhkrTbhvLHBDCOjPe0eKLx4BKBxrKzx2VjJNI

THE USSR AND HOMOSEXUALITY PART I

(ARTICLE 121 – 1934)
Author’s Note:  As a Marxist-Leninist who supports Joseph Stalin as a good and great leader
of the Soviet Union, I must declare from the start, that I view the Soviet Union as one of the
most progressive regimes humanity has ever produced, and considering the objective facts of
history, I understand that the West (through the Cold War) has deliberately distorted not only
the history of the Soviet Union, but has deliberately attacked the otherwise good reputation of
Joseph Stalin – the man who defeated Hitlerism, and the Communist leader the West most
feared due to its own greed-orientated paranoia. The Trotskyite (and government-led lies)
perpetuated by Western academia (and its State media) can produce no authentic academic
references in the Russian language, to support its bizarre notions against the USSR – simply
because no such academic references exist in the Soviet Archives.  Of course, as with any
leftwing progressive, I fully support LGBTQ Rights, and am probably one of a handful of
Communists who has taken the trouble to march in London’s Gay Pride Parade. I originally
published this article on the 19.3,2015 (see full text below – Appendix I), but since that time,
more reliable academic evidence has come to light, that has allowed me to historically
contextualise this issue far more thoroughly (with the reconstituted article appearing below). 
Initially, my research began with Article 121 of the 1934 RSFSR Criminal Code, and its
apparent association between male homosexuality and the odious crime of paedophilia (a
logical assumption made from an analysis of the wording – albeit in English translation).  I
mistakenly felt at the time that the entirety of the thinking of the USSR was dialectically
deficient in this area, and that this notion served as the basis of my initial investigation
(although, of course, it is clear that old Czarist notions and Christian derived prejudices were
present in early Soviet modes of thought as expressed by certain soviet ideologues).  I then
read, (after the first draft of this essay was published), a very interesting biography of Lenin
compiled by Tamas Krausz, within which he asserts that Lenin deliberately ‘decriminalised’
homosexuality, and that Stalin later ‘criminalised’ it.  I must say that after reading the
Collected Works of both men, I have never encountered any written texts (by either of these
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leaders) that specifically addressed or considered the subject of ‘homosexuality’.  This fact
alone sheds doubt on the assumption of Krausz (which he presents an unquestioned ‘fact’).
Krausz seems to be perpetuating a Trotskyite demonisation of Stalin, by protecting an equally
Trotskyite distortion of history upon Lenin (i.e. Lenin must be ‘good’ for Stalin to be ‘evil’ etc). 
I was able to come to this conclusion, when I recently read the excellent article entitled
‘Homosexuality in the USSR’ (linked below) written by Alfonso Casal (and published on the
Stalin Society of North America – SSNA – in April, 2015).  This article is logical, historically
accurate, and dialectically correct.  Homosexuality is a complex affair, not only within Soviet
history, but also throughout the world.  Lenin freed the working class (including gay people,
but not exclusively so) from Czarist oppression, and Stalin furthered this freedom through the
legal reforms that were initiated during his leadership of the USSR.  ACW 28.12.2016
The Soviet law text entitled ‘Criminal Code of the RSFSR’, (see Chapter Four – Crimes Against
the Life, Health, Freedom, and Dignity of the Person’), contains Article 121 (1934), which
reads (in full) as follows:

‘Pederasty

Sexual relations of a man with a man (pederasty),

Shall be punished by deprivation of freedom for a term of up to five years.

Pederasty committed with the application of physical force, or threats, or with respect to a
minor, or with taking advantage of the dependent position of the victim,

Shall be punished by deprivation of freedom for a term of up to eight years.’

(Butler, WE, Translator & Editor, Basic Documents on the Soviet Legal System, Oceana
Publications, 1983, Page 344)

The choice of the term ‘pederasty’ is curious, as it derives from the origin Greek ‘paederasty’,
which literally translates as ‘love of boys’, and refers to the ancient Greek cultural practice of
sexual relations between mature men and adolescent males. However, it also carries the implied
connotation that the practice of ‘homosexuality’, is in fact the practice of ‘child abuse’, with the
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former being clearly conflated with the latter, despite the fact that Article 121 appears to define
‘pederasty’ as the performance of a sexual act between one man and another. In reality,
Pederasty is generally defined as the committing of a homosexual act by an older man, upon a
much younger male. When I was researching this article, I came across the following quote
which purports to set what it implies is the historicity of Lenin’s apparent ‘pro-gay’ and Stalin’s
alleged ‘anti-gay’ stance:

‘At the same time Lenin stood up for freedom of lifestyle, apparent from the fact that a decree
signed by him in Soviet Russia was the first in the world to end the criminality of
homosexuality. Chicherin, the commissar for foreign affairs, did not make a secret of the fact
that he loved men, and many others did not hide their sexual orientation either. It is another
matter that under Stalin, as of March 1934, homosexuality came to be considered a medical
disorder and an offense.’

(Krausz, Tamas, Reconstructing Lenin, an Intellectual Biography, Chapter 1 – Who Was Lenin
– Page 71)

The footnote (numbered 199) accompanying this paragraph reads in part:

‘Soviet law proclaims the absolute non-interference of the state in any matters relating to the
sexes, until no one suffers damages, and no one’s rights are infringed.’ Grigory Batkis 1925.

Tamas Krausz creates a hard-hitting paragraph with only the scantiest of references, and appears
to be following an anti-Stalinist Cold War agenda (formulated within the Western imagination).
He does not provide any relevant academically sound reference for this quote, and therefore
fails to adequately define his terms, and legitimately make his point. Where is the evidence that
Lenin ‘decriminalised’ homosexuality? Where is the evidence that Lenin was interested in the
subject of homosexuality at all? Where is this ‘decree’ that Lenin signed ending discrimination
against homosexuals? What happened in March 1934? Where is the evidence that Stalin took
an interest in the subject of homosexuality? Where is the proof that Stalin considered
homosexuality to be an abhorrent medical condition? The narrative Krausz creates suggests
that Lenin allowed for homosexuality, whilst Stalin rejected it – both of these stances appear
historically and academically incorrect. Lenin did abolish the old Czarist regime and its entire
body of law, that is true. The Czarist feudalistic law did contain openly hostile laws outlawing
homosexuality (possibly influenced by the Russian Orthodox Church), and when these laws
13
were abolished, the anti-homosexual laws were also abolished. This does not mean, however,
that Lenin deliberately ‘decriminalised’ homosexuality, but rather that the decriminalisation of
homosexuality was entirely incidental to the abolition of the old order. Furthermore, as Alfonso
Casal points-out in his excellent article entitled:
“The fact that homosexuality was criminally sanctioned under Soviet law is something that is
often thrown in the face of communists in general, and used to “discredit” Comrade Stalin in
particular. Indeed, “Stalin hated gays” is something I’ve seen posted online numerous times by
trots and anarchists. I doubt Stalin ever wrote or spoke a single public word on the matter. In
any event, such an accusation is by, its very nature, decontextualized and misleading. What
needs to be stated is that Soviet legal and medical opinion on this question was no different than
what was generally accepted in the world at large, namely, that homosexuality was a psycho-
sexual disorder, a form of mental illness. Additionally, there were arguments made that
attempted to tie homosexuality to fascism – especially considering that many of Hitler’s
Brownshirts were homosexual.
Bad as this may seem, it needs to be seen in historical context. Science advances, knowledge
grows and deepens. The science of human sexuality was in its infancy for all of Stalin’s life.
Stalin died in 1953. He died before the ‘sexual revolution’, and he never heard of Alfred Kinsey,
Masters and Johnson or the ‘Hite Report.’ In fact, it was only in 1975 that the American
Psychological Association itself ceased to classify homosexuality as a mental disorder. To
expect that Stalin, and Soviet Russia in the 1930s, would foresee the advances in medical and
psychological science that would occur forty years in the future is either naïve or malicious. It
should be noted, by comparison, that the GDR had a much more open and positive policy with
respect to homosexuality. This can be explained by the fact that studies in sexology were more
advanced in Germany than in any place else in the world. But this too has to be seen in
historical context, as part not only of the deepening of scientific knowledge, but the spread of
such knowledge throughout the society in general. By 1987, GDR law stated that
“homosexuality, just like heterosexuality, represents a variant of sexual behavior. Homosexual
people do therefore not stand outside socialist society, and the civil rights are warranted to them
exactly as to all other citizens.”
So, here is the real answer. As Marxist-Leninists, we are scientists. As scientists we seek to
advance human knowledge and understanding. And, as our knowledge and understanding
grows, so does our ideology. Today, there is not a single communist worthy of the name who
does not whole-heartedly support gay rights.
Moreover, I think it should also be pointed out that, despite the view that homosexuality was a
mental disorder, the actual law in question, Article 121 of the Soviet Criminal Code, was pretty
much only enforced in cases of pedophilia, with some 800 – 1000 prosecutions annually.

14
Wikipedia (everyone’s quick go-to) quotes the 1930 “Great Soviet Encylopedia” as follows:
Soviet legislation does not recognize so-called crimes against morality. Our laws proceed from
the principle of protection of society and therefore countenance punishment only in those
instances when juveniles and minors are the objects of homosexual interest … while
recognizing the incorrectness of homosexual development … our society combines prophylactic
and other therapeutic measures with all the necessary conditions for making the conflicts that
afflict homosexuals as painless as possible and for resolving their typical estrangement from
society within the collective
—Sereisky, Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 1930, p. 593
Actually, Communists were MORE progressive on the question of gay rights than was the
bourgeois society of the time. Once again, the important thing here is the level of scientific
understanding and the extent to which that knowledge has been spread throughout society at
large. Germany had the longest history of psychological and medical research on human
sexuality. The was an Institute of Sexology as early as the 1920s. The Nazis closed it down
when they came to power. Leading medical researchers at the Institute of Sexology were
affiliated with the KPD. That’s right, the KPD, the “STALINIST” German Communist Party.
Many German Communists were not only supportive of gay rights, but were pioneers of sexual
liberation. In fact, a number of them sang the health praises of nudism. This includes Markus
Wolf’s father and family. Markus Wolf would later become the head of foreign intelligence for
the GDR; the man the CIA would call “the man without a face” because they didn’t possess a
photograph of him.
Furthermore, “Lenin decriminalized homosexuality” is a much beloved trotskyite trope that
they love to throw at Marxist-Leninists. The facts, are a little different:
“The initiative for revocation of antihomosexual legislation, following the Revolution of
February 1917, had come, not from the Bolsheviks but from the Cadets (Constitutional
democrats) and the anarchists (Karlinsky, 1989). Nevertheless, once the old criminal code had
been repealed after the October Revolution, the antihomosexual article also ceased to be valid.
The Russian Federation criminal codes for 1922 and 1926 did not mention homosexuality,
although the corresponding laws remained in force in places where homosexuality was most
prevalent – in the Islamic republics of Azerbaijan, Turkmenia, and Uzbekistan, as well as in
Christian Georgia.”
“Soviet medical and legal experts were very proud of the progressive nature of their legislation,
lnl930, the medical expert Sereisky (1930) wrote in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia: “Soviet
legislation does not recognize so-called crimes against morality. Our laws proceed from the
principle of protection of society and therefore countenance punishment only in those instances
when juveniles and minors are the objects of homosexual interest” P. 593).

15
“As Engelstein (1995) justly mentions, the formal decriminalization of sodomy did not mean
that such conduct was invulnerable to prosecution. The absence of formal statutes against anal
intercourse or lesbianism did not stop the prosecution of homosexual behavior as a form of
disorderly conduct. After the 1922 Penal Code was published there were in that same year at
least two known trials for homosexual practices. The eminent psychiatrist Vladimir Bekhterev
testified that “public demonstration of such impulses … is socially harmful and cannot be
permitted” (Engelstein, 1995, p. 167). The official stance of Soviet medicine and law in the
1920s, as reflected by Sereisky’s encyclopedia article, was that homosexuality was a disease
that was difficult, perhaps even impossible, to cure. So “while recognizing the incorrectness of
homosexual development … our society combines prophylactic and other therapeutic measures
with all the necessary conditions for making the conflicts that afflict homosexuals as painless as
possible and for resolving their typical estrangement from society within the collective”
(Sereisky, 1930, p. 593).”
“The precise number of persons prosecuted under Article 121 is unknown (the first official
information was released only in 1988), but it is believed to be about 1000 a year. Since the late
1980s, according to official data, the number of men convicted under Article 121 has been
steadily decreasing. In 1987, 831 men were sentenced (this figure refers to the entire Soviet
Union); in 1989, 539; in 1990, 497; in 1991, 462; and for the first 6 months of 1992, 227,
among whom all but 10 were sentenced under Article 121.2 (figures are for Russia only)
(Gessen, 1994). According to Russian lawyers, most convictions have indeed been under Article
121.2, 80 percent of cases being related to the involvement of minors up to 18 years of age
(Ignatov, 1974). In an analysis of 130 convictions under Article 121 between 1985 and 1992, it
was found that 74 percent of the accused were convicted under 121.2, of whom 20 percent were
for rape using physical force, 8 percent for using threats, 52 percent for having sexual contact
with minors and 2 and 18 percent, respectively, for exploiting the victims dependent or
vulnerable status (Dyachenko, 1995). ”
SOURCE: http://www.gay.ru/english/history/kon/soviet.htm
So, in conclusion:  Lenin DID NOT specifically decriminalize homosexual activity. The Tsarist
criminal code was declared null and void, the anti-homosexual statutes along with all the others.
The 1922 and 1926 Soviet criminal codes did not mention homosexuality, but anti-homosexual
laws remained on the books in the Islamic republics and Georgia. When homosexuality does re-
enter the Soviet criminal code, prosecutions are relatively rare (1,000 per year out of a
population of 200 million) and those that were prosecuted targeted instances of rape, child
abuse, and abuse of dependent and vulnerable persons.
Those are the FACTS. Was the law perfect? Of course not! Was it a good law or something to
be admired or replicated? No. Was the law abused and innocent people sanctioned? Likely, as in
all legal systems. But, the intent and extent of the law was far different from what anti-Stalin
and ‘left anti-communist” propaganda would have one believe.”
16
The old anti-homosexual laws were retained in the Islamic Republics, and Christian Georgia,
even after 1917, apparently as a means not to offend religious sensibilities in the area, at a time
of otherwise great social upheaval. Although Lenin was for the freedom of the proletariat, he
did not, as Krausz suggest, deliberately legitimise homosexuality.  Other than abolishing the
Czarist code, Lenin did not sign any decree specifically dealing with homosexuality.  This is an
important historical point, as it exposes the further assertion alleged by Krausz that Stalin later
effectively ‘abolished’ Lenin’s earlier good work.  Stalin did not abolish any homosexual-
friendly law ‘decreed’ by Lenin simply because Lenin never issued any such law.  What Stalin
did do was officiate over the impressive and much discussed 1936 Constitution of the USSR,
seen by many as ground-breaking legal work, within which Article 121 is to be found.  Article
121, despite its curious reading, appears to have been designed to protect Soviet society from
the menace of child abuse and paedophilia, although it is recorded that Soviet academia was
interested in the practice of homosexuality from a medical perspective, and attempting to
ascertain its root cause (with a number of early Soviet researchers following the Czarist
assumption of aberration). This did not mean that homosexuals were persecuted – far from it –
the general underlying trend in the USSR was to end all oppression, and facilitate the
integration of the individual into the collective.
The Czarist regime, by and large was heavily influenced by the bourgeois mind-set of ‘moral
conservatism’ found within the Judeo-Christian paradigm, which manifested in areas considered
moral issues – vocally asserting that one mode of sexual expression was more ‘god-like’ than
another. What usually accompanies this religiously inspired indignation is the practice of the
highest hypocrisy which sees advocates of moral conservatism condemn others on the one hand
for their sexual preferences, whilst secretly engaging in the very same sexual activity on the
other. This treatment is usually decided by class in the bourgeois system, whereby middle class
sex offenders are ignored or protected by the State their class controls, whilst working class
‘sexual offenders’ experience the full weight of the bourgeois law. As usual, the bourgeois lives
in a secular world of duality inspired by the dichotomy of good and evil found in Judeo-
Christian theology. The bourgeois wants to be ‘good’, and please his ‘god’, whilst always
running the risk of giving-in to what might be correctly described as ‘natural impulses’ of desire
– which he sees as ‘evil’. The underlying paradox for the bourgeois is that ‘pleasure’ equates to
‘evil’, and this serves as the basis for self-loathing and bizarre laws that only ever punish the
lower strata of society. The bourgeois sleeps soundly in his bed at night knowing that the
working class is being punished by a legal system that reflects his backward, religiously
inspired viewpoints, even if those viewpoints manifest in a secular world. For the Christian
monastic, celibacy is the highest form of worshipping his god. The bourgeois layman is
confused – procreation is required to perpetuate the species (and he desires to participate in it),
but his religion historically informs him that what is good for the man is not good for god. This
inverted thinking deprives humanity of the means to perpetuate itself.

17
These attitudes, built up and sustained over many hundreds of years, are difficult to uproot over-
night, even in a regime as progressive as the USSR, which did not pursue deliberately anti-gay
agendas, but looked to ‘include’ rather than ‘exclude’.  The Soviet Union was a Socialist State
seeking to evolve society beyond its feudal and capitalist limitations, and into an advanced
Communist System where class, religion and State would no longer be required for the
maintenance of an optimum human society. In regard to this objective, the Soviet legal system
over-turned the rotten feudal and bourgeois system it inherited from the Czar. The Soviet legal
system was progressive in every single manner, and made life better for virtually every single
one of its citizens. The Soviet legal system was superior in every way to the bourgeois legal
codes (even at its inception). Men and women were given absolute equality and protection
under Soviet law, and the wording of the extensive anti-rape legislation appears to recognise
that both a man and a woman can be raped. Another area that exhibits advanced consideration
in the Soviet legal code is the rules concerning the prevention of rape and sexual exploitation of
young children and minors. However, in the important area of homosexuality, its progressive
nature was not fully developed at the time, not because of any ‘imagined’ anti-gay agendas, but
because Socialist dialectical development simply takes time to unfold in a scientific and logical
manner.
——————————————————-
Appendix I – Original Article: Homosexuality in the USSR (19.3,2015)
Author’s Note (added 30.5.2016):  Since I wrote this article, a new and crucial piece of
evidence has come to light that suggests that the USSR under Lenin (in its early days) was in
fact the first nation in history to legalise homosexuality:
‘At the same time Lenin stood up for freedom of lifestyle, apparent from the fact that a decree
signed by him in Soviet Russia was the first in the world to end the criminality of
homosexuality.  Chicherin, the commissar for foreign affairs, did not make a secret of the fact
that he loved men, and many others did not hide their sexual orientation either.  It is another
matter that under Stalin, as of March 1934, homosexuality came to be considered a medical
disorder and an offense.’
(Krausz, Tamas, Reconstructing Lenin, an Intellectual Biography, Chapter 1 – Who Was Lenin
– Page 71)
The footnote (numbered 199) accompanying this paragraph reads in part:
‘Soviet law proclaims the absolute non-interference of the state in any matters relating to the
sexes, until no one suffers damages, and no one’s rights are infringed.’ Grigory Batkis 1925.
As a matter of clarification, my essay in essence deals with the post-1934 change in Soviet Law
which effectively demonised homosexuality and in so doing turned the progressive clock of
Lenin back.  This shift from enlightened liberalism to bigoted narrow-mindedness played
18
straight into the hands of the rightwing moral conservatives – the natural enemies of the USSR. 
ACW 30.5.15
It is an interesting point to observe that both the USSR (and the post-Soviet-Russian
Federation), retain a hostile and negative attitude toward both the theory and practice of
homosexuality – if homosexuality is defined as a sexual relationship between two consenting
adults of the same gender; i.e. a man with a man, or a woman with a woman. This category of
sexual relationship can also include bisexuality – whereby a man or a woman voluntarily
engages in sexual relationships of a heterosexual and homosexual nature. Transgender is also an
issue of sexuality, as a man may feel ‘trapped’ in a female ‘birth’ body, and a woman ‘trapped’
in a male ‘birth’ body, etc., thus affecting their apparent or real sexual orientation. Generally
speaking, the bourgeois mind-set of ‘moral conservatism’ tends to apply a presumed Judeo-
Christian paradigm to areas considered moral issues – vocally asserting that one mode of sexual
expression is more ‘god-like’ than another. What usually accompanies this religiously inspired
indignation is the practice of the highest hypocrisy which sees advocates of moral conservatism
condemn others on the one hand for their sexual preferences, whilst secretly engaging in the
very same sexual activity on the other. This treatment is usually decided by class in the
bourgeois system, whereby middle class sex offenders are ignored or protected by the State
their class controls, whilst working class ‘sexual offenders’ experience the full weight of the
bourgeois law. As usual, the bourgeois lives in a secular world of duality inspired by the
dichotomy of good and evil found in Judeo-Christian theology. The bourgeois wants to be
‘good’, and please his ‘god’, whilst always running the risk of giving-in to what might be
correctly described as ‘natural impulses’ of desire – which he sees as ‘evil’. The underlying
paradox for the bourgeois is that ‘pleasure’ equates to ‘evil’, and this serves as the basis for self-
loathing and bizarre laws that only ever punish the lower strata of society. The bourgeois sleeps
soundly in his bed at night knowing that the working class is being punished by a legal system
that reflects his backward, religiously inspired viewpoints, even if those viewpoints manifest in
a secular world. For the Christian monastic, celibacy is the highest form of worshipping his god.
The bourgeois layman is confused – procreation is required to perpetuate the species (and he
desires to participate in it), but his religion historically informs him that what is good for the
man is not good for god. This inverted thinking deprives humanity of the means to perpetuate
itself.
The Soviet Union was a Socialist State seeking to evolve society beyond its feudal and
capitalist limitations, and into an advanced Communist System where class, religion and State
would no longer be required for the maintenance of an optimum human society. In regard to this
objective, the Soviet legal system over-turned the rotten feudal and bourgeois system it
inherited from the Czar. The Soviet legal system was progressive in every single manner, and
made life better for virtually every single one of its citizens. The Soviet legal system was
superior in every way to the bourgeois legal codes. Men and women were given absolute
equality and protection under Soviet law, and the wording of the extensive anti-rape legislation
19
appears to recognise that both a man and a woman can be raped. Another area that exhibits
advanced consideration in the Soviet legal code is the rules concerning the prevention of rape
and sexual exploitation of young children and minors. However, in the important area of
homosexuality, its progressive nature was not fully developed.
The concept of the possibility of a sexual relationship happening between a woman and a
woman was not recognised as physically possible, and so no law was enacted either for or
against its practice. However, the practice of sexual relations between a man and man was
recognised within Soviet law, and firmly legislated against. The Soviet law text entitled
‘Criminal Code of the RSFSR’, in Chapter Four – ‘Crimes Against the Life, Health, Freedom,
and Dignity of the Person’, contains Article 121 (1934), which states in full the following,
which forbids male homosexual relationships:
Pederasty
Sexual relations of a man with a man (pederasty),
Shall be punished by deprivation of freedom for a term of up to five years.
Pederasty committed with the application of physical force, or threats, or with respect to a
minor, or with taking advantage of the dependent position of the victim,
Shall be punished by deprivation of freedom for a term of up to eight years.
(Butler, WE, Translator & Editor, Basic Documents on the Soviet Legal System, Oceana
Publications, 1983, Page 344)
The choice of the term ‘pederasty’ is curious, as it derives from the origin Greek ‘paederasty’,
which literally translates as ‘love of boys’, and refers to the ancient Greek cultural practice of
sexual relations between mature men and adolescent males. However, it also carries the implied
connotation that the practice of ‘homosexuality’, is in fact the practice of ‘child abuse’, with the
former being clearly conflated with the latter, despite the fact that the actual anti-homosexual
legislation in question, defines ‘pederasty’ as the performance of a sexual act between one man
and another. Pederasty is generally defined as the committing of a homosexual act by an older
man, upon a much younger male. The idea that two mature adults of a consenting age could
enter a loving relationship is not considered possible in the Soviet legal code – much of which
stemmed from the time period of 1917 onwards, and encapsulates many attitudes common to
that time. Most bourgeois legal systems at that time did not protect their ordinary citizens to the
extent that the Soviet legal code did, and none acknowledged the existence (or validity) of
loving, homosexual relationships. Where homosexuality was mentioned by the bourgeois legal
codes, it was usually viewed as an expression of sexual deviancy, and it is interesting to note
that the legal system of the Soviet Union took this line, when in virtually all other areas, the
USSR thoroughly departed away from established bourgeois thinking. For instance, its
strictures protected the individual as well as the family, giving ample consideration to the rights
20
of women and young children. In fact the emancipation of women from patriarchal control was
a major feature of Soviet Law, and yet this did not apparently extend to the consideration of the
emancipation of homosexual women from the equally ‘patriarchal’ bias of male legal
domination. Instead, homosexuality was outlawed with a legal attack aimed solely at men –
turning legitimate homosexual interaction between consenting adults into a dark act of violent
and morally debased criminality.
The Soviet legislation against homosexuality must be viewed as a dialectical error. This
judgement is correct even if a stringent and strictly ‘biological’ view is taken toward the
physical mechanics of reproduction of the species, in relation to the practice of homosexuality.
This stance suggests that as living off-spring are produced through the successful sexual
interaction of a male and female – then logic dictates that this must be the ‘normal’ or
‘preferred’ mode of sexual orientation, and that any other form of sexual expression is by
definition a diversion away from ‘normality’. However, all is not what it seems. Within the
Judeo-Christian bible, it states that Adam and Eve (and others) procreated to give rise to the
human race. This is imagined nonsense, of course, but it does explain the Christian Church’s
bigotry when it comes to the matter of homosexuality – despite the fact that many modern-day
Christian priests have been revealed to be both child-molesters and rapists, etc. The bourgeois
system – even in its secular mode – carries on much of the religious bigotry bequeathed to it by
the medieval church. This inverted attitude manifests through moral determinism which
inflexibly judges things along theological lines as either ‘good’ (heterosexuality), or ‘bad’
(homosexuality). This has nothing to do with modern science, but is merely an outdated mode
of religious thinking projected over empirical findings. Males and females do interact sexually
to produce off-spring – this is not a moral fact but rather an impartial scientific observation –
but it is not the only way that life is produced in the modern age. Off-spring can be produced
through the skilful combining of a male sperm and a female egg under laboratory conditions.
This shows the morally ‘blind’ nature of biological evolution and function. It does not matter
where the healthy sperm or egg has originated, just as the gender or sexual orientation of the
medical technicians involved is of no importance whatsoever. What is of paramount importance
is that the mechanisms of biological processes are properly understood and correctly
manipulated. Therefore the idea that procreation only happens during heterosexual activity is no
longer correct or valid. Furthermore, although heterosexual activity does produce off-springs, it
biological mechanism has been shown through scientific scrutiny, to be highly inefficient.
However, despite this innate inefficiency, the fact that consenting sexual activity of any kind is
inherently ‘pleasurable’ ensures that human beings participate in it throughout their lives. What
the Soviet legal code should have considered is that the Bourgeois Judeo-Christian bias toward
heterosexual relationships was dialectically redundant in the Socialist State, and it should have
been radically abandoned along with capitalism and ownership of private property.  The Soviet
legal code should have adopted a priori an anti-bourgeois dialectical position that swept away
religiously inspired, feudalistic and bourgeois inverted views of the world with regards to the
21
theory and practice of homosexuality. A Socialist State – by definition – is a dialectical
progression ‘beyond’ the bourgeois system and its religious tendencies. Anti-homosexual views
are a product of historical religious views that have been superimposed onto secular bourgeois
society – simply through force of habit from one generation to the next – that has nothing to do
with science, but which has been morally assumed to be ‘scientific’ in nature. Nature has
evolved freely and outside of the moral (and religious) constraints of the human imagination. A
Socialist State cannot, and should not preserve any bourgeois or religionists tendencies.
Homosexuality does not only refer to human behaviour, but has been observed in other species.
Homosexuality is a product of ‘blind’ evolution and is ‘natural’ in origination. From an
evolutionary perspective, it exists because it efficiently and positively fulfils a biological
function linked to human emotion and psychology. A Socialist State is not necessarily ‘pro’
homosexual, but neither should it be ‘anti’ homosexual – as these either-or categories are
products of a bourgeois system premised upon the ‘good’ and ‘evil’ dichotomy of the Judeo-
Christian religion. The practice of Socialist dialectics bursts open the constraints of bigoted
bourgeois sentimentalism and inverted thinking, and ushers in a new era of psychological and
physical freedom. A Socialist State serves to ‘progress’ homosexuality and should not oppress
or criminalise it.

THE USSR AND HOMOSEXUALITY PART II (CZARIST

ARTICLE 995)
Original Chinese Language Article By: http://www.aibai.com
(Translated by Adrian Chan-Wyles PhD)
Translator’s Note: As I cannot read Russian (and do not trust Western, bourgeois sources), but
wanted to access Russian-language Soviet historical information, I have instead accessed
Communist Chinese academic articles that extensively cover the history of homosexuality in
Russia, both before and during the Soviet era.  I have translated below about extracts of a very
interesting 2002 Chinese language text entitled ‘俄国同性恋概史’, or ‘An Overview of Russian
Homosexuality’.  Where necessary, I have added one or two clarifying remarks.  Article 995 of
the Czarist Criminal Code did not appear in Russia until as late as 1832 – although the
theoretical ground-work – (I believe) existed in Russia centuries before, due to the hostile view-
points of the Russian Orthodox Church. Article 995 criminalised anal sex between men (but not
gay relationships between men that did not involve anal sex).  Homosexuality between women
was not acknowledged as existing, and so was neither ‘criminalised’ or de-criminalised’ in
either Czarist or Soviet Russia.  Lenin abolished the entirety of the Czarist Code, but did not
‘legalise’ homosexuality, and Stalin did not personally ‘criminalise’ homosexuality (despite the
peculiar wording of Soviet Article 121, which was designed to fight paedophilia rather than
homosexuality).  If anything, the Soviet attitude toward gayness might better be described as
‘ambiguous’ rather than hostile, although it is true that Leon Trotsky, even before his open
22
betrayal of the Soviet Union, expressed decidedly ‘anti-gay’ sentiments.  One point of
contention is that the author of the translated article below states that homosexuality was not
made ‘illegal’ in the 1926 Criminal Code. However, a law against ‘Sodomy’ was introduced in
Russia at this time.  Article 154a of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR, enacted in 1926 stated:
‘Sexual intercourse of a man with a man (sodomy) – deprivation of liberty for a term of three to
five years. Sodomy committed with application of violence or with the use of the dependent
status of the victim, – the deprivation of liberty for a term of five to eight years.’ (Article 154a
would eventually be updated to form Article 121 in 1934). In Communist China, the LGBT
community is slowly developing, and the Chinese language article I have accessed is from
‘Aibai Network’ website. The Aibai Network (爱白网 – ‘Love Unlimited’) was founded in 1999
by a Chinese gay couple as a website providing translated LGBT news, books, and information
from around the world. Aibai is a non-profit organization, based in Beijing, which provides
resources, education, and advocacy for and about the LGBT community in China.  ACW
1.1.2017
The Russian Orthodox Church, wedded as it is to the Old Testament creation myth of Adam and
Eve, has always advocated heterosexuality as the norm for (Christian) humanity.  The
theological underpinnings of this assumption stem from the fact that it is apparently self-evident
that the Christian ‘god’ decreed that the reproductive sexual act must occur between a man and
woman, otherwise off-spring will not be produced.  If this was not the case, (as theology
instructs), god would not have designed the human biological sexual capacity to function
around the genital interaction of a man and a woman. This is a curious mix of mythological
theology, and pragmatic (deterministic) biological observation, that assumes that the only
purpose of the sexual act is that of procreation.  This limited view omits anyother cogent view
of existence, and has no notion that the sexual act serves as an extensive plethora of physical,
psychological and emotional needs for the individual than just ‘procreation’ (an act, that if
successful, has historically served to create more Christians for the congregation).  It has been
this anti-gay attitude that has manifested beyond the pulpit every so often throughout Russian
history, in various guises and in various strengths.  However, when foreigners visited Russia in
the 16th and 17th centuries, they were confused to encounter the apparently easy-going attitude
shown toward same-sex relationships (and the intimacy such interactions involved), and yet
later (during the 18th century), Peter the Great (1672-1725) forbade any homosexual practice
within his armies (a proscription, however, that did not extend into civil society). During the
reign of Czar Nicholas, I, Article 995 was added to the Criminal Law in 1832.  This out-lawed
the practice of male sodomy, with those convicted of this offence threatened with exile to
Siberia for up to five years.  However, this law did not punish amorous relationships between
adult men that did not involve anal sex (homosexuality between adult women was not
considered to ‘legally’ exist). Despite the rather draconian nature of this law, it is historically
evident that it was not pursued with any particular vigour throughout Russian society, with
many upper-class Russian men pursuing semi-open gay life-styles.  Of course, just as everyone
23
in Russia did not necessarily follow or believe in the Russian Orthodox Church (particularly in
North Russia), so it was that there was a certain tolerant attitude amongst some segments of
Russian society toward homosexuality. Even within certain folk religious rituals, there was
often open simulation of homosexual acts.  This observation (from the remote areas of Russia)
prompted the historian Soloviev to write: ‘Neither the East nor the West has ever had a place so
disagreeable with this evil against nature.’ There is even examples of some Russian officials
beings sympathetic to the plight of homosexuals – with even those who were exiled to Siberia
being treated leniently. However, despite this tolerance, Russia was by no means a homosexual
utopia, with many people (like the writer Gogol and composer Tchaikovsky) persecuted for
their gayness.
At the beginning of the 20th century, as the total monarchy of the Czarist regime began to
crumble, it was evident that Russia was far behind Europe in its social and political
development.  This reality saw the legal code come under much scrutiny and alteration, with the
punishment for male sodomy being restricted to 5 years hard-labour, instead of exile to Siberia. 
With the abolition of the absolute Czarist State (under Czar Nicholas II), and the introduction of
a Constitutional Czarism (and a democratically elected Congress) in 1905, many thinkers turned
their minds toward the subject of civil liberties, with the liberal lawyer Vladimir Dmitrievich
Nabokov (1870–1922) suggesting that the Russian government should not interfere in the
private lives of Russian citizens (particularly in the area of sexual orientation and sexual
preference).  His son, Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) wrote the novel ‘Lolita’.  Freedom of
expression promoted cultural development, and the period from 1905 to 1917, often referred to
as the silver age of Soviet literature, was a golden age for homosexuality, with many men living
openly gay life-styles, and many pivotal works of gay literature being written. After the October
Revolution of 1917, the Bolshevik Party came in power. At first, the Communist view of
homosexuality was difficult to define. On the one hand, Marxism strongly criticized
Christianity and advocated the idea of equality for all, women’s liberation and free marriage.
From this humanitarian principle designed to fight all forms of bourgeois oppression,
homosexuals should have been one of the emancipated minority groups. On the other hand, the
Communist Movement advocated the sacrificing personal interests, and any desire for lust,
especially within the area of sexual life, because such selfish activity was seen as diverting
energy and will away from the Revolution.  Another issue was that homosexuality had been
historically perceived as a bourgeois ‘vice or ‘eccentricity’, and the product of corrupt
bourgeois values incompatible to the proletarian Revolutionary spirit. Nevertheless, the
overthrow of the Czarist regime was welcomed by the majority of civilians and intellectuals,
with many referring to its progressive nature as being a ‘modern miracle’.
In 1917, the Soviet Union abolished all the criminal laws of the Czarist era, including Article
995 and its punishment of homosexuality.  This action was viewed as progressive throughout
Western Europe, with such experts as the German Sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935),
(together with the German Communist Party), calling for a similar lifting of all oppressive and
24
regressive laws throughout Europe that criminalised homosexuality.  These events created the
impression that the USSR had deliberately ‘decriminalised’ and then ‘legalised’ homosexuality,
but this view was not entirely correct.  Yes, the USSR had abolished the oppressive Czarist
Legal Code, and in so doing had dissolved Article 995.  However, this act was merely
incidental, as the USSR had abolished ALL Czarist proscriptions against every form of
criminality (which did not automatically equate to murder and rape, etc, being suddenly
declared ‘legal’).  This action was carried-out because the bourgeois, feudalistic law of the
Czarist era was incompatible with the progressive law of the proletariat Revolution (meaning
that an entirely ‘new’ legal system had to be written from scratch, by the workers for the
workers).  At this time (in 1917), the Soviet attitude toward homosexuality can be described as
legally ‘indifferent’, but homosexuality certainly had not been ‘legalised’.  However, after this
time, during the uncertain years of the Russian Civil War (1918-1922), there were a small
number of prosecutions for various homosexual activities.  After the end of the Civil War (with
the defeat of the White Army), Soviet Russia enacted a new Criminal Law in 1922, which was
amended in 1926. The new Criminal Law defined a ‘minor’ as being under 16 years of age,
with 16 years being the ‘age of consent’ for lawful sexual intercourse. This Criminal Code
banned prostitution and pimping, but homosexuality remained undefined as a legal category
(and was not made ‘illegal’). However, as Marxist ideology advocates respect for the natural
sciences, the academic community at that time, generally held that homosexuality was a disease
(or a psychological or physical dysfunction), a type of mental (and physical) illness that could
be medically treated.  These attitudes are reflected in a Soviet academic work published in
1923, by the Ministry of Public Health, entitled ‘Contemporary Youth and Sexuality,’ which
stated that: ‘Scientific research has proven beyond doubt, that homosexuality is not out of
malice, nor is it a crime, but rather a disease … it runs counter to the sexual desires of normal
people.’ Again, in the 1930 edition of the Encyclopaedia of Medicine, homosexuality is defined
as: ‘A desire to disobey nature between members of the same sexual gender.’  Marriage and
psychotherapy were the preferred methods of treatments, but as the USSR was exploring a
limitless proletarian science, there was some theorising (never put into practice), that if the
testes were transplanted from a heterosexual man into a homosexual man, the homosexual
tendencies would naturally fall away.  Despite this ambiguity toward gayness in the USSR,
homosexuals were never targeted for pogroms of eradication as was the case in Nazi Germany
during the 1930’s and 1940’s. However, in 1934, Article 121 was enacted in the USSR which
banned sex between a man and man, but simultaneously defined such activity as ‘paedophilia’
(i.e. ‘pederasty’), or an illegal sexual act between a man and a male child.  This law, despite its
ambiguous wording, appears to have been aimed at stamping-out paedophilia (and the sexual
exploitation of children), and used in that function, rather than to attack the gay community in
the USSR.
Original Chinese Language Source Article:
http://www.aibai.com/infoview.php?id=5750
25
 THE USSR AND HOMOSEXUALITY PART III (RSFSR
ARTICLE 154A)
Research By Adrian Chan-Wyles PhD
Researcher’s Note: It seems logical to conclude that the 1926 Article 154a was a legislation
against male on male rape – despite the peculiar wording of the opening line (an opening line
that would be retained in the later Article 121, which appears to be a legal extension to prevent
paedophilia). What must be considered is the ‘nuance’ of the original Russian language text,
which has probably been lost in English translation, (as in English translation, these
legislations appear ‘homophobic’).  The fact that the Soviet Union was considered enlightened
and tolerant demonstrates that these laws were not applied as a deliberate attack upon
homosexuals – although in the 1930’s, certain homosexual activity became associated with
specific counter-revolutionary activity.  In this regard, homosexuals who strove to bring-down
the USSR were treated as ‘criminals’ – just as their heterosexual colleagues.  Soviet records
demonstrate that Joseph Stalin was not behind the apparently anti-gay legislation, but was
responding to various police reports about contemporary counter-revolutionary activities
(usually within major cities). ACW  5.1.2016

The Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) officially existed as a sovereign

State between October, 1917 and late December, 1922 – before being formally incorporated (as
a Republic) into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).  In 1917, Lenin abolished the
old Czarist Legal Code – including Article 995 which ‘banned’ male homosexuality.  The
decriminalising of homosexuality in Revolutionary Russia was incidental to the over-throw of
the old order, and was not carried-out as a specific act of liberation.  However, for reasons
apparently related to ‘religious sensitivities’, the Czarist Article 995 was legally retained in
the Caucasian and Central Asian Republics, after 1917, before being finally abolished in 1920.
In 1922, homosexuality continued to be decriminalised throughout Revolutionary Russia, but in
April, 1926, the RSFSR enacted Article 154a, which reads as follows:
‘Sexual intercourse of a man with a man (sodomy) – deprivation of liberty for a term of three to
five years. Sodomy committed with application of violence or with the use of the dependent
status of the victim, – the deprivation of liberty for a term of five to eight years.’
This legislation appears to have been interpreted as a protection against male on male rape, and
not an attack upon homosexuality in general.  This stance appears to be vindicated by the fact
that the Soviet Government (in 1926), invited the German Magnus Hirschfeld – the famous gay
emancipator and founder of the World League of Sexual Reform – to witness first-hand the
tolerance toward homosexuality in Revolutionary Russia. As a result, during the 1928
Copenhagen Congress of the Institute for the Science of Sexuality, the League stated that the
26
Soviet Union was a model of tolerance for sexual diversity.  When Hitler came to power,
however, these progressive institutes were attacked and destroyed.
As time progressed, particularly following Trotsky’s betrayal and banishment from the Soviet
Union (in 1929), certain overt modes of (male) homosexuality came to be associated with
counter-revolutionary activity, and a manifestation of bourgeois decadence.  Due to this
heightened sense of internal attack within the USSR, a number of leading Soviets started to
agitate for a law ‘banning’ homosexuality as a means to break-up groups practising ‘pederasty’
and the corruption of (male) youth.  This movement did not begin with Stalin and was not
implemented from above.  Russian language sources record that the Deputy Chairman of the
NKVD – Genrikh Yagoda – in a report to Stalin dated to September, 1933, that 130 people had
been arrested in Moscow for facilitating the ‘…creation of a network of salons, homes, brothels,
associations and other organized groups of practising homosexuals, with the further
transformation of the unions into direct spy cells …  with active homosexuals using elitist
pederast circles directly for counter-revolutionary purposes, decaying politically different
social layers of the youth, particularly young workers, as well as trying to infiltrate the army
and navy.’  Stalin’s written reply does not contain any elements of homophobia – but is matter
of fact about retaining law and order: ‘It is necessary to punish the villains and to introduce
relevant governing legislation to facilitate this action.’  The NKVD continued to make reports
to the Soviet government relating how groups of counter-revolutionary men were using
homosexual practice to undermine Soviet Authority.  The NKVD petitioned the politburo to
back a change in legislation, which was unanimously supported, with the exception of Kalini –
who steadfastly opposed any laws out-lawing homosexuality.  Kalini stated that he was opposed
to the passing of this law, and against any NKVD action against homosexuals initiated outside
of the Soviet Court System.  At this time, the Soviet press deployed a socio-political campaign
against homosexuality, which saw Maxim Gorky on May 23, 1934 (on the front pages of
newspapers ‘Pravda’ and ‘Izvestiya’) in his article ‘Proletarian humanism’, referred to
‘homosexuality’ as a ‘social crime and offense’, stating ‘Destroy homosexuality – Fascism will
disappear.’  This building social and political pressure led to the 1926 Article 154a being
modified into the 1934 Article 121 which stated:
‘Sexual intercourse of a man with a man (sodomy) is punishable by imprisonment for up to five
years.  Sodomy, committed with the use of physical violence, threats, or against a minor, or by
using the dependent position of the victim, shall be punished by imprisonment for a term not
exceeding eight years.’
This was in response to Intelligence reports received in Moscow, which stated that Hitler and
the upper echelons of the Nazi Party – despite their ‘official’ criticism of homosexuality – were
indeed participating in all kinds of depravity in a private capacity, and planning on ‘exporting’
this moral decadence to other lands (as a means to undermine Soviet morality). The fact that
genuine homosexual adults engaged in loving relationships were rounded-up and sent to the
27
Concentration Camps by this very same Nazi regime, suggests that there was a distinction
between the sexual and moral depravity as practised by the leading lights of the Nazi Party –
and the legitimate homosexuality as punished in the Concentration Camps.
Russian Language Source Article:
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Уголовное_преследование_мужеложства_в_РСФСР
Note on the above Reference: Modern (capitalist) Russia has now imported much of the anti-
Soviet Cold War disinformation fabricated by the US (and her allies) between 1945 – 1991. As
a result, many modern Russian authors side with the reactionary forces of capitalism and adopt
this pseudo-history as their own (apparently not realising its ‘racist’ anti-Slavic nature). The
above article is anti-Soviet and is designed to give the impression that the USSR carried-out a
continued pogrom against homosexuals – even though its author continuously states that there
is no evidence to support his claims. Indeed, the only evidence the author can muster is
‘Western’ Cold War authors whose work – as pieces of official fiction – contain no Russian
language sources. However, I have quoted this piece where I have been able to verify the facts
within Russian language sources. It remains informative on two counts, 1) as a narrative
history of homosexuality (and its persecution) in Russia from early times to present, and 2) as a
study of modern (Russian) anti-Soviet literature.  I have found no objective, verifiable evidence
of a deliberate persecution of homosexuals in the USSR. ACW 29.10.2018

THE USSR AND HOMOSEXUALITY (PART IV) DR TS

ATAROV AND OTHERS
‘Harmonious behaviour is achieved when the interests of freedom and the personal desires of
the person coincide with, or at least do not contradict, the interests of the people around him or
her, as well as the interests of society as a whole.’
Dr TS Atarov – Problems of Sexual Education (1959) USSR
In 1961, the BBC correspondent and Russian-born British journalist – Alexander Werth (1901-
1969), published his book entitled ‘Russia Under Khrushchev’. This was a culmination of
interviews, research and experiences that Alexander Werth had during his 1959 visit to the
USSR. Due to his ability to read, write and speak Russian, he had been one of the few ‘foreign’
journalists allowed to ’embed’ with the Soviet Red Army for virtually the entirety of the Great
patriotic War (1941-1945), and this visit to Russia was his first in 15 years. Russia Under
Khrushchev covers all the main facets of Soviet life in its 28 chapters, and gives a very
balanced view of life in the Soviet Union at that time. However, in this article I will be focusing
upon Chapter 15 – entitled ‘Soviet Man – Private Life and Sex’.  Alexander Werth points-out
that by 1959, the USSR remained a morally conservative nation which followed the thinking of
Lenin that required a Socialist Society to be both disciplined and controlled in all areas of

28
endeavour. In this regard, the private life of a Soviet Citizen, particularly with regard to sexual
attitudes and sexual expression, must not be allowed to fall into bourgeois modes of decadent
expression. This type of control was to be generated through education (and not coercion), and
be demonstrated as Revolutionarily superior to those oppressive sexual modes routinely
expressed within the capitalist world. This attitude hinged upon the emancipation of women
from patriarchy, and so did not include men as the victim, but rather as the historical villain
(particularly within feudalistic and capitalist societies). Soviet morality, therefore, was an
ideological counter-balance to potentially out of control and aberrant male sexual behaviour. in
1917, Soviet women were freed from the kitchen and the bedroom, and were allowed to take
their rightful place in the workforce as equally contributing citizens of a developing Socialist
Society. From that moment onward, the bodies of women were nolonger subject to the tyranny
or desires of patriarchy, and the minds of women were educated to a very high degree.

In the US during the post-WWII era, the Kinsey Reports of 1948 and 1953 sought to
scientifically observe, record and understand sexual behaviour in men (1948), and women
(1953). Werth points-out that in the decade or so after WWII, no such similar study had been
carried-out in the USSR, until Dr TS Atarov published his book entitled ‘Problems of Sexual
Education’. This was published in Moscow in 1959, with a hundred thousand copies being sold
in just a few days! Its preamble was composed of long quotes from Marx and Engels regarding
the historical oppression of women, and the need for Socialist Societies to be premised upon
full and total emancipation. There were ideological attacks upon the decadent values found
within Western societies, and the preference for ‘Socialist’ monogamy and the wholesome
upbringing and care for children. Marriage was preferred over ‘free’ associations, and the Soviet
State was designed around assisting married copies with dependent children. Dr Atarov is open
and frank about the behaviour of some Soviet men who think nothing of betraying their wives
and engaging in illicit sexual relationships – a mode of expression, Dr Atarov explains – that
has been left-over from feudal times. He also criticised the modern habit of routine divorce
(practised equally by Soviet men and women), and lamented the fact that this instability caused
by selfish adults led to regressive tendencies in the development and education of the children
involved. In this regard, Dr Atarov comments:
‘Also, it is wrong when teachers are mysterious about sex, as if it were a subject on which it
was awkward to say anything, on the other hand, it is wrong when any manifestations of the
sexual urge in children and adolescents are automatically treated as a sign of depravity or
immorality…  It is essential to put an end to both “neutrality” in these matters, and to the
prevalent “conspiracy of silence.’
Dr Atarov is of the opinion that parents must work to carefully keep their own sexual behaviour
strictly separate from the obvious attention of their children (with no affection being displayed
in public, or around the children), so that sexual (biological) and emotional urges and
29
behaviours are not triggered too early in the development of the child. Dr Atarov in the USSR,
and Dr Kinsey in the US, both appear to have made the same observations about the
development of Children in as much as children possess a latent sexual ability that only
manifests when triggered by environmental factors, but that this ‘triggering’ should be at a time
that is both ‘morally’ and ‘socially’ acceptable, when the child has developed into a young
adult, etc. Where as Dr Kinsey in the US equates the early triggering of Child sexual behaviour
with sexual abuse (inflicted by offending adults upon young children), Dr Atarov simply
equates it with Soviet children perhaps observing (by mistake), their parents in a passionate
embrace. This suggests that the plague of child sexual abuse prevalent in the capitalist West, did
not exist in the Soviet Union, and was unknown.
Alexander Werth notes on a number of occasions, the complete lack of any mention by Dr
Atarov of ‘homosexuality’ in his book. Indeed, it is treated as if it does not exist at all. This
cannot be blamed on the idea that homosexuality was ‘unknown’ in Russia, as many famous
Russians had been Gay (including Tchaikovsky), including a number of early Bolsheviks who
had been quite open about their sexuality.  Furthermore, authors such as Tolstoy had even
written near pornographic novels dealing with the subject of homosexuality. Despite all of this
liberality, however, Werth states that the Russian people – probably under the influence of the
Russian Orthodox Church – remained reticent about sexuality even after the Revolution.
Alexander Werth offers this footnote as a means explain Dr Atarov’s omission of
homosexuality:
‘In the standard textbook on Psychiatry (Uchebnik Psychiatriyi by OV Kerbikov and others,
Moscow 1958, p. 313) we find the following on this point:
“Why are sexual perversions so unusual in our country? Because phenomena like
homosexuality (which are acquired and not innate) have nothing in our environment to
encourage them… In the capitalist world, with its sadistic films and books, there is a good deal
of  sadism. In prewar Berlin there were three papers for homosexuals, and 120 widely
advertised clubs, besides numerous cafes where people sharing this tendency met. The healthy
atmosphere in which Soviet youth is brought up provides no conditions which would encourage
the development of such perversions; and these are very unusual in our country. Under our law
(Art. 154a of the criminal Code of the RSFSR) homosexuality practises between males are
punishable, and although homosexuality is a morbid phenomenon, persons guilty of such
practises are considered responsible for their actions, and cannot plead irresponsibility.’
Werth is quoting from a Soviet Psychiatry manual dated ‘1958’, giving the impression that the
work was then contemporary and up to date, but this cannot be the case for the following
reason. Article 154a of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR was enacted in 1926 and stated:

30
‘Sexual intercourse of a man with a man (sodomy) – deprivation of liberty for a term of three to
five years. Sodomy committed with application of violence or with the use of the dependent
status of the victim, – the deprivation of liberty for a term of five to eight years.’
However, this law was abandoned in 1934 and replaced with Article 121 which states:
‘Pederasty
Sexual relations of a man with a man (pederasty),
Shall be punished by deprivation of freedom for a term of up to five years.
Pederasty committed with the application of physical force, or threats, or with respect to a
minor, or with taking advantage of the dependent position of the victim,
Shall be punished by deprivation of freedom for a term of up to eight years.’
Article 121 was in force from 1934 until 1991 (and the dissolving of the USSR), and was the
law in 1959 when Werth was visiting the Soviet Union. I have written elsewhere that despite its
peculiar wording, both Article 154a and Article 121 were not specifically ‘anti-Gay’, or
intended to demean or attack homosexuality in and of itself. These laws, in their original
Russian language form, are clearly designed as a safe-guard to prevent child sexual abuse. It
would be interesting to ascertain the ‘original’ publication date of the Psychiatry manual quoted
by Werth, and to explore further, the thinking of its authors, as although Dr Atarov does not
mention homosexuality, it is also true that he does not openly condemn it.

THE USSR AND HOMOSEXUALITY PART V – MAXIM

GORKY: PROLETARIAN HUMANISM (1934)
Original Russian Language Article By: Maxim Gorky (Максим Горький)
(Translated by Adrian Chan-Wyles PhD)
Translator’s Note: As with all things ‘Anti-Soviet’, the reality is quite different to the
assumption. The greatest threat to the safety, continuation and development of humanity was
not Soviet Socialism, but is rather US anti-Intellectualism. This institutionalised ‘stupidity’ has
blighted the US from its earliest days and turned its own Revolution into a confirmation of the
bourgeois status quo. The US remains the only country to have a) invented atomic weapons,
and b) to have used those atomic weapons. Millions of Africans were transported to the US to
be used as ‘slaves’ on the plantations. These men, women and children were assumed to be little
more than animals resembling human-beings and treated in a truly despicable and inhuman
manner. White slave owners would use African men, women and children for their own sexual
gratification – training generations of slaves that ‘rape’ was a natural part of their lives -both
homosexual and heterosexual. African men and boys were routinely raped by their White male

31
owners – which created a climate of ‘normalising’ male rape. Within other capitalist countries,
the upper and middle classes made a similar use of the bodies of their respective working
classes. Of course, women and girls have always suffered from the brutality of male
domination, but working-class men and boys have also suffered non-consensual homosexual
activity. This is not consensual sexual activity, but rather ‘rape’, exactly the kind of
homosexuality that Soviet Law sought to stop and eradicate. The following is a coherent anti-
fascist article written by Maxim Gorky (but not included in his collected works), which is often
said to have been liked by Joseph Stalin (but not mentioned in his collected works). It is used by
anti-Soviet ideologues to create a false paradigm which suggests a continuous pogrom by the
Soviet State against gay people (despite having not been translated into English) – a lie for
which there is no evidence outside of US anti-intellectualism. Hitler came to power in 1933 and
was being courted by the British royal family and the likes of Winston Churchill. In 1934 (the
year of this article’s publishing), Hitler had abolished democracy and had served notice of his
intended pogroms. Bizarre stories were coming out of Germany of sadistic SS Officers using the
bodies of young recruits for their sexual gratification – stories that turned-out to be true. The
Nazi German State perpetuated an upper-class ‘cult of deviant homosexuality’, whilst
simultaneously persecuting ordinary people engaged in consensual and loving homosexual
relationships. It is this ‘deviant’ homosexuality that the Soviet States always opposed, and
which Maxim Gorky is proudly discussing in this article. The anti-Soviet ideologues appear to
be deliberately confusing these two clear categories, and through their deception, are laying
the foundations for the ‘toleration’ of aberrant sexual abuse. ACW 29.10.2018
‘The world is ill’ – it is not only the Bolsheviks that assert this, it is also affirmed by the
lyrically-oriented humanitarians, who finally understand that the ‘philanthropy’, ‘mercy’,
‘generosity’ (and other sentiments) that bipedal predators have used to try and camouflage and
hide their true wolfish ‘nature’ – these feelings are inapplicable to reality – as such sentiments
are difficult to turn into a product, they do not find consumers and adversely affect the growth
of commercial and industrial profits.
‘The world has gone wild’ – people who have chosen to defend and justify the irresponsible,
inhuman power of capital throughout the world over the working people, are defending the
equally senseless and limitless exploitation by the masters of energy – and in doing so, they
speak louder and louder.
The history of the ‘disease’ of capitalism begins almost immediately after the bourgeoisie
wrested power from the weakened hands of the feudal lords. We can assume that the first to
note this disease and cried desperately about it was Friedrich Nietzsche, a contemporary of Karl
Marx. There are no accidents, all phenomena of life are justified, and it is not by chance that in
those years when Marx scientifically and irrefutably substantiated the inevitability of the death
of capitalism, the inevitability of the power of the proletariat, Nietzsche, with the fury of a sick
and intimidated fanatic, preached the legitimacy and boundlessness power of the ‘blond beast’.
32
Before Nietzsche denied the bourgeois state, religion and morality whilst arguing for the
singular right to unlimited egoism, there was Max Stirner, who through his denial and anarchist
lies, in essence denied ‘humanism’, but it was this very ‘Humanism’ that the bourgeoisie began
to develop in the Middle Ages, and which marked the beginning of its struggle against
feudalism and the church – the ideological leader of the feudal lords. The inconvenience and
inconsistency of this ‘humanism’ in the everyday practice of the bourgeoisie was realised very
early on, as evidenced by the Church reforms of Luther, Calvin and others. In essence, this
reform was reduced to the fact that the “humanitarian” gospel was replaced by the Bible, which
not only considers it completely natural, but even praises the enmity of the tribes, the
extermination of people, robbery, deception and all that, without which Bourgeois States cannot
exist. Until Luther, the Church taught the labourers – the true builders of culture – to suffer and
endure for the sake of Christ, Luther taught in the 16th century (during the revolutionary
uprising involving peasants and artisans) live and work in such a way that it is easy for the
kings and barons to enjoy you. Luther said ‘Be patient, give in, give up both your body and
property, do not rebel against the authorities and against the rapist.’
‘Humanism’ in our day, when the bourgeoisie is organizing fascism, itself ejects its own
humanism as a worn-out mask that no longer covers the face of a predatory beast – it expels it
because humanism is now perceived as one of the reasons for splitting and rotting. The facts
mentioned above suggest that every time sensitive people are alarmed by the spectacle of the
abominations in this world, they preach to humanity through a naïve desire to soften these
abominations or cover them with eloquence – these are the masters of life, or shopkeepers- who
allow this sermon only as an attempt to reassure people irritated by poverty, lack of rights,
oppression and other inevitable results of the world ‘cultural’ activities preferred by the
shopkeepers. As soon as this irritation of the working masses took on social-revolutionary
forms, the bourgeoisie responded to this ‘(progressive) action with (regressive) reaction’.
Our liberal bourgeoisie willingly submitted to the law, publicly stating after the events of 1905-
1906 in the penitential collection Milestones: “We should be grateful to the authorities for
protecting us from the people’s rage with bayonets.” The power was then in the hands of
Minister Stolypin, who, acting dictatorially, hanged over 5,000 workers and peasants.
Nowadays, the historically and scientifically grounded, and truly universal, proletarian
humanism of Marx-Lenin-Stalin – humanism, which the purpose is to completely liberate the
working people of all races and nations from the iron clutches of capital – has threatenedly
stood-up infront of the authorities. This truly philanthropic teaching irrefutably proved that the
iron-claws of capital are created by the workers and that it is the proletarian who builds for the
capitalist a ‘beautiful life’, while remaining powerless beggars.
This revolutionary humanism gives the proletariat the historically based right to rage a
merciless struggle against capitalism, the right to destroy and eradicate all the vilest foundations
of the bourgeois world. For the first time in the history of mankind, genuine philanthropy is
33
organized as a creative force, it sets as its goal the emancipation of hundreds of millions of
working people from under the inhuman and senseless power of an insignificant minority, it
indicates to hundreds of millions of people of physical labor that this work created all the values
of culture and that, relying on them, the proletariat should create a new universal culture of
Socialism, which will firmly establish in the world fraternity and equality amongst the working
people.
This humanism of the proletariat is not a fantasy, not a theory, but a combative, courageous and
heroic practice of the proletariat of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics, a practice that has
already proved that in the former bourgeois, peasant, ‘barbaric’ and multi-tribal Russia,
fraternity and equality of the tribes has been truly realized through the process of turning a huge
amount of physical force into intellectual energy, and is indeed and incontestably developing
further.
Why are the capitalists of all countries against the growth of the Revolutionary legal
consciousness of the working class?
Straining until the last efforts to preserve their power over a billion working people, defending
their freedom for the meaningless exploitation of labour, the capitalists have organized fascism.
Fascism is the mobilization and organization (by the forces of capital) of physically and morally
unhealthy detachments of an exhausted bourgeois society, the mobilization of young
descendants of alcoholics and syphilitics, the mobilization of hysterical children affected by the
impressions of the war of 1914-18, the children of the petty bourgeoisie, the ‘avengers’ for
defeat and victory, a victory which proved to the bourgeoisie no less destructive than defeat.
The psyche of these adolescents is characterized by facts of this kind: in Germany, in the first
days of this May in the city of Essen, Heins, Hristen, a teenager of 14 years old, was killed his
friend, Fritz Valkenhorst, a boy of 13 years. The murderer calmly said that he had dug a grave
for his friend beforehand, threw him in there alive and kept his face pressed into the dirt until
Valkenhorst was out of breath. This murder was motivated by the fact that he very much wanted
to master drumming technique demanded by Hitler, a skill which very much belonged to
Valkengorst.
Those who have seen fascist parades have seen that these are parades of rickety, scrofulous,
consumptive youth who want to live with all the thirst of sick people, who can accept
everything that gives them the freedom to reveal the purulent boiling of their poisoned blood.
Thousands of gray, skinny people are considered healthy, whilst full-blooded people are
noticeable in their absence, because they are few. These, of course, are the faces of the class-
conscious enemies of the proletariat or adventurers from the petty bourgeoisie, yesterday’s
Social Democrats, small shopkeepers who want to be big and whose voices the leaders of
German fascism buy by giving the shopkeepers a little fuel and potatoes for nothing, that is,
earned by (and stolen from) the workers and peasants. The head waiter would like to have his
own small restaurant, the petty thieves would like to embark upon the theft legalized by the
34
power of the big thieves — these are the ‘cadres’ of fascism. The fascist parade is a parade of
the strengths and weaknesses of capital.
Let us not close our eyes: among the fascists there are quite a few workers from among those
who do not yet understand the decisive force of the Revolutionary proletariat. Let us not hide
from ourselves that capitalism, the parasite of the world, is still quite powerful, because the
workers and peasants, with poor weapons and a little bread in their hands, continue to feed it
with their flesh and blood. This is the saddest and shameful phenomenon of turbulent
modernity. Shockingly, this submissive feeding of the enemy, brought up in the working class
by its social democratic leaders, whose names are now and forever surrounded by a yellow, bold
radiance of shame. Amazing is the patience of unemployed, hungry people in the face of such
facts as, for example, the destruction of food products in order to keep their market price at a
certain height, while unemployment rises, wages go down and the purchasing power of even the
petty bourgeoisie falls.
It would seem that the human dignity of the English proletariat should be deeply and actively
angered by the facts of cynical ridicule at their unemployed brothers – facts like the following:
In the English County of Surrey, the world’s first confectionery for dogs opened. Any dog can
get a cake in this pastry shop, and homeless and hungry dogs are provided with food and
overnight. This confectionery was opened at the expense of Mr. James Patterson, who died a
few weeks ago at Brockhorst.
Shameless, cynical antics of this type are becoming more frequent in England, the state of the
‘aristocratic race’. It is quite possible that under these antics that Patterson’s sense of the
inevitability of his death is hidden and these antics mark Patterson’s aristocratic desire, going
out of life, to be vindictively spoiled perhaps more.
Arming adolescents and young men, not just with revolvers, but also outdated ideas of
nationalism and racism, raising social cynicism and sadistic passion for murder and destruction
among young people, capitalists organize from this youth not only police assistants in their
struggle against the Revolutionary proletariat, but treat it as poison, which will be poured into
the blood of the army of workers and peasants, armed with modern mechanical technology of
human extermination. The capitalists well remember that the workers and peasants, disciplined
by the atrocious barracks, showed in 1918-1920 that their senseless, suicidal automatic service
to the class enemy has its limit and that behind this limit are bayonets and guns – after millions
of workers and peasants exterminate, disfigure each other, cease to serve the interests of capital.
Of course, ‘better late than never’, but in this case one should learn from the class enemy: the
capitalist destroys the worker before the worker legally has time to raise his honest hand against
him.
Not tens, but hundreds of facts speak about the destructive, corrupting influence of fascism on
the youth of Europe. To enumerate the facts is disgusting but necessary, whilst the memory
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refuses to be loaded with the dirt which the bourgeoisie is increasingly (diligently) and
abundantly producing. I will point out, however, that in a country where the proletariat manages
courageously and successfully (i.e. the USSR), a homosexuality that corrupts young people is
recognized as socially criminal and punishable, and in a ‘cultural’ country of great philosophers,
scientists, musicians, (i.e. Nazi Germany) it manifests freely and with impunity. A sarcastic
saying has already taken shape: ‘Destroy homosexuals – fascism will disappear.’ It should be
pointed out that the Semites, people of the race, which could – if necessary – boast of its purity,
people who gave humanity so many really great masters of culture – and the greatest of them,
the true Messiah of the proletariat Karl Marx – are expelled by the fascist bourgeoisie of
Germany, and the fascists of England — where many Semites happened to be ‘at the helm of
power’, and many were included in the country’s aristocracy — the reason the fascists of
England have also began to preach shameful anti-Semitism.
At the same time, in a country where power belongs to the working class, an independent
Jewish republic is organized — the Jewish Autonomous Region.
National capitalist groups are hastily preparing for a new world war, in a new way they want to
redistribute the world for a wider and more convenient exploitation of the labour of workers and
peasants. Small countries are once again in danger of being caught in the arms of the ‘greats’,
they are again being asked to take away the right to freely develop their cultures.
In the masses of the proletariat of a multilingual, multi-tribal proletariat, imperialism and
fascism sow the evil seeds of national enmity, racial neglect and contempt that can grow into
racial hatred and hamper the development in the world of the working people of the
consciousness of the unity of its class interests, saving consciousness, which alone can liberate
workers and peasants across the whole world from the position of defenseless, powerless slaves
to distraught shopkeepers. Their national commercial and industrial enmity can easily escalate –
and already develops – into the preaching of racial hostility and racial wars. Today they are
preaching – and they are already practicing anti-Semitism as a basic practice — tomorrow they
will return to the preaching of anti-Slavism, recalling the shameful opinions about the Slavs of
Mommsen, Treychka and others, and forgetting how many talented people gave the German
culture Poles, Pomeranians, and Czechs. Since all breeders and shopkeepers in Europe produce
the same goods and trade them, it is quite natural that the hostilities and wars of the German
race against the Romanesque will occur, as well as against the Anglo-Saxon. Of course, there
are alliances, but if you need to sell, then what prevents a betrayal? For example: there is a
union in England with Japan, but the Japanese in London sell silk stockings for 3 pence, – that
is for two pairs – this is, of course, a trifle, but the Japanese “dumping” is a sufficient reason for
the emergence of hostility and hatred of the yellow race. Impunity for the actions of the
Japanese imperialists in Manchuria – China is very tempting for the imperialists of Europe.
Racial theory is the last ‘ideological’ reserve of dying capitalism, but its rotten breathing can
poison even sensible people, for people are generally corrupted by the long spectacle of
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unpunished enslavement by heavily armed whites of Europe against unarmed Hindus, Chinese,
and Negroes.
Only the revolutionary proletariat, with its united front, can resist poisoning by the temptation
of the vile and unpunished plunder of its class brothers.
This proletariat, brought up by the ideology of Marx-Lenin, really and wisely carried out by its
leader Stalin, this proletariat proved to the world that in its motley-tribal country of ethnicities
and races are absolutely equal in rights to life, to work, to develop their cultures. To the
illiterate, who did not have writing, to half-savvy people, the Russian worker widely opened the
way to knowledge. In the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, there is not a single numerically
insignificant tribe that does not prove its thirst for culture and its ability to perceive it …
The speed of cultural growth of the population of the Union of Soviets is recognized by honest
people of all countries. It would seem that honest people, recognizing this fact, should draw
from it an appropriate, very simple, moral and hygienic conclusion: it is both subjective and
objective much more useful, much more honest to live in a healthy environment than in an
environment mortally infected with social illnesses and condemned to doom. Having
recognized the proletariat as capable of social creativity, it is much more useful to promote in
every way the development in it of its thirst for knowledge, its talents and consciousness in the
mass of the proletariat of its historical purpose, which it has already begun to carry out in the
country where 170 million live. It would seem that the self-esteem of the masters of culture, the
‘humanists’, should be deeply outraged by the facts of the denial of culture by shopkeepers, by
their campaign against the growth of any technology other than wearable or designed to
exterminate people. It is not noticeable that the masters of bourgeois culture were outraged by
the burning of books, disliked by fascism, the preaching of misanthropy, concluded in the
meanings of national and racial theories, a preparation for a fierce new war – to the senseless
extermination of millions of the healthiest people, to the new extermination with age-old
cultural values, the destruction of cities, the destruction of the results of the hard work of the
masses, who created factories and plants, processed fields, built bridges, and roads. The
madness of predators cannot be cured by eloquence, tigers and hyenas do not eat cake.
It is not always noticeable that humanity in general possesses the characteristics of “humanists”,
it is not obvious that they would feel the greatest, heroic tragedy of the era and understand who
its heroes are. The time is approaching when the Revolutionary proletariat will come, like an
elephant, on a crazed, fussy anthill of shopkeepers — it will come and crush it. It’s unavoidable.
Mankind cannot perish because a small minority of it is creatively becoming decrepit and
decomposed due to the fear of life and the painful, incurable thirst for profit. The death of this
minority is an act of the greatest justice, and this story commands the proletariat to commit it.
Behind this great act will begin the world-wide, amicable and fraternal work of the peoples of
the world, the work of free, beautiful creativity of a new life.

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Is this a belief? The time has passed for the proletariat when faith and knowledge were at
enmity, as lies and truth. Where the proletariat dominates, where everything is created by its
mighty hand, there is no place for spreading knowledge with faith, there belief is the result of
man’s knowing the power of his mind, and this belief, creating heroes, does not create and will
not create gods.
NOTES: Proletariat Humanism
First published simultaneously in the newspapers Pravda, 1934, number 140 of May 23, and
Izvestia of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR and the All-Russian Central
Executive Committee, 1934, number 119 of May 23.
In a letter dated June 10, 1934 to one of his correspondents who asked to write an article for a
French magazine, M. Gorky wrote: “I recommend the article“ Humanism of the Proletariat
”published in Pravda about a month ago. This article was very much approved by Comrade
Stalin” (Archive of AM Gorky).
The article was not included in the authorized collections.

On homosexuality in the USSR
BY ALFONSO CASAL on MAY 8, 2023

By Alfonso Casal, National Chair of the American Party of Labor.

The fact that homosexuality was criminally sanctioned under Soviet law is something that is often
thrown in the face of communists in general, and used to “discredit” Comrade Stalin in particular.
Indeed, “Stalin hated gays” is something I’ve seen posted online numerous times by Trots and
anarchists. I doubt Stalin ever wrote or spoke a single public word on the matter. In any event, such
an accusation is by its very nature decontextualized and misleading. What needs to be stated is that
Soviet legal and medical opinion on this question was no different than what was generally
accepted in the world at large, namely, that homosexuality was a psycho-sexual disorder, a form of
mental illness. Additionally, there were arguments made that attempted to tie homosexuality to
fascism – especially considering that many of Hitler’s Brownshirts were homosexual.
Bad as this may seem, it needs to be seen in historical context. Science advances, knowledge grows
and deepens. The science of human sexuality was in its infancy for all of Stalin’s life. Stalin died in
1953. He died before the ‘sexual revolution,’ and he never heard of Alfred Kinsey, Masters and
Johnson, or the “Hite Report.” In fact, it was only in 1973 that the American Psychological
Association itself ceased to classify homosexuality as a mental disorder. To expect that Stalin, and
Soviet Russia in the 1930s, would foresee the advances in medical and psychological science that
would occur forty years in the future is either naïve or malicious. It should be noted, by
comparison, that the GDR had a much more open and positive policy with respect to
homosexuality. This can be explained by the fact that studies in sexology were more advanced in
Germany than in any place else in the world. But this too has to be seen in historical context, as part
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not only of the deepening of scientific knowledge, but the spread of such knowledge throughout
society in general. By 1987, GDR law stated that “homosexuality, just like heterosexuality,
represents a variant of sexual behavior. Homosexual people do therefore not stand outside socialist
society, and the civil rights are warranted to them exactly as to all other citizens.”
So, here is the real answer. As Marxist-Leninists, we are scientists. As scientists we seek to advance
human knowledge and understanding. And, as our knowledge and understanding grows, so does
our ideology. Today, there is not a single communist worthy of the name who does not
wholeheartedly support LGBTQIA+ rights.
Moreover, I think it should also be pointed out that, despite the view that homosexuality was
considered a mental disorder, the actual law in question – Article 121 of the Soviet Criminal Code
– was pretty much only enforced in cases of pedophilia, with some 800–1000 prosecutions
annually.
Actually, Communists were MORE progressive on the question of gay rights than was the
bourgeois society of the time. Once again, the important thing here is the level of scientific
understanding and the extent to which that knowledge has been spread throughout society at large.
Germany had the longest history of psychological and medical research on human sexuality. There
was an Institute of Sexology as early as the 1920s. The Nazis closed it down when they came to
power. Leading medical researchers at the Institute of Sexology were affiliated with the KPD.
That’s right, the KPD, the “STALINIST” German Communist Party. Many German Communists
were not only supportive of gay rights, but were pioneers of sexual liberation. In fact, a number of
them sang the health praises of nudism. This includes Markus Wolf’s father and family. Markus
Wolf would later become the head of foreign intelligence for the GDR; the man the CIA would call
“the man without a face” because they didn’t possess a photograph of him.
Furthermore, “Lenin decriminalized homosexuality” is a much beloved Trotskyite trope that they
love to throw at Marxist-Leninists. The facts are a little different, as presented by Professor Igor
Kon in “Soviet Homophobia”:
“The initiative for revocation of antihomosexual legislation, following the Revolution of February
1917, had come, not from the Bolsheviks but from the Cadets (Constitutional democrats) and the
anarchists (Karlinsky, 1989). Nevertheless, once the old criminal code had been repealed after the
October Revolution, the antihomosexual article also ceased to be valid. The Russian Federation
criminal codes for 1922 and 1926 did not mention homosexuality, although the corresponding laws
remained in force in places where homosexuality was most prevalent – in the Islamic republics of
Azerbaijan, Turkmenia, and Uzbekistan, as well as in Christian Georgia.
“Soviet medical and legal experts were very proud of the progressive nature of their legislation. ln
1930, the medical expert Sereisky wrote in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia: ‘Soviet legislation does
not recognize so-called crimes against morality. Our laws proceed from the principle of protection
of society and therefore countenance punishment only in those instances when juveniles and minors
are the objects of homosexual interest.’
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“The most important collection of documents and texts on Soviet homosexuality is Kozlovsky
(1986).
“As Engelstein (1995) justly mentions, the formal decriminalization of sodomy did not mean that
such conduct was invulnerable to prosecution. The absence of formal statutes against anal
intercourse or lesbianism did not stop the prosecution of homosexual behavior as a form of
disorderly conduct. After the 1922 Penal Code was published there were in that same year at least
two known trials for homosexual practices. The eminent psychiatrist Vladimir Bekhterev testified
that “public demonstration of such impulses … is socially harmful and cannot be permitted”
(Engelstein, 1995, p. 167). The official stance of Soviet medicine and law in the 1920s, as reflected
by Sereisky’s encyclopedia article, was that homosexuality was a disease that was difficult, perhaps
even impossible, to cure. So “while recognizing the incorrectness of homosexual development …
our society combines prophylactic and other therapeutic measures with all the necessary
conditions for making the conflicts that afflict homosexuals as painless as possible and for
resolving their typical estrangement from society within the collective” (Sereisky, 1930, p. 593).”
“The precise number of persons prosecuted under Article 121 is unknown (the first official
information was released only in 1988), but it is believed to be about 1000 a year. Since the late
1980s, according to official data, the number of men convicted under Article 121 has been steadily
decreasing. In 1987, 831 men were sentenced (this figure refers to the entire Soviet Union); in
1989, 539; in 1990, 497; in 1991, 462; and for the first 6 months of 1992, 227, among whom all
but 10 were sentenced under Article 121.2 (figures are for Russia only) (Gessen, 1994). According
to Russian lawyers, most convictions have indeed been under Article 121.2, 80 percent of cases
being related to the involvement of minors up to 18 years of age (Ignatov, 1974). In an analysis of
130 convictions under Article 121 between 1985 and 1992, it was found that 74 percent of the
accused were convicted under 121.2, of whom 20 percent were for rape using physical force, 8
percent for using threats, 52 percent for having sexual contact with minors and 2 and 18 percent,
respectively, for exploiting the victims dependent or vulnerable status (Dyachenko, 1995).”
So, in conclusion: Lenin DID NOT specifically decriminalize homosexual activity. The Tsarist
criminal code was declared null and void, the anti-homosexual statutes along with all the others.
The 1922 and 1926 Soviet criminal codes did not mention homosexuality, but anti-homosexual
laws remained on the books in the Islamic republics and Georgia. When homosexuality does re-
enter the Soviet criminal code, prosecutions are relatively rare (1,000 per year out of a population
of 200 million) and those that were prosecuted targeted instances of rape, child abuse, and abuse of
dependent and vulnerable persons.
Those are the FACTS. Was the law perfect? Of course not! Was it a good law or something to be
admired or replicated? No. Was the law abused and innocent people sanctioned? Likely, as in all
legal systems. But, the intent and extent of the law was far different from what anti-Stalin and “left
anti-communist” propaganda would have one believe.

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