Abbreviations

AIDS	acquired immunodeficiency syndrome
GARF	Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (State Archive of the Russian Federation)
GDR	German Democratic Republic
GULAG	Glavnoe upravlenie lagerei (Main Camp Administration)
ITK	ispravitel’no-trudovaya koloniya (corrective labour camp)
ITU	ispravitel’no-trudovoe uchrezhdenie (corrective labour institution)
KGB	Komitet gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti (Committee for State Security)
MVD	Ministerstvo vnutrennikh del (Ministry of Internal Affairs)
RSFSR	Rossiiskaya Sovetskaya Federativnaya Sotsialisticheskaya Respublika (Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic)
SSR	Soviet Socialist Republic
STI	sexually transmitted infection
Archival citations are accompanied by the following abbreviations:
f.	fond (archive)
op.	opis’ (inventory)
l.	list (page)

Introduction

The history of Soviet homosexuality is largely unexplored territory, especially during the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras. We know very little about the Soviet state’s attempts to control and regulate homosexuality during this period, while the historiography on this topic is extremely scant. Igor Kon, the pioneering scholar of Soviet and Russian sexuality, said that between 1934 and 1986 ‘a complete and utter silence on the subject had descended … homosexuality was simply never mentioned’, having acquired the status of an ‘unmentionable vice’ during this period.1 In fact, there was a lot of talk about sex during this time and this book breaks through the seeming silence to uncover what was being said. It examines a range of previously unexplored sources that demonstrate that there were remarkable discussions on the issue among Soviet experts – doctors, jurists and educators – and police from 1956 until the collapse of the USSR. In their discussions, both experts and police defined homosexuality and elaborated on ways of dealing with it in the Soviet context.

The examination of these extraordinary and previously unknown discussions allows us to explore the relevance of Michel Foucault’s complex writing on ‘the history of sexuality’ to Soviet homosexuality and to see whether the Foucauldian power-knowledge paradigm had the same implications for the issue of homosexuality in the USSR as it did in Western countries. According to Foucault, the modernisation of Western societies was strongly linked to the emergence of discourses on sexuality in them. These discourses acted as new means of control over the health and prosperity of the people. Sexuality became the object of analytical and scientific scrutiny, so that sexual abnormalities, which had hitherto been regarded as moral failures and crimes, now became the objects of disciplinary power, regulated by medical knowledge and institutional controls. Medical examination of same-sex-attracted people led to the construction of a new image of the homosexual: a species with its own history, character, psychology and physiology.2 Similar trends appear to have occurred in the Soviet Union: educators, doctors and jurists embraced sexual modernity, by rationalising and modernising controls over homosexuality and abandoning simplistic understandings of it as an infraction and temporary aberration, while framing it in more ‘modern’ terms – a disease, a mental disorder or even just a variant of normal sexuality. These experts moved forward with bold proposals to decriminalise homosexuality and wrest it from police hands, relegating the issue to the sphere of medicine, even admitting that homosexual desire was not an ailment at all. Importantly, it was not only homosexuality that fell within these experts’ purview, but the issue of sex more broadly. Doctors and educators, concerned with post-war demographic crisis, framed sex as a matter of economic and national significance, underscoring the importance of medical discourse and sex education, as well as the provision of sexological medical services to Soviet people. Fulfilling sexual lives, they argued, enhanced the labour productivity of Soviet citizens and were therefore essential for the development of society and the state.

Despite the existing similarities between the Soviet and Western modernisation of sex, this process had been different in the USSR. In fact, it has always been problematic for historians to apply Foucauldian theories to Russian and Soviet cases. Laura Engelstein expressed doubts about the relevance of Foucault’s ideas to the Russian case, arguing that the power-knowledge paradigm never had the chance to thrive in Russia.3 Oleg Kharkhordin expressed similar scepticism, contending that ‘Soviet individualisation hardly happened in a way described by Foucault for the case of Western Europe’ and noting that the practice of private confession was never a central feature of Russian society.4 Kharkhordin’s observation is a useful one for historians attempting to draw parallels between Foucault’s writing and Soviet reality: in Western societies, it was precisely during the course of patients’ confessions to their doctors that their sexuality (and homosexuality) was becoming the object of medical intervention and disciplinary controls. According to Kharkhordin, political suppression of psychoanalysis in the 1930s and, more importantly, a ‘lack of habit among Russians to discover one’s own essence by means of confessing desires’, as well as a ‘wholehearted aversion to wordy outpourings’, made confessions an unlikely feature of Soviet reality.5

Although confession didn’t seem to play a central role in Russia, this book reveals that Soviet same-sex desiring men and women did in fact discuss their sexual lives and desires with their doctors and in a very elaborate form. These patient–doctor interactions were often as striking as their settings – GULAG and prison infirmaries, as well as Soviet clinic consultation rooms. There, doctors listened to their same-sex-attracted patients and actively encouraged them to pronounce and reflect on their desires verbally and in writing. The extent of these practices is yet to be established, because most of the illuminating sources are still classified. In fact, the materials explored in this book may well be the tip of the iceberg, but so far it seems that the Soviet medicalisation of homosexuality was limited in scope, at least in the ‘free’ society, although interactions between doctors and same-sex-desiring inmates were more consistent. Unlike in the West and some Eastern European countries, Soviet sexology, only revived in the mid-1960s, received little support from the state and was too weak to produce powerful discourses to disseminate them across the vast territories of the country. The practitioners of this new discipline who seriously practised the psychotherapy of homosexuality could only be found in a handful of large Soviet cities and so were not widely available to Soviet same-sex-desiring men. The voices of sexologists who argued for the decriminalisation of homosexuality were feeble and unconfident in confronting the moralistic and ideological reasoning of Soviet key decision-makers. I will argue, then, that Soviet leadership remained reluctant to fully embrace sexual modernity, and this reluctance carried conflicting implications for Soviet gay and lesbian people. On the one hand, medical discourses encouraged a re-evaluation of homosexuality as a medical matter, lending support to arguments for decriminalisation. On the other hand, police officers, despite being influenced by medical models, continued to insist that homosexuality was a criminal act which should remain in their purview.

Apart from engaging with Foucauldian theories, this book also explores Soviet experiments on raising a special type of citizen – the New Soviet Person. The creation of such a person was the cornerstone of Soviet plans to build a new society; with the help of this person, the Bolsheviks attempted to uphold their political decisions and promote social stability.6 Scholars, training their gaze on this historical theme, have identified a set of characteristics that this New Soviet Person was expected to possess. John Haynes has argued that such a person was ‘the figurehead of the people’s government of the revolutionary Soviet Union, the populist proselytiser of a qualitative change in human nature’.7 Soviet leaders expected such a person to have ‘a high-principled personality, placing the social, the public interest first, and sharing the aims and principles of the communist ideology’.8 Other characteristic features of the New Soviet Person included ‘youth, fitness and energy, particularly as expressed in the fields of manual labour and physical culture’.9

The moulding of the New Soviet Person, as Catriona Kelly has argued, was contingent on the inculcation of Soviet people with a set of behavioural ideals to conform and measure up to. These ideals were designed in the early years of Soviet power and they were ‘clearly recognisable in later generations, even if they had started to seem controversial, or even absurd, to some members of these’.10 The creation and proliferation of ideal models of ‘new men’ and ‘new women’ were ‘to function as incentives to the creation of a new society’ and ‘to act as a proof that this society already existed’.11 Scholars have pointed out that Soviet leaders used a variety of methods with a view to raising such a person – one such way was making the lives of Soviet people inseparable from the collective. Under Stalin, for instance, Soviet citizens were taught to ‘sacrifice their personal interests for the sake of the collective’, and the official propaganda linked personal fulfilment with a close association with the collective.12 Under Khrushchev, as Oleg Kharkhordin shows, the collectivisation of life was further intensified, and its role in the formation of a consciousness of the New Soviet Person continued to be important.13 Apart from instilling collectivist values and consciousness in Soviet people, the government relied on educational methods. One of these consisted of encouraging people to ‘work on oneself’, that is, to work towards self-transformation and self-perfection. Popular Soviet brochures on ‘working on oneself’ started to appear in the late 1950s and proliferated during the late Soviet era.14 The authors of the brochures offered a variety of methods on how one should work on oneself, and according to Kharkhordin they all included three main stages: ‘self-evaluation’, which included ‘the realisation of certain personal deficiencies’, then ‘self-compulsion or self-stimulation’ and finally ‘self-control and self-command’.15 Building on these insights, this book attempts to discern the ethos of Soviet man in discussions of homosexuality between GULAG officials, sex educators and Soviet sexologists, suggesting that the eradication of homosexuality was also part of the Soviet project of creating a New Soviet Person, albeit one that was discussed mostly behind closed doors.

This book also enhances our understanding of public and private boundaries in the Soviet society of the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras. Earlier scholarly works noted that, from the onset of the Soviet state, its leaders sought to appropriate private realms for public needs. Eric Naiman shows that, during the early Soviet years, Bolshevik leaders sought to subject the personal life of their citizens to societal needs.16 During the Stalin period, as Jeffrey Brooks argues, collectivisation significantly diminished private space; Brooks goes so far as to argue that ‘the press shrank private space still further during these years by enlarging and sacralising public places and structures’.17 Vladimir Shlapentokh asserts that since the mid-1950s the Soviet state had begun to gradually lose its authority over ‘all strata of the population’, and the process of ‘privatisation’ of society had commenced.18 Such ‘privatisation’ manifested itself in the emergence of ‘totally private institutions’ of family and friends, the growth of ‘unofficial public life’ in civil society and the exploitation of Soviet citizens’ positions for personal gains.19

More recent studies of Soviet private and public boundaries have offered a more nuanced examination of this theme. Deborah A. Field argues that, despite the growing aspirations of the Khrushchev government to introduce new types of social control, during this time Soviet people managed to find new ways ‘to evade, to resist, and make use’ of the state’s interference.20 Field also challenges Shlapentokh’s view whereby Soviet public and private were sharply distinct, proposing that there was a fluid relationship between them.21 Further, Lewis H. Siegelbaum contends that Soviet private spheres were ‘neither hermetically sealed nor necessarily in antagonistic relation to public spheres’, as opposed to being viewed as merely ‘the beleaguered antithesis of state power’.22 Drawing on Siegelbaum’s framework, Juliane Fürst examines the networks of like-minded friendship circles among Soviet youth in the 1950s and 1960s, filled ‘with a spirit of political and social reawakening’.23 Although, as Fürst contends, one would be inclined to assign these networks to the private realm, they ‘demonstrated a desire to “be” or “create” a public sphere’.24 This book supports both Shlapentokh’s argument about growing privatisation and more recent scholars’ descriptions of a fluid relationship between public and private in Soviet society after Stalin’s death. In fact, I show that these two positions are mutually inclusive rather than exclusive.

The lives and experiences of Soviet homosexual people is a particularly fitting object for the examination of public and private dynamics: male homosexuality was criminalised, which meant that Soviet same-sex-desiring men had to carve out private spaces in which to pursue their sexual desires. Dan Healey shows that homosexual men established their bonds through the use of ‘private sites’, which included ‘all-male drinking parties (popoiki), workplace fraternisation, mentoring, and comradeship’.25 Healey also argues that these men ‘were helped by a strong and growing popular sense of entitlement to a private life that was less intrusively policed by the state and its agents’.26 It was not only homosexual men who were helped by this growing ‘privatisation’: Soviet legal scholars and sexopathologists made extensive use of this trend, framing homosexuality not as a matter of the state’s concern, but a private matter of a given individual. Indeed, as I show in Chapter 4, Brezhnev-era legal scholars who suggested decriminalising consensual sex between men implicitly appealed to the ‘notion of privacy’; they stated that consensual homosexual relations were not worthy of penalising, since they were located in the private realm, unreachable for the state. In Chapter 5, I examine medical discussions of homosexuality by Soviet doctors in the 1970s, who underscored the importance of privacy for the treatment’s success. Likewise, in this chapter I reflect on the place of such medical practice in public and private boundaries. Certainly, since male homosexuality was officially a crime and medical treatment of homosexuality was not an institutionalised practice, those doctors who administered these treatments had to do so in private.

What do we know about Soviet homosexuality?

It was only in the second half of the twentieth century that sexuality and homosexuality came to be globally accepted as valid topics of historical research. Inspired by the sexual revolution of the 1960s and with the help of Western feminist and gay liberation movements, historians began to conceptualise sex as a historical issue.27 They dispelled the hitherto prevailing notion of sexuality as a mere biological category, contending that it was a socially constructed concept. Since then a large body of literature on the history of homosexuality and homosexual emancipation in the West has been produced.28 Although an impressive number of scholarly works are also emerging on the history of homosexuality in the countries of Eastern Europe, scholarship on the history of Russian and Soviet homosexuality remains modest, and the paucity of sources is one of the chief reasons for the absence of systemic studies of homosexuality in Russia and the USSR.29 Indeed, Russian archives do not allow historians to access personal files more recent than seventy-five years old, and it is in these files that the most illuminating information on the lives of Soviet homosexual people can be found. The access to archival materials on homosexuality can be even more difficult, despite the expired privacy limitations of the requested files.30 On some occasions, as Ira Roldugina explains, Russian archival workers may even deny historians permission to peruse materials whose content they consider to be ‘inappropriate’.31

Another cause of the absence of historical studies on Soviet homosexuality is scholars’ reluctance to seriously engage with the topic. Unfortunately, the field of Russian and Soviet studies is still prone to evade, trivialise and under-theorise homosexuality, so scholars generally fail to adequately examine examples of same-sex desire in the sources they find. It appears that most historians simply view homosexuality as a sexual act which lacks any emotional or intellectual dimension, and therefore, according to their line of reasoning, it does not deserve serious historical thinking.32 Jeffrey S. Hardy, for example, in his study GULAG after Stalin: Redefining Punishment in Khrushchev’s Soviet Union, 1953–1964 (2016) completely ignores the topic (the word ‘homosexuality’ itself was not included in the monograph’s index), despite the ample discussions between GULAG officials and doctors on the subject during the period, as well as their availability in the archives.33 Miriam Dobson’s monograph Khrushchev’s Cold Summer: Gulag Returnees, Crime, and the Fate of Reform after Stalin (2011) also makes no mention of the topic.34 Be it benign neglect or intentional oversight, the avoidance of the issue by historians has implications both for the existing body of knowledge on Russia and for our understanding of the present-day homophobia in the region. When we omit homosexuality from the historical narrative, we risk confining ourselves to a reductive understanding of how the relations of power were ordered in the USSR.35 Undoubtedly, for example, the examination of how GULAG managers and doctors attempted to control homosexuality with disciplinary mechanisms, rather than criminal sanctions, would have significantly amplified the scope of Hardy’s discussion on the redefinition of punishment in the Khrushchev-era GULAG and society. Likewise, an examination of Soviet homosexuality from a historical perspective would broaden our scant understanding of the homophobia rampant in most countries of the former Soviet bloc.

Although modern Russian homophobic sentiment had been brewing since the early 2000s, it intensified after the adoption of a notorious federal law in 2013 banning propaganda of ‘non-traditional sexual relations’.36 As Alexander Kondakov explains, this law rendered ‘the repression of sexualities’ an ‘official policy’.37 In the wake of its adoption, the Russian government unleashed a campaign of hatred towards gay people in Russia, legitimised gay bashing and censored any media that did not cover homosexuality in a negative way.38 This hostility extended to the realm of academia, where research on homosexuality came under attack from Russia’s conservative activists, while academics accused of ‘promoting sodomy’ were even forced to leave their jobs and the country.39 Russian homophobia took a more sinister turn in April 2017, when reports appeared about the brutal torturing and killing of gay people in the Russian region of Chechnya, sanctioned and condoned by the regional leaders.40 Russian homophobia remains a serious issue which needs addressing. But in order to address it, we need, in Dan Healey’s words, ‘historical information about the mechanisms and scale of Soviet homophobic persecution’, since such knowledge is able to ‘provide a much-needed evidence base for arguments in favour of strengthening the human rights of LGBT citizens in Russia’ and to ‘explain the dangers of official homophobic persecution to their fellow citizens’.41

In the Soviet era, the social-scientific study of homosexuality remained largely taboo until the final years of Soviet rule, and research on homosexuality was conducted through the lens of medicine.42 Soviet historians and sociologists almost never examined the issue from a historical or sociological point of view. Igor Kon demonstrates the impossibility of historicising homosexuality under the Soviet regime, recalling how in 1974 he attempted to discuss homosexual relations in an article, ‘The Concept of Friendship in Ancient Greece’, for publication in a historical journal, Vestnik Drevnei Istorii (Ancient History Review). The censors demanded that he avoid using words such as ‘pederasty’, which referred to anal intercourse between two men, or ‘homoerotic’ in the article, and eventually Kon had to opt for a more appropriate euphemism: ‘those specific relationships’.43

Considering such hostile attitudes towards any studies of homosexuality in the Soviet Union, it comes as little surprise that the first ground-breaking historical research on Soviet same-sex desire came from the West. One of the most notable scholars here was Simon Karlinsky, who began to examine the issue in Russian history and literature from the late 1970s. Karlinsky’s primary focus was literary: for example, he explored the depiction of homosexual love in the work of a Russian poet, Mikhail Kuzmin.44 Karlinsky also provided a historical overview of how homosexuality was handled in Russia from the Petrine era to the post-Stalinist decades.45 Some of his findings, however, were subsequently called into question by scholars who approached Russian history via new sources.46

It was only following the demise of the Soviet Union that Russian scholars turned to the topic. In 1995 Igor Kon published The Sexual Revolution in Russia: From the Age of the Czars to Today, which, by his own admission, draws on ‘literary and scientific data’ from various areas of knowledge.47 Kon’s discussion of homosexuality largely concentrates on the criminalisation of sodomy under Stalin and its framing under Khrushchev and Brezhnev. As a scientist and key contributor to Soviet studies of gender and sexuality, he presents an ‘inside story’ on how the Soviet authorities treated homosexuality, relaying curious episodes from his interactions with Soviet doctors, police and censors. Despite the uniqueness of Kon’s work, it contains various contradictory generalisations. He argues, for example, that since the 1930s ‘a complete and utter silence on the subject [homosexuality] had descended’, that ‘homosexuality was simply never mentioned’ and that it ‘had become an “unmentionable vice” in the full sense of the term’ throughout the Soviet period.48 Yet, contradicting his own statement that homosexuality was never mentioned, Kon notes that the first sexopathology books appearing in the USSR in the 1970s labelled homosexuality a ‘sexual perversion’.49

The fall of the ‘iron curtain’ and the opening up of Soviet state archives attracted Western scholars and prompted them to approach the history of Russian and Soviet homosexuality with the newly available sources.50 Unpacking Foucauldian ideas of knowledge and power, Canadian historian Dan Healey examines how they shaped the regulation of homosexuality in tsarist and communist Russia in his pioneering study Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia: The Regulation of Sexual and Gender Dissent (2001).51 Healey has persuasively argued that disciplinary mechanisms employed by tsarist and communist Russia’s experts in relation to homosexuality were significant, despite the constraints of the authoritarian regime imposed on them. The decriminalisation of tsarist sodomy statutes in 1922 by Bolsheviks gave rise to the proliferation of medical discourses on homosexuality, which held a promise of reframing the issue as a matter of medical concern. Yet, after Stalin recriminalised male sodomy in 1934, male same-sex desire acquired a criminal status, and the state imposed ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ on its citizens.

Healey’s more recent monograph Russian Homophobia from Stalin to Sochi (2018) departs from an entirely Foucauldian approach and explores the historical roots of contemporary Russian homophobic sentiment. It discusses the history of the GULAG, underscoring its crucial role in producing homophobia under and after Stalin. The monograph also shifts its focus from regulatory discourses on homosexuality to examine the lived experiences of Soviet same-sex-desiring people in the rural and urban areas in the 1950s, revealing that some of them possessed homosexual self-awareness. Finally, it discusses the Brezhnev era, a time of comfortable economic growth accompanied by the growing availability of housing and general improvements in people’s standards of living – developments that expanded opportunities for Soviet homosexual people to have a relatively comfortable life and enjoy urban gay male cruising in the largest cities.52

In Russian Homophobia Healey argues that in the 1950s, as the dismantlement of the GULAG was under way, its authorities were worried about the possibility of homosexuality spreading into wider society.53 It was one of these anxieties, as I show in Chapter 1, which apparently triggered a host of measures against homosexuals and lesbians in the GULAG from 1956 to 1959. Healey also considers the handling of same-sex love in the late Soviet penitentiary system, arguing that ‘the late Soviet decades appear to have hardened the homophobia in prisoner subcultures, especially among male convicts’.54 This homophobia was most evident in the proliferation of homosexual violence, wherein ‘degraded’ men – passive partners in anal intercourse – were raped by other prisoners and branded with shaming tattoos, which underscored their low status.55 Building on these foundations, I demonstrate in Chapter 5 that throughout the 1970s, Soviet MVD (Ministerstvo vnutrennikh del, Ministry of Internal Affairs) officials were worried about these practices and were eager to resolve the problem of homosexual sex in prisons with the help of a newly established medical science – sexopathology, which emerged in the mid-1960s and included homosexuality in its research agenda. MVD officials commissioned sexopathologists to produce manuals on medical treatment of homosexuality in prisons; they did so on numerous occasions in the 1970s and despite the official status of male homosexuality as a crime.

Although Healey’s monographs present numerous innovations, some of their arguments are problematic. For instance, reflecting on the fate of the Stalin-era sodomy statute, Healey noted that the ‘energetic renewal of “socialist legality”’ under subsequent Soviet leaders did not ‘lead to an examination of the value of the 1934 anti-sodomy statute’.56 More recently, he provides a new perspective on this issue, arguing that the decision to retain the anti-homosexual legislation after Stalin’s death was made by a decree on the struggle with sodomy issued by the officials of the Interior Ministry in 1958. Healey construes this decree as ‘rare evidence that Khrushchev’s reformers deliberately discussed Stalin’s law against male homosexuality, and chose to keep it’.57 I will, however, demonstrate that it was Soviet legal scholars, drafting the new Republic Criminal Codes in 1959, rather than MVD officials, who were responsible for retaining the anti-sodomy statute. These legal scholars did examine the law on sodomy, and some of them even suggested eliminating the article penalising consensual homosexual relations between men. Likewise, commenting on the issues of medicalisation of homosexuality under Khrushchev and Brezhnev, Healey notes that lesbians were the primary objects of medical intervention during these periods, due to the absence of legal penalties for female same-sex relations, while same-sex-desiring men were pursued with the existing sodomy laws.58 Even so, medical treatment of homosexual men did occur in the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras, despite the existing criminal penalties, and such treatments, as I show in Chapters 3 and 5, were no less common than medical treatment of lesbians.

Regrettably, the medicalisation of homosexuality in the USSR, and under Khrushchev and Brezhnev in particular, remains largely unexplored terrain. The unavailability of illuminating sources and stringent confidentiality rules imposed on medical materials dated from the mid-1960s onwards have prevented scholars from engaging with the topic satisfactorily.59 The few existing scholarly discussions of the medicalisation of Soviet homosexuality usually start with a nod to the report The Rights of Lesbians and Gay Men in the Russian Federation: An International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission Report (1994).60 In her report, Masha Gessen observes that during Soviet times ‘punitive psychiatry was employed against homosexuals and lesbians’ and that it was often the relatives of a homosexual person that initiated such treatment.61 Gessen bases her conclusions on a range of interviews with Soviet lesbians which she conducted in Russia in the period from 1991 to 1993. The interviewees revealed that the medical treatment of lesbianism typically occurred thus: a parent or any other guardian learnt that there was a sexual relationship between two young women and initiated hospitalisation of one or both of them in a psychiatric hospital. There, the women would typically be subjected to treatment with psychotropic drugs for about three months, and after discharge from hospital they were registered as psychiatric outpatients and assigned a local psychiatrist for regular monitoring.62

Echoing Gessen’s account and drawing on her own interviews with eight Soviet lesbians, American sociologist Laurie Essig, in her monograph Queer in Russia: A Story of Sex, Self and the Other (1999), argues that apart from being forcibly hospitalised, Soviet lesbians succumbed to medical treatment, ‘secure in the knowledge that only with medical intervention could they go on living’.63 According to Essig, in order to conform to societal norms, Soviet lesbians even consented to undergoing same-sex operations, while homosexual men who wished to avoid prosecution for sodomy did likewise (Igor Kon subsequently criticised these conclusions, questioning the reliability of Essig’s data).64 More recent studies have shifted from the narratives of compulsory hospitalisation, presenting a more complex account of Soviet lesbians’ everyday life during the late Soviet era. Francesca Stella, for example, suggests that forced psychiatric treatment of lesbians was not ‘a universally accepted practice among medical practitioners’ and that some of them, upon learning of their female patients’ homosexuality, could offer the option of ‘heterosexual re-education’, rather than a medicated approach.65 Some doctors, Stella reveals, even ‘ruled out medical treatment as ineffective in changing an individual’s sexuality’.66

If the existing literature, albeit very sketchily, reveals how medical treatment of female homosexuality was conducted in the Soviet Union, this is not the case when it comes to male homosexuality. Indeed, the literature says very little about the issue, especially with reference to the Khrushchev and Brezhnev periods.67 Many questions remain unanswered. Could a medical diagnosis of homosexuality save those accused of sodomy from incarceration? How did Soviet courts distinguish between the disease and the crime? Did the regular police know about the existence of medical treatments for homosexuality? Was it a crime to go to the doctor and confess one’s homosexual desires? Some scholars have argued that it was indeed possible for Soviet gay men to obtain legal immunity with the help of doctors. Sonja Franeta tells of an interviewee who in the 1980s escaped criminal punishment for sodomy due to his ‘diagnosis’ – he shared his problem with a local psychiatrist, who sent him to psychiatric hospital for medical examination. The medical examination revealed that he was indeed a homosexual; from now on this new status rendered him immune to the police.68 In her book My Pink Road to Russia: Tales of Amazons, Peasants, and Queers (2015), Franeta quotes a man who deliberately underwent medical treatment for homosexuality to escape criminal prosecution.69 French historian Arthur Clech confirmed the testimonials of Franeta’s interviews in his article ‘Between the Labor Camp and the Clinic: Tema of the Shared Forms of Late Soviet Homosexual Subjectivities’ (2018), revealing that both women and men were subjected to medical treatment and that in some cases psychiatric treatment could save homosexual men from prosecution.70

Drawing on the existing work on the medical treatment of homosexuality, this monograph explores discussions and practices of Soviet sexopathologists who spearheaded Soviet sexological science. Although male homosexuality remained a crime, they examined it through a ‘scientific’ lens, seeking to provide medical treatment for such individuals. Some sexopathologists sought to claim homosexuality for their profession by arguing for the decriminalisation of sodomy and pointing out that existing criminal sanctions prevented homosexuals from seeking medical help due to fear of prosecution. Some made less explicit attempts to change the status of homosexuality from crime to disease, proposing to establish medical treatment of homosexuality as an official practice. Others theorised on the issue of whether a homosexual could be spared a prison sentence and instead be sent to a psychiatric hospital for treatment of his ‘disease’.

Soviet homosexuality and new sources

The majority of documents and files I draw on have hitherto been unexplored by scholars and therefore it is worth elaborating on their provenance. The sources in question fall into three groups by their location – first, archival material; second, sources that I located in Russian libraries; and third, materials that I acquired through my personal interaction with former Soviet doctors who performed medical treatment on same-sex-desiring people.

The files from the first group of sources come from the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF) and the State Archive of Latvia. Most of these sources are GULAG documents produced between 1956 and 1959, and I examine them in Chapter 1. They include decrees by GULAG directors on the struggle against homosexuality, their internal correspondence and reports on the measures taken to prevent it, reports of GULAG doctors on venereal disease and an unpublished brochure by a GULAG psychiatrist on lesbianism. Another intriguing archival source in this group is a manual on ‘physical education’, produced in 1958 for the officials of juvenile colonies. In this manual, which is considered in Chapter 2, the author gives recommendations on how to prevent ‘sexual perversions’ among adolescents in places of confinement. Other archival materials include the minutes of the RSFSR (Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic) Legislative Commissions which participated in the drafting of a new RSFSR Criminal Code in 1959 – these commissions considered the first part of the law on consensual sodomy, and some of its members proposed eliminating it altogether. This group of sources also encompasses archival materials located in the State Archive of Latvia – a draft of the Latvian Criminal Code, proposed by the Latvian SSR’s law commission in 1960, containing a proposal to criminalise lesbianism and a draft proposal of the Supreme Court of the Latvian SSR to introduce harsher penalties for ‘perverted’ sexual practices such as oral and anal sex in 1977. I obtained these files during my fieldwork in Russia and Latvia in autumn 2016, yet I was unable to find similar files in the state archives of Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania and Estonia, which I also consulted in the course of this research trip.

The second group of sources comes in the main from the Russian State Library and the Russian National Library, specifically, from a reading room containing materials designated ‘for official use only’ (dlya sluzhebnogo pol’zovaniya). In this room I discovered manuals and handbooks for Soviet investigators and cadets of the MVD Higher School on the investigation of sex crimes, which featured debates on the criminal status of homosexuality in the USSR: these sources are considered in Chapter 4. Sources from this group also include brochures, intended for Soviet penal officers, with recommendations on how to combat sexual perversions in prisons, and these are considered in Chapter 5. I have also consulted the Central Scientific Medical Library, where I located monographs on sexopathology with medical discussions on homosexuality, as well as unpublished dissertations on treating lesbianism – these files are considered in Chapter 3.

The third group of sources is represented by materials that I obtained in the course of my communication with Soviet sexologists. Some of these scholars still work in the Department of Sexopathology of the Moscow Institute of Psychiatry, whose establishment dates back to 1965. This institution was the main sexological centre in the USSR where research on sexopathology was conducted and patients with sexual disorders, including homosexuality, were treated. During my fieldwork in Moscow in March 2017, I had an informal communication with the doctors of the department, who kindly shared some of the documents that they stored in their bookcases. These documents included an unpublished dissertation, ‘Materials on the Sex Life of Male Workers of an Industrial City of Central Kazakhstan’ (1968), by Soviet sexopathologist I. A. Popov. This dissertation was the first study to examine sexual behaviour of Soviet people, where the author compared the prevalence of homosexuality in Soviet and Western societies. Another source in this group is a typewritten outline of scientific tasks, put before the doctors of the Department of Sexopathology by the MVD in 1973, requiring sexologists to design methods of medical treatment of homosexuality to be used in Soviet prisons. One more illuminating source here is a report produced in 1973 by the doctors of the department, where they documented their meetings that year with the KGB and MVD officials on the issue of homosexuality, as well as their work on designing new drugs for the treatment of homosexuality.

Another doctor I approached is Yan Goland, a Soviet psychiatrist-sexopathologist, who has been practising the medical treatment of homosexuality in the city of Gorkii since the mid-1960s. After decades of medical practice, Goland accumulated a sizable collection of files and documents, which he kindly allowed me to use. These included his unpublished papers on homosexuality, his correspondence with Moscow sexopathologists, his letter to the Soviet journal Zdorov’e on the subject of homosexuality and many others. Patients under his treatment were required to keep a diary in which they described their lives prior to the start of the treatment and documented its progress. These diaries were meant to be part of the treatment – the documented progress would be discussed with Goland, who would then decide what course of action to take. Once the treatment was over, Goland typed out these handwritten testimonials, anonymising the diarists’ identities and eliminating any other personal details. These former patients’ typewritten testimonials were then shown to other patients, who were expected to be encouraged by them, and in this monograph I use some excerpts from these. I also use an excerpt from Goland’s interview with a former patient conducted in the 1990s and recorded on a videotape. Finally, I rely on an interview with Goland himself, which I conducted with him in April 2017 in Nizhnii Novgorod.

A few words should be said about the limitations of the sources I have described above. The aim of this monograph is to document discussions on homosexuality held between Soviet officials and specialists, rather than identify the authentic voices of Soviet queer people – therefore my analysis is mostly state- and intelligentsia-centred. I also examine the officially published sources, considering the individuality of the views expressed in them and the authoritative regime and censorship constraints within which they existed. I analyse diaries from Goland’s collection with great caution: I am aware that since he promoted his treatment using these diaries, some information, especially on the treatment outcomes, cannot be considered totally trustworthy – some of his patients would certainly report positive results just to meet the doctor’s expectations. However, in my analysis of these diaries, I focus not on technical questions of treatment efficacy, but the patients’ stories of how they first came to sexologists with the ‘problem’ and how they first consulted the doctor.

Each of the five main chapters of this book examines discussions on homosexuality within a specific realm and timeframe. The timeframes chosen are dictated by the available sources. In Chapter 1 I examine how homosexuality was dealt with in the GULAG in the period from 1956 to 1959. Chapter 2 looks at how Soviet educators discussed sex and homosexuality in a series of manuals published under Khrushchev in the period from 1956 to 1964. In Chapter 3 I consider how same-sex desire was explained and constructed within the field of Soviet psychiatry – sexopathology, which emerged in the 1960s. Chapter 4 examines manuals, textbooks and dissertations on sex crimes and on the sodomy law, produced by Soviet experts in crime and law in the period from 1959 until 1975, along with their discussions on the value of the existing sodomy statutes in them. Chapter 5 examines discussions of homosexuality among Soviet sexopathologists and MVD officials in the 1970s as well as their attempts to regulate homosexuality in prisons during this period. A conclusion reflects on the implications of these discussions and provides a brief overview of how Soviet experts and police tackled the issue after Brezhnev and up until the collapse of the Soviet Union.

A note on the Soviet sodomy law

A few words should be said about the existing anti-sodomy law in the USSR. Male homosexual acts became illegal under Stalin in 1934 with the adoption of the anti-sodomy law – Article 154a of the USSR Criminal Code.71 The article consisted of two parts: the first (154a – I) criminalised consensual sodomy (punishable by deprivation of liberty for a term of three to five years), while the second (154a – II) criminalised so-called ‘forcible’ sodomy (with a more severe penalty of five to eight years).72 Female homosexuality was never criminalised.

The few historical accounts of the adoption of this law point out that no announcement was made explaining the rationale for its introduction. The existing sources are too scant to deduce with certainty why the Stalinist leadership brought it in.73 Historians have made some attempts to investigate this question. Dan Healey and Laura Engelstein agree that political reasons were an important factor and link the adoption of the law to the Stalinist leadership’s drive to tighten control over the Soviet people’s intimate lives and to deter political disloyalty, which the Stalinist leadership associated with homosexuality.74 Healey also suggests that anxieties about the declining birth rate were relevant.75 He has also pointed out that the leadership under Stalin deemed it unnecessary to criminalise lesbianism, preferring instead to reinforce the motherhood cult and using it as an important reminder of the purpose of women’s sexuality, and in the later Soviet period resorted to medical controls.76

Notes

1Igor Kon, The Sexual Revolution in Russia: From the Age of the Czars to Today (New York: Free Press, 1995), p. 241.

2Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality. Volume 1: An Introduction (New York: Pantheon, 1978), p. 43.

3Laura Engelstein, ‘Combined Underdevelopment: Discipline and the Law in Imperial and Soviet Russia’, American Historical Review 98, no. 2 (1993): 338–53.

4Oleg Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual in Russia: A Study of Practices (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 5–7.

5Ibid.

6Maja Soboleva, ‘The Concept of the “New Soviet Man” and Its Short History’, Canadian – American Slavic Studies 51, no. 1 (2017): 84.

7John Haynes, New Soviet Man: Gender and Masculinity in Stalinist Soviet Cinema (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2003), p. 1.

8Lynne Attwood, The New Soviet Man and Woman: Sex-Role Socialisation in the USSR (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1990), p. 33.

9Catriona Kelly, ‘The New Soviet Man and Woman’, in The Oxford Handbook of Modern Russian History, ed. Simon Dixon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 4.

10Ibid., p. 3.

11Ibid.

12David L. Hoffmann, Cultivating the Masses: Modern State Practices and Soviet Socialism, 1914 – 1939 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2011), p. 228.

13Oleg Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual in Russia: A Study of Practices (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1999).

14Ibid., p. 241.

15Ibid., p. 242.

16Eric Naiman, Sex in Public: The Incarnation of Early Soviet Ideology (Princeton and New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1997).

17Jeffrey Brooks, Thank You, Comrade Stalin: Soviet Public Culture from Revolution to Cold War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 74.

18Vladimir Shlapentokh, Public and Private Life of the Soviet People: Changing Values in Post-Stalin Russia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 153–4.

19Ibid., p. 154.

20Deborah A. Field, Private Life and Communist Morality in Khrushchev’s Russia (New York: Peter Lang, 2007), p. 55.

21Ibid., p. 102.

22Lewis H. Siegelbaum, ‘Introduction: Mapping Private Spheres in the Soviet Context’, in Borders of Socialism: Private Spheres of Soviet Russia, ed. Lewis H. Siegelbaum (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 3.

23Juliane Fürst, ‘Friends in Private, Friends in Public: The Phenomenon of the Kompaniia among Soviet Youth in the 1950s and 1960s’, in Borders of Socialism: Private Spheres of Soviet Russia, ed. Lewis H. Siegelbaum (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).

24Ibid., p. 244.

25Dan Healey, Russian Homophobia from Stalin to Sochi (London and Oxford: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), p. 62.

26Ibid., p. 26.

27John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940–1970 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 3.

28Among the most recent are the following: Sean Brady, Masculinity and Male Homosexuality in Britain, 1861–1913 (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Scott Gunther, The Elastic Closet: A History of Homosexuality in France, 1942 – Present (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Richard Cleminson and Francisco Vasquez Garcia, ‘Los Invisibles’: A History of Homosexuality in Spain, 1850–1939 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2007); Brian Lewis, ed., British Queer History: New Approaches and Perspectives (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2013); Jeffrey Meek, Queer Voices in Post-War Scotland: Male Homosexuality, Religion and Society (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

29The existing historical and sociological scholarship on Russian homosexuality is largely confined to the post-Soviet period. See for example: Brian James Baer, Other Russias: Homosexuality and the Crisis of Post-Soviet Identity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Brian James Baer, ‘Now You See It: Gay (In)visibility and the Performance of Post-Soviet Identity’, in Queer Visibility in Post-Socialist Cultures, ed. Narcisz Fejes and Andrea P. Balogh (Bristol: Intellect, 2013). On representations of homosexuality in post-Soviet music, see: Stephen Amico, Roll Over, Tchaikovsky! Russian Popular Music and Post-Soviet Homosexuality (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2014). On gay visibility in post-Soviet Russian films, see: Kevin Moss, ‘Straight Eye for the Queer Gay: Gay Male Visibility in Post-Soviet Russian Films’, in Queer Visibility in Post-Socialist Cultures, ed. Narcisz Fejes and Andrea P. Balogh (Bristol: Intellect, 2013), pp. 197–220. On the challenges facing historians writing the history of homosexuality in the USSR, see: Healey, Russian Homophobia, pp. 151–77. See also Dan Healey, ‘Homosexual Existence and Existing Socialism’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 8, no. 3 (2002): 351–2.

30Irina Roldugina, ‘Pochemu my takie lyudi? Rannesovetskie gomoseksualy ot pervogo litsa: Novye istochniki po istorii gomoseksual’nykh identichnostei v Rossii’, Ab Imperio, no. 2 (2016): 183–7.

31Ibid. The archives holding the most illuminating materials, namely those of the Federal Security Service (successor to the KGB) and the Archive of the President of the Russian Federation, are also likely to remain inaccessible in the foreseeable future. My attempts to approach these institutions, even under the guise of a more ‘appropriate’ research topic, were unsuccessful.

32Healey, Russian Homophobia, p. 174.

33Jeffrey S. Hardy, The Gulag after Stalin: Redefining Punishment in Khrushchev’s Soviet Union, 1953–1964 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2016).

34Miriam Dobson, Khrushchev’s Cold Summer: Gulag Returnees, Crime, and the Fate of Reform after Stalin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009).

35Dan Healey, Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia: The Regulation of Sexual and Gender Dissent (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2001), p. 9.

36Alexander Kondakov, ‘Teaching Queer Theory in Russia’, QED: A Journal in GLBTG Worldmaking 3, no. 2 (Summer 2016): 107.

37Ibid.

38Ibid., 108.

39Ibid., 113.

40Elena Milashina, ‘Ubiistvo chesti: Kak ambitsii izvestnogo LGBT-aktivista razbudili v Chechne strashnyi drevnii obychai’, Novaya gazeta, 3 April 2017, www.novayagazeta.ru/articles/2017/04/01/71983-ubiystvo-chesti (accessed 17 December 2020).

41Healey, Russian Homophobia, p. 154.

42Daniel P. Schluter, Gay Life in the Former USSR: Fraternity without Community (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), p. 4.

43Kon, Sexual Revolution in Russia, p. 328.

44Simon Karlinsky, ‘Death and Resurrection of Mikhail Kuzmin’, Slavic Review 38, no. 1 (March 1979): 92–6.

45Simon Karlinsky, ‘Russia’s Gay Literature and Culture: The Impact of the October Revolution’, in Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, ed. Martin Duberman, Martha Vicinus and George Chauncey (New York: NAL Books, 1989), pp. 347–64.

46Healey, Homosexual Desire, p. 3.

47Kon, Sexual Revolution in Russia, p. 4.

48Ibid., p. 242.

49Ibid.

50See for example: Eve Levin, Sex and Society in the World of the Orthodox Slavs, 900–1700 (New York: Cornell University Press, 1989); Laura Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness, Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-Siècle Russia (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1992); Laura Engelstein, ‘Soviet Policy Towards Male Homosexuality: Its Origins and Historical Roots’, in Gay Men and the Sexual History of the Political Left, ed. Gert Hekma, Harry Oosterhuis and James Steakley (New York and London: Haworth, 1995), pp. 155–78. More recent works include: Dan Healey, Bolshevik Sexual Forensics: Diagnosing Disorder in the Clinic and Courtroom, 1917–1939 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2009); Frances Lee Bernstein, The Dictatorship of Sex: Lifestyle Advice for the Soviet Masses (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2007).

51Healey, Homosexual Desire.

52Healey, Russian Homophobia, pp. 93–147.

53Ibid., pp. 27–51.

54Ibid., p. 45.

55Ibid., pp. 45–6.

56Healey, Homosexual Desire, p. 258.

57Healey, Russian Homophobia, p. 43.

58Ibid.

59Catriona Kelly, ‘White Coats and Tea with Raspberry Jam: Caring for Sick Children in Late Soviet Russia’, in Soviet Medicine: Culture, Practice and Science, ed. Frances L. Bernstein, Christopher Burton and Dan Healey (DeKalb: University of Illinois University Press, 2010), p. 258.

60Masha Gessen, The Rights of Lesbians and Gay Men in the Russian Federation: An International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission Report (San Francisco: Gay & Lesbian Human Rights Commission, 1994).

61Ibid., p. 16.

62Ibid., p. 17.

63Laurie Essig, Queer in Russia: A Story of Sex, Self and the Other (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1999), p. 29.

64Igor Kon, ‘Amerikanskaya aspirantka otkryvaet golubuyu Rossiyu’, (1999), http://az.gay.ru/articles/reviews/kon_essig.html (accessed 11 March 2018).

65Francesca Stella, Lesbian Lives in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia: Post/Socialism and Gendered Sexualities (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), p. 47.

66Kon, ‘Amerikanskaya aspirantka otkryvaet golubuyu Rossiyu’, p. 48.

67Vladimir Volodin, Kvir-istoriya Belarusi vtoroi poloviny XX veka: Popytka priblizheniya (Minsk, 2016), pp. 35–49.

68Sonja Franeta, Rozovye flamingo: 10 sibirskikh interv’yu (Tver’: Kolonna, 2004), pp. 70–1.

69Sonja Franeta, My Pink Road to Russia: Tales of Amazons, Peasants, and Queers (Oakland: Dacha, 2015), pp. 203–31.

70Arthur Clech, ‘Between the Labor Camp and the Clinic: Tema of the Shared Forms of Late Soviet Homosexual Subjectivities’, Slavic Review 77, no. 1 (2018): 6–29.

71Healey, Homosexual Desire, p. 185.

72Mark I. Yakubovich and Vladimir F. Kirichenko, Sovetskoe ugolovnoe pravo (Moscow: Gosyurizdat, 1958), p. 342.

73Healey, Homosexual Desire, p. 186.

74Ibid., p. 221. Laura Engelstein, ‘Soviet Policy’, pp. 169–70.

75Healey, Homosexual Desire, pp. 202–3.

76Ibid., p. 204.