Despite the prevailing assumption that the issue of homosexuality was never given sufficient attention by Khrushchev- and Brezhnev-era experts or by the police, in this book I have demonstrated the contrary. Jurists, educators and doctors, as well as police, extensively discussed the issue during the period. In their discussions they searched for modern solutions to homosexuality, by departing from Stalin-era understandings of it as a crime and instead problematising the issue from medical, educational and juridical perspectives. Soviet experts also framed sex itself as a matter of national significance and incorporated it into pedagogic discussions. Particularly instrumental in the process of the production of discourse on homosexuality were doctors and sexologists. Not only did they speak about same-sex desire, they also invited same-sex-desiring people to speak about themselves. Indeed, the desiring subject was a welcome feature of Soviet sexological thinking; having encountered same-sex-desiring individuals, doctors engaged in extensive exploration of their psyche, urging them to speak about their sexual lives in tantalising details. These private doctor–patient interactions took place in various settings – the consultation rooms of Soviet clinics, and more importantly and unexpectedly, GULAG hospitals and prison infirmaries, where same-sex activity was rife and visible to authorities.
The willingness of Soviet experts to problematise the issue of homosexuality as a medical issue can first be detected in the discussions of Soviet GULAG officials and doctors of the 1950s. It is very possible that some GULAG doctors had engaged with the problem under Stalin – many of such works were likely unpublished so never made it into the archival holdings. Stalin’s heirs, concerned about the spiking rates of crime in society due to the mass release of prisoners, attempted to put the GULAG system in order, to minimise the negative effects of the mass prisoners’ exodus. They attempted to improve prisoners’ health, re-educate them before release and, most significantly, discourage them from engaging in same-sex activity which, as Soviet officials feared, could spill over into society and spawn sexual perversions there. To prevent this from happening, the GULAG leadership summoned GULAG directors, forensic experts and doctors. Leaving the issue of sodomy to the realm of criminal law, GULAG doctors, excited at new opportunities to establish medical authority over a previously ‘unclaimed’ issue (female homosexuality was neither officially a crime nor a disease), began to examine female same-sex activity in prison, produce discourse on it and offer their expertise to GULAG leadership. Doctors claimed a unique ability to elicit open confessions from lesbian women and emphasised the crucial role their expertise could play in discouraging these women from homosexuality. The medicalisation of the issue of lesbianism triggered a power shift in the GULAG – medical experts’ opinion, which had hitherto often been ignored, had now to be heeded by GULAG directors regarding homosexuality. Historians wishing to further investigate the medicalisation of homosexuality in the GULAG are likely to uncover more evidence (provided they manage to find sources) of patient–medical interactions on the topic of homosexuality in GULAG infirmaries. More evidence of such interactions will further demonstrate that confession was not a phenomenon completely alien to Soviet society and that the process of medicalisation was very akin to that described in Western societies.
In the 1950s, while doctors were wrestling with the issue of homosexuality in the GULAG, outside the barbed wire Soviet officials were worried about the sexual lives of the younger generation and searched for ways of establishing control over them. Such control was important for increasing declining birth rates and alleviating the devastating human losses after the war. Medical discourse on sex education was chosen as a viable solution. Having decriminalised abortion, the Khrushchev leadership approved the publication of numerous brochures, which, appealing to medical knowledge, discouraged adolescents from terminating pregnancies, emphasising the potential harm that they could inflict on themselves. Educators also encouraged young people to abstain from promiscuity, raised their awareness about STIs and steered them away from sexual perversions. Regarding the latter, the authors of sex education manuals sought to discourage any sexual practices or environments that could be conducive to homosexuality. Some sex manuals openly talked about homosexuality – framing it as both a crime and a disease. These manuals were translated versions of manuals from Czechoslovakia and East Germany, where sexology had become a well-developed science. These two countries were instrumental in the development of discourse on sex and sexuality in the USSR and significantly shaped experts’ understanding of homosexuality there.
In the mid-1960s Soviet sexual modernity was injected with fresh dynamism following the establishment of a new branch of medical science – sexopathology. In their discussions the practitioners of this newly established science constructed a new image of homosexuality, which differed from the Stalin- and Khrushchev-era understandings of it as a criminal psychopathy. Soviet sexopathologists presented homosexuals as individuals who were reclaimable for the Soviet project of creating a New Soviet Person. This entailed desiring to work and contribute their labour to society, while being able to realise their deficient sexuality, work on it and change themselves for the better. Apart from constructing a new image of homosexuality, Soviet sexopathologists sought to claim homosexuality for their profession, albeit very carefully. One such sexopathologist, V. K. Kosarev, discussed whether homosexuality should be considered a medical problem rather than a criminal one – he did so with a nod to Czechoslovakia and East Germany, where by that time homosexuality had been decriminalised and now featured on medical agendas. Some sexopathologists went so far as to suggest that homosexuality should be decriminalised altogether. Other sexopathologists, however, tried to medicalise homosexuality, without openly appealing to decriminalisation: Yan Goland, for example, moved forward with an initiative to institutionalise medical treatment of homosexuality, to no avail. Sexopathologists invited same-sex-desiring patients to the clinic, urging them to confess their desires and using these confessions for scientific research. An interesting aspect of these private doctor–patient interactions was that some doctors did not wish to impose overt medicalisation on their patients, but rather sought to deal with the issue constructively. Ivanov, for example, was ready to acknowledge the limits of medical knowledge when one of his patients asked to be cured of homosexuality – he attended to his patient’s distress but did not offer to treat his homosexuality with drugs, instead pointing out that homosexuality could be a natural phenomenon not amenable to treatment. To some extent, the same approach can be discerned in Goland’s medical practices – instead of imposing compulsory treatment on his patients, he carefully selected them and worked only with those who were committed to it.
The emerging medical ideas on homosexuality insinuated themselves into juridical circles and spurred discussions on the necessity to decriminalise consensual sodomy among leading Soviet jurists on the grounds of it being a medical matter. Soviet jurists attempted to eliminate the penalty for consensual sodomy as early as the late 1950s, but to no avail. At this time, proponents of decriminalisation did not have sufficient arguments to base their proposals on – homosexuality had not yet been decriminalised in many socialist countries (thus there was no current example to allude to) and Soviet sexological science had been non-existent. Even so, in the 1960s, with the growing sexological knowledge at home and the pro-decriminalisation movement elsewhere in the world, Soviet jurists’ voices in support of overhauling the Stalinist statute on consensual sodomy became more vocal. In their dissertations and treatises, jurists alluded to the scientific findings of Soviet sexologists and contended that homosexuality was a medical matter. Some of them even suggested that homosexuals did not need medical intervention at all – since their sexuality was natural. By the 1970s, however, anti-decriminalisation views started to emerge – scholars who opposed decriminalisation claimed that homosexuality was a threat to socialist morality, saying that in the absence of penalties for it, same-sex activity would become unbridled and widespread. Strikingly, these scholars also proposed to criminalise lesbianism, pointing out its inconsistency with communist morality and its perceived social harm. The debates on the criminal status of lesbianism were not confined solely to scholarly circles but extended far beyond academia. Republican prosecutors and judges, as well as officials from the Supreme Court of the USSR, contributed extensively to the discussion. Surprisingly, despite the small number of scholars who argued in favour of criminalisation of female homosexuality, most scholars and officials dismissed these proposals on the grounds that lesbian love was not as common as sodomy.
In 1973 the Soviet Health Ministry established the All-Union Scientific Methodological Centre for Issues of Sexopathology, which was to oversee and encourage the production of sexological research. This started to attract the attention of the Interior Ministry, which had long wished to find ways to resolve the conundrum of same-sex desire in Soviet prisons. The Interior Ministry commissioned sexologists to deliver lectures to MVD and KGB officials, where they shared their scientific knowledge and even promoted the idea of utility of decriminalisation of consensual sodomy. Most importantly, sexologists were encouraged to conduct research on homosexuality in prisons with a view to helping the prison authorities to eliminate this phenomenon. Seizing on the opportunity to expand their medical authority over the homosexual body, sexologists examined same-sex-desiring prisoners and produced manuals for MVD officials on how to deal with them. In some of these manuals, sexologists openly contended that the issue of homosexuality could be resolved only through medical methods, advising prison officials to heed their expert recommendations. Again, sexologists approached the issue of homosexuality constructively – for instance, they acknowledged the predicament and psychological suffering of prisoners who were raped and abused by ‘active homosexuals’ and, instead of branding them as homosexuals, advocated provision of psychotherapy to alleviate their suffering. In the 1970s doctors in the free society continued to offer treatments for homosexuality too, experimenting with new approaches, albeit in private.
That doctors had to keep their practices unofficial and that they were denied any attempts to institutionalise their practice attests to the paradox which characterised Soviet sexual modernity in the second half of the twentieth century. Although allowed to flourish, and even encouraged by authorities on an ad hoc basis, medical knowledge was still subordinate to police requirements. These requirements reflected the authorities’ desires to eliminate homosexuality in places of confinement and to possibly furnish psychological evidence of a suspect’s homosexuality in criminal cases. Despite doctors’ claims for decriminalisation of consensual sodomy and their persistent attempts to push the matter into the medical domain, their attempts to do so were unsuccessful.
It is undeniable that the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras were a time of unprecedented discursive explosion on sex and homosexuality. In order to fully understand its extent, historians need more sources and they need to look for these sources in places other than historical archives. Most of them are likely to be stored in the semi-sequestered archives of Soviet psychiatric clinics. One such example is Popov’s dissertation (examined in Chapter 3) and the fact that it never made its way into any of Russia’s libraries. It is possible that there were many more such works, with elaborate descriptions, large-scale examinations and deep interventions into the sexual lives of Soviet citizens of all sexual orientations. In a country like Russia, with its vast territory and different traditions and cultures, discourse on sex and homosexuality was extremely variegated, bearing characteristics of the regions and republics where it evolved. The sheer size of the Soviet Union also made it difficult for medical discourse to evenly spread itself across the country. Soviet sexology was too weak and dragged its feet compared to its Western and even communist counterparts. A glance at the group photo of newbie sexologists who congregated for a 1966 sexological seminar suggests that the number of people willing to receive training in this nascent science did not exceed seventy. Many of these doctors were either from Moscow or Gorkii, which suggests that sexopathology remained an obscure science for medical professionals in the faraway regions and republics of the vast Soviet land. Likewise, despite the provisions of the 1973 Health Ministry decree on the opening of sexological consultation rooms across the USSR, it is still unlikely that sexology had any significant influence as a science in the 1970s and 1980s.
Despite the still existing reluctance on the part of Russian historians to engage with the topic of homosexuality seriously, scholars have much to learn from new perspectives on the issue. Debates on homosexuality between doctors and GULAG and prison officials point to the way power relationships were structured between experts and police in these settings, as well as Soviet society more broadly. In the same way, dynamic discussions on the criminal status of homosexuality and the unexpectedly bold and non-compliant stances of Brezhnev-era academics on the issue make a striking intervention into the scholarly discussions of the late Soviet era as a time of vibrant intellectual life rather than mere stagnation. Historians may also learn a great deal about public and private boundaries in the Soviet society when looking at same-sex relationships and how homosexual people carved out private spaces in the pursuit of their desires.
Coda: homosexuality after Brezhnev
Throughout the 1980s the issue of homosexuality continued to be on sexopathological agendas – it retained its status as a syndrome and disease which could be treated, albeit with great difficulty. In his two-volume manual for sexologists and psychiatrists, Private Sexopathology (1983), Georgii Vasil’chenko, head of the All-Union Research Method Centre on Sexopathology, provided a lengthy section on the question, illustrating various types of homosexuality with a relevant case study.1 He lamented that it was difficult to establish the diagnosis correctly, even more so to obtain objective measurements of a patient’s type of homosexuality, since many patients sought to conceal their ‘pathological deviations of sexuality’ and doctors simply did not possess any ‘objective methods’ of diagnosing sexual perversions.2 The only method which Vasil’chenko deemed credible was penile plethysmography, a method of measurement of sexual arousal first proposed by Czechoslovakian sexologist Josef Hynie in the 1930s and later developed by Kurt Freund in the 1960s.3
The evocation of this method by Vasil’chenko is noteworthy. We know that during the Cold War, American and British sexologists designed a great many machines and devices for sex research, including penile strain gauges used in aversion therapies.4 In Soviet sexological practice such instruments were not as common – it was only in the 1980s that Soviet sexopathologists started reporting the use of such.5 They noted that phallography had been conducted (fallografiya) on a ‘group of individuals who deemed themselves to be homosexuals’ and that this method could be used ‘in sexological practice for a variety of goals’, including ‘detection of sexual perversions’.6 They did not specify for what purposes and under which circumstances such detection was needed, yet, considering the fact that during the 1970s the MVD was actively exploring new opportunities of finding scientific evidence for the crime of sodomy, discussions of phallography’s utility in detecting sexual perversions could have been a ramification of it.
Vasil’chenko’s manual also featured a section on the treatment of homosexuality – this was written by Yan Goland.7 The section built on Goland’s previous work and summarised the main techniques of his psychotherapy method, consisting of three stages and accompanied by autogenic training. Goland listed several contraindications for psychotherapy of homosexuality, that is, signs in a patient showing that therapy would not lead to the desired effect. These included psychiatric disorders, alcoholism, ‘intellectual deficiency’, ‘lack of will and the patient’s passivity’.8 During the 1980s, Goland continued his practice of medical treatment, securing his role as a leading Soviet specialist on the problem. In 1982 he presented his papers ‘Psychotherapy of Homosexuality’ and ‘Psychotherapy of Sexual Perversions’ at a sexology seminar in Riga.9 There, he also presented former patients, who had successfully completed psychotherapy for homosexuality and sexual perversions, to other doctors. As Goland explained to me, his patients were wearing heavy make-up, sunglasses and wigs to conceal their identity. In the same year, Goland delivered these reports and showed his patients to colleagues at the Central Institute for Doctors’ Advanced Training.10
While Soviet sexopathologists continued to produce medical knowledge on homosexuality, albeit in very modest portions, the MVD developed further interest in their studies. Throughout the 1980s more brochures for MVD penal officials with instructions on how to address the problem of sexual perversions and homosexuality were published. Among them were Sexual Disorders in the Convicts of the ITU (1980), a paper Methodic Recommendations on Prophylaxis of Sexual Perversions (1983), ‘Prophylactic Medical Examination of Individuals, Suffering from Sexual Perversions in SIZO and ITU’ (1984) and a manual, Prisoners’ Sexual Disorders (1985).11 The titles of these brochures suggest that their authors framed homosexuality as a medical problem. All of them were published by the All-Union Institute for Advanced Training of Senior Officials of the Corrective Labour Institutions of the MVD SSSR (Vsesoyuznyi institut povysheniya kvalifikatsii rukovodyashchikh rabotnikov ispravitel’no-trudovykh uchrezhdenii).12 None of these brochures are available in any of Russia’s state libraries and they are likely to be stored in the library of the institute’s successor – the VIPK of the Russian Interior Ministry, which can be consulted only by the institute’s cadets and officials. I came upon the references to these brochures in a similar manual, Educational Work with Convicts Suffering from Sexual Perversions (1989).13 This manual was written by the same author as the previous ones and it offers a window on the possible content of the author’s earlier manuals on the subject.
In his discussions of homosexuality, the author, Vitalii Volkov, drew on the texts on homosexuality written by Soviet leading sexologists Nikolai Ivanov, Yan Goland, Pavel Posvyanskii and Abram Svyadoshch.14 Volkov urged the Medical Department of the Colonies to take an active part in prophylaxis and medical treatment of homosexuality: ‘The medical department in corrective labour institutions must organise prophylaxis and symptomatic treatment of perverted types of sexual desire in individuals located in places of confinement.’15 He suggested that medical examination of such individuals be conducted ‘in a mandatory manner’ (v obyazatel’nom poryadke) by the prison psychiatrists.16 Yet the treatment itself, especially involving medications, was to be conducted only with the prisoner’s consent: ‘The object of treatment can only be the prisoner who voluntarily consented to it. Compulsion is in such cases out of place and it cannot be effective without the patient’s desire, especially in those individuals who consider their state as a norm.’17 However, this statement contradicted Volkov’s own previous remarks where he argued that penal officials must ‘lead an uncompromising and decisive struggle’ with the ‘convicts’ deviant sexual behaviour’ through ‘primarily medicated and psychotherapeutic correction’ (vypravlenie).18 It is notable that in contrast to the similar manuals produced in the 1970s, examined in Chapter 5, Volkov’s brochure framed homosexuality exclusively as a medical problem without allusions to the efficacy of punitive measures – this suggests a continuing shift of MVD perceptions of homosexuality from crime to disease.
The advent of the AIDS epidemic in the USSR in the late 1980s stoked anxiety about homosexuality and its perceived social danger: it was now viewed not only as a crime or a disease, but as a phenomenon conducive to the spread of AIDS. Apparently this anxiety triggered more energetic attempts to study homosexuality and find effective ways of dealing with it. One such attempt was undertaken by psychiatrists A. Kachaev and G. Ponomarev of the Serbskii Institute; in 1988 they published a summary of their study, ‘Age Dynamics and Conditions of Formation of Male Homosexuality’, in the course of which 240 homosexual men from the age of eighteen to fifty were examined and medically treated.19 Expounding on the rationale of their research, Kachaev and Ponomarev explained:
Individuals with homosexual attitudes (ustanovki) are not subject to registration (ne podvergayutsya uchety), medical examination (dispanserisatsiya) or forced treatment, which they need, considering the criteria of social dangerousness … homosexuality tends to spread (imeet tendentsiyu k rasprostraneniyu) and constitutes a genuine source of venereal, viral (hepatitis, candidiasis, AIDS), infectious and intestinal diseases.20
One of the key objectives of the study was the examination of the homosexual men’s psychological and sexual development during infancy and adolescence with a view to identifying the factors which contributed to their perverse desire. Scrutinising the past lives of each homosexual man, psychiatrists established the most significant milestones in the development of their homosexual desire. Kachaev and Ponomarev discovered that, at the ages of five to seven, the examined men displayed ‘heightened sexuality’ (povyshennaya seksual’nost’), characterised by a ‘heightened interest’ in individuals of the same and opposite sex.21 At the ages of seven to twelve their ‘heightened sexuality’ was reinforced by ‘environmental influences’ – ‘related information from their peers and other sources’.22 During these years ‘homosexual fixations’ were beginning to take shape, facilitated by the ‘close same-sex communication characteristic of this age’.23 Perverse homosexual desire was then further reinforced at the ages of fourteen to sixteen, by means of ‘mutual masturbation’, due to an ‘inebriated state’ or due to an intention ‘to stand out’. Finally, from the ages of eighteen to twenty it was ‘stabilised definitively’.24
In light of their findings, Kachaev and Ponomarev proposed a detailed description of measures for ‘prophylaxis of sexual perversions’.25 These measures were to be conducted by school doctors, paediatricians and infant psychiatry services (detskaya psikhiyatricheskaya sluzhba) and were designed in accordance with the discovered milestones in the development of homosexuality. The proposed measures were similar to those contained in the Khrushchev-era sex education manuals; yet Kachaev and Ponomarev’s advice was more age-specific. Children from five to seven were to be instructed on how to ‘restrain the arousal of erogenous zones and emergence of early sexuality’ – these instructions were to have a focus on the ‘hygiene of sexual organs’.26 Children from seven to twelve were to be carefully informed, ‘in a simple and comprehensible form, of the physiological basics of sexual development and sexuality’.27 Teenagers between twelve and eighteen were to be instructed on the ‘harm of masturbation, premature sexual liaisons as well as sexual perversions’.28
Forty of the examined 240 men underwent medical treatment, in the course of which they were adminisered highly aversive drugs – aminazin and sulfazine (sul’fazin).29 The treatment with these drugs, as doctors observed, provided a ‘strong therapeutic effect’ and made the patients develop a desire ‘to get rid of homosexuality’.30 To the doctors’ disappointment, after the treatment ceased, some of the patients again started displaying homosexual tendencies.31 Still, doctors noted that such treatment was useful especially in places of confinement.32
The emerging climate of freedom provided by Gorbachev’s glasnost’ and perestroika allowed for the appearance of publications with alternative views on homosexuality. One such was a book, Sexology and Sexopathology, by prominent Polish sexopathologist Kazimir Imelinskii, which was translated into Russian and published in 1986. In it the author claimed that homosexuality was not a disease at all: ‘From a clinical point of view, one should pay attention to the fact that homosexuality does not constitute an illness that can be treated at all. There is a large group of homosexuals who not only accept their inclinations but are content with them.’33 Doctors could be of help only in those cases where homosexual persons suffered from anxiety and depression, a result of the double life they were forced to lead, rather than their sexuality. Describing such persons, Imelinskii wrote:
They fear condemnation and shame and therefore hide their homosexual proclivities even from their closest relatives; they are preoccupied with their fate and with the impossibility to create a family; they fear loneliness and that they are deceived by destiny, which does not allow them to live like other people and foredooms them to suffering and loneliness.34
Some Soviet sexopathologists, such as Abram Svyadoshch, disagreed with these views. In a third edition of his book Female Sexopathology (1988), he argued that homosexuals should be medically treated, even if they did not deem their homosexuality to be a sexual disorder:
In English and American literature an opinion is being stated with increasing frequency that homosexuality is merely a variant of the norm and that is why it is not necessary to seek ways of conducting therapy. We cannot agree with this point of view. We cannot deem it natural when a person is experiencing a same-sex desire towards persons of the same sex and feels aversion to individuals of the opposite sex. If everyone became homosexuals, humankind would cease to exist.35
At a time when Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost were relaxing censorship, the discussion of sex and related topics became possible in the pages of the Soviet press. The subject of homosexuality attracted the attention of Gorbachev-era newspaper correspondents who approached doctors and even police officers with requests to comment on the problem of homosexuality in the Soviet Union. F. Podkolodnyi, a correspondent for Meditsinskaya gazeta, approached L. G. Gertsik, the head of the Moscow Psycho-Endocrinological Centre.36 Rather unexpectedly, Gertsik suggested that homosexuality was not a disease at all; in fact he stated that consensual homosexuality was a private matter and that doctors could help homosexuals by helping them overcome their anxiety:
It goes without saying that in a democratic state we cannot oppress people because of their sexual orientation … Two adult men shut themselves in a room (zakryvayutsya v komnate) and society is peeking into the keyhole? I believe that our Criminal Code sufficiently protects a person from violence, and minors from corruption and depraved acts. Why have a separate article on homosexuality? For the time being, it is not even clear whether it’s a disease or not. For our centre, homosexuality itself is not a diagnosis, it’s not even a patient’s complaint. You see they can be well adapted both psychologically and socially. They even live in families. It’s a different matter if there is some intrapsychic (intrapsikhicheskii) conflict, when homosexual orientation hinders adaptation, if there is a fear of contracting AIDS or venereal diseases. Only then is there a reason for the patient’s examination and medical treatment. But what to treat such a patient for? For homosexuality? And what if he doesn’t want to be treated? Therapy for homosexuals has to be voluntary. Otherwise, it is simply impossible. This I can tell you as a specialist as opposed to those who assert that homosexuals should be treated forcibly. Let them tell us how!37
Surprisingly, the diversity of opinions as to whether homosexuals should be deemed criminals or not existed among the law-enforcement agencies themselves. The author of the article went to seek clarification on the issue from the police officers working in the Investigative Department of the Chief Directorate of Internal Affairs of Moscow to ask them what they thought about homosexuals. As the conversation revealed, only a very small number of homosexuals were prosecuted for consensual sodomy, which, as the author noted, was because ‘there was no affected party (poterpevshaya storona) and thus no need to resort to the police’.38 In fact, the officers of the department, in the author’s words, considered the problem of homosexuality not as their job, but as ‘a medical and social one’, except for cases involving homosexual prostitution, rape or homosexual acts against minors.39
Other MVD officials were also willing to express their opinion about the problem during perestroika. For instance, in 1990 the newspaper Argumenty i fakty published an opinion of V. Kachanov, an official from the Moscow Criminal Investigations Department, who argued that the sodomy law was a ‘restraining factor’ for homosexuals ‘responsible for the dissemination of AIDS’.40
The hitherto discreet discussion between legal academics and MVD officials also started appearing widely on the pages of Soviet newspapers. Soviet jurists whose attempts to decriminalise consensual homosexuality I examined in Chapter 4 gave interviews and continued to argue for decriminalisation of consensual homosexual acts. In December 1989 a monthly periodical Molodoi kommunist featured a lengthy article on the problem of homosexuality in the Soviet Union. In this article A. N. Ignatov briefly summarised the current state of discussion on the law on sodomy between its proponents and opponents:
The majority of authors who write on this topic come to the conclusion that criminal liability for homosexuality is not expedient. Why? First of all, if it is pathology, then it cannot be punished. Secondly, there is no danger for society here. In fact, all the main arguments of the proponents of criminal liability for homosexuality are refuted. Which ones exactly? Well, that homosexuality will lead to the decreased masculinity of the nation. Yet, the example of Sparta demonstrates the contrary. Another alleged consequence of homosexuality is that it will decrease birth rates. The statistics do not confirm this conclusion. Then, they say that it leads to the degradation of a person. However, we know many great homosexuals – Tchaikovsky, Leonardo da Vinci and so on, and their creative work refutes the previous statement.41
According to Ignatov, the opponents of the decriminalisation of sodomy were also convinced that if there was no law in place, then homosexuality would thrive.42 Such views had been expressed by the MVD scholars as early as 1972 and, as Ignatov showed, they persisted well into the 1980s:
There is a lay perception that if we abolish article 121 of the Criminal Code then everyone will start to engage in homosexuality! Nonsense! A person who has no propensity for it cannot be influenced by the absence or existence of criminal liability. Criminal liability also does not influence the person who has such propensity. Criminal liability plays little role here – it neither reduces nor eliminates homosexuality, because sexual needs, whatever you may say, are some of the strongest.43
Most importantly, Ignatov’s comment presented an illuminating account of the reasons underlying the reluctance of Soviet officials to listen to the arguments of legal scholars for the repeal of the sodomy law. Ignatov explained that the ultimate decision to abolish the sodomy law was often left to individual Soviet bureaucrats, who had the final word on everything and often had the power to dismiss the most well-conceived and substantiated draft law on the grounds of personal distaste, without any explanations or further comment. Ignatov reasoned that: ‘In former times, a person who was not a jurist, but who held a senior position, could say something like this at the last moment: “And what is this? Let’s cross this out! Or, conversely, let’s add something.” As a result, a well-thought-out and well-substantiated proposed law changed abruptly.’44 Ignatov did not lose hope, though; instead, he publicly pledged to continue to advocate for the abolition of the law, believing that, since Gorbachev was a jurist by education, he would be more inclined to listen to the jurists. ‘Along with other jurists,’ he said, ‘I will continue to struggle for the abolition of this law. We are confronting the prejudice of the majority of the population and the opinion of influential officials … We count on Gorbachev. He is a jurist.’45
Ultimately, however, it was Boris Yeltsin, not Gorbachev, who removed the notorious law from the statute books in April 1993. While Yeltsin’s personal desire to join the Council of Europe certainly underpinned his decision to repeal the sodomy law, it is also important to recognise that this was not something entirely new: a movement towards the decriminalisation of sodomy among Soviet leading jurists and their scholarly arguments, discussed in this dissertation, also appeared to be crucial. We still have much to learn about the neglected history of these debates.
Notes
1Georgii Vasil’chenko, Chastnaya seksopatologiya: Rukovodstvo dlya vrachei (Moscow: Meditsina, 1983), pp. 95–115.
2Ibid., p. 108.
3Ibid.
4Donna J. Drucker, The Machines of Sex Research: Technology and the Politics of Identity, 1945–1985 (Dordrecht: Springer, 2014).
5I. L. Botneva, I. P. Zhdanov and V. M. Maslov, ‘O perspektivakh fallografii v seksologicheskoi praktike’, Aktual’nye voprosy seksopatologii: Sbornik tezisov dokladov i Vsesoyuznoi konferentsii seksopatologov g. Ufa, 17–19 sentyabrya 1986 g. (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Moskovskogo NII psikhiatrii MZ RSFSR, 1986), pp. 63–6.
6Ibid., p. 64.
7Vasil’chenko, Chastnaya seksopatologiya, p. 109.
8Ibid.
9Yan Goland, ‘Nauchnaya i prakticheskaya rabota: Doklady’, https://goland.su/nauch.html (accessed 11 January 2016).
10Interview with Goland, 1 April 2017.
11SIZO: sledstvennyi izolyator (detention cell). Vitalii Volkov, Seksual’nye rasstroistva u osuzhdennykh v ITU (Moscow: VIPK MVD SSSR, 1980); V. N. Volkov, P. M. Rybkin and A. N. Gnedin, Metodicheskie rekomendatsii po profilaktike polovykh izvrashchenii v ITU (Moscow: VIPK MVD SSSR, 1983); Vitalii Volkov, ‘Dispanserisatsiya lits, stradayushchikh polovymi perversiyami v SIZO i ITU’, in Aktual’nye voprosy organisatsii spetsializirovannykh vidov medpomoshchi kontingentam ITU, SIZO i LTP (Moscow: VIPK MVD SSSR, 1984), pp. 55–62; Vitalii Volkov, Seksual’nye rasstroistva u osuzhdennykh (Domodedovo: VIPK MVD SSSR, 1985).
12The institute was founded on 27 August 1976 and was entrusted with the task of providing advanced training for a range of specialists and officials working within the Soviet penitentiary system, including the medical department. On the history of the institute, see: Yurii N. Demidov, VIPK MVD Rossii: Vchera, segodnya, zavtra: Posvyashchaetsya 45-letiyu instituta (Domodedovo: VIPK MVD Rossii, 2017), pp. 20–2.
13Vitalii Volkov and Aleksandr Pishchelko, Vospitatel’naya rabota s osuzhdennymi, stradayushchimi seksual’nymi izvrashcheniyami (Domodedovo: VIPK MVD SSSR, 1989).
14Ibid., pp. 54–5.
15Ibid., p. 30.
16Ibid., p. 31.
17Ibid., p. 40.
18Ibid., p. 3.
19A. K. Kachaev and G. N. Ponomarev, ‘Vozrastnaya dinamika i usloviya formirovaniya muzhskogo gomoseksualizma’, Nevropatologia i psikhiatriya, no. 12 (1988): 78–82.
20Ibid., 79.
21Ibid.
22Ibid.
23Ibid.
24Ibid.
25Ibid., 81.
26Ibid.
27Ibid.
28Ibid.
29Ibid., 80.
30Ibid., 81. Generally applied for the treatment of schizophrenia, progressive paralysis or catatonic conditions, aminazin was also used as a punishment in Soviet psychiatric hospitals. The effects of it included great pain and a rise in body temperature up to 40 degrees. See: Fireside, Soviet Psychoprisons, pp. 148–9. On sulfazine treatment, see also: Podrabinek, Punitive Medicine, pp. 93–4.
31Podrabinek, Punitive Medicine, p. 81. These drugs were used extensively by Soviet psychiatrists against dissidents.
32Kachaev and Ponomarev, ‘Vozrastnaya dinamika’, 81.
33Kazimir Imelinskii, Seksologiya i seksopatologiya (Moscow: Meditsina, 1986), p. 330. On Polish sexology and Imelinskii, see: Agnieszka Kos´cian´ska, ‘Beyond Viagra: Sex Therapy in Poland’, Czech Sociological Review 50, no. 6 (2014): 91–138. In Poland, Imelinskii was a supporter of the emerging homosexual groups in the late 1980s. For example, in 1988 he signed an open letter to the Ministry of Internal Affairs in support of the Warsaw Homosexual Movement. See: Lukasz Szulc, Transnational Homosexuals in Communist Poland: Cross-Border Flows in Gay and Lesbian Magazines (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), p. 112.
34Imelinskii, Seksologiya i seksopatologiya, p. 331.
35Svyadoshch, Zhenskaya seksopatologiya, p. 82.
36F. Podkolodnyi, ‘Sodomskii grekh’, Meditsinskaya gazeta, 2 September 1988, 4. Moscow City Psycho-Endocrinological Centre was founded in 1986 with a view to providing better psychoendocrinological medical assistance to the people of Moscow. See: Anonymous, ‘O Moskovskom gorodskom psikhoendokrinologicheskom tsentre’, https://arbat25.ru/o-czentre/istoriya-czentra (accessed 7 January 2018).
37Podkolodnyi, ‘Sodomskii grekh’, 4.
38Ibid.
39Ibid.
40A. Petrov, letter to the editor, Argumenty i fakty no. 9 (1990), 7.
41Novikov, ‘Sindrom “Trekh obez’yanok”’, 71.
42Daniel’bek, Polovye izvrashcheniya, p. 89.
43Novikov, ‘Sindrom “Trekh obez’yanok”’, 71.
44Ibid.
45Valerii Rodikov, ‘Golubye eli…’, Literaturnaya Rossiya no. 12 (1990): 24.