Authorities claimed that homosexuality was the result of bourgeois Western and German fascist influence, and the official Soviet newspaper Pravda published an article which ended with the slogan: “Destroy homosexuality and fascism will disappear!”
From the beginning of 1934, gay men began to be arrested in large numbers in major Russian cities and sent to the gulags. One prisoner, Valery Klimov, wrote about the treatment gay detainees received:
“there were about 10 occasions when gays were murdered before my eyes. One was beaten to death in a prison in Sverdlovsk. There were 100 men in our cell; three or four raped him every day and then chucked him under the bunks. It was bestial, a nightmare. Once 10 of them raped him and then jumped on his head. I nearly went mad there; my hair turned grey. That’s how people lose their sanity; many never recover even after they leave.”
While lesbianism was never prohibited, and some masculine lesbians were valued in the military, many lesbians did still suffer persecution such as termination of studies or jobs, bullying, threats to remove custody of their children or being committed to psychiatric facilities.
1930s USSR was super gay.
It took decades of reactionary influencing and organizing to turn the Eastern Bloc into a horrifying ultra-nationalist paleoconservative hell hole.
We’ve seen similar patterns in West Africa, Latin America, and the Pacific Rim.
Kissing as a sign of friendship/goodwill is not a sign of homosexuality or of acceptance of homosexuality. It is deeply tasteless to use it as an example of being “super gay”.
Your claim about the “prelevance” of gay culture in USSR is based on a link to a lengthy and wordy PDF of an introduction and one chapter from an academic volume. It is a vague theoretical/methodological text about studying not just USSR but Central and East Europe during and after socialism. I don’t intend to scrutinise the pages and pages of the Foucaultian language to wring out some potential proof for your claim, what is needed is actual documentation. In fact I’m wondering if you yourself have read and understood the PDF.
If by “gay culture” you mean cultural output with LGBT themes, that effectively didn’t exist in USSR (or at least in Russia, that I’m slightly more familiar with). We can go look for specific examples to check that. If by “gay culture” you mean gay people managing to survive away from the public eye and having some small communities, that’s an unacceptably low bar. By that logic you could make excuses for just about every repressive regime that didn’t completely eradicate its “enemies”.
If you’re arguing against the idea that USSR was the most henious country against LGBT in history, yeah, that’s likely not true. But nobody was claiming that. OP text is (I believe) a reaction to the current touting of the progressive sexual victories in the earliest years of the Union while making little mention of their reversal and the overall bleak situation for most of the country’s history.
You are in some deep seated denial if you don’t think homosexuals express affection through kissing.
Yeah, I’m sorry if the size and depth of the document scared you off.
I’m arguing the homosexual urge is strong and universal. Russia is no exception. And that, when the political moment allows for it, the expressions of queer love flourish.
What we saw in the USSR, early in the revolution, was an instance of that flourishing. One that reactionary strains in future state governments failed to suppress, time and time again.
Liberals want to deny that this golden age of free love and open queer expression occurred, because it flies in the face of their orthodoxy. But it happened repeatedly over the history of the USSR. Soviet peoples openly expressed their queer love and accepted the queer love of their neighbors. Soviet governments bent in the face of it, even as the reactionaries fought against it. And even now, in an outright fascist post-Soviet nation, queer love endures.
You don’t need perfect liberal conditions to enjoy a queer society. Hell, quite a bit of modern western history suggests liberalism is as much a threat to queer expression as any socialist government. What you need are queer people united in purpose and committed to one another’s liberation. Russia and the surrounding states are filled with these people and will continue to be filled with these people, whether you choose to acknowledge them or not.
I expected more than defaulting to disingenuity. Straight men kissing is not the same as gay men kissing. Implying that Soviet politicians expressed their homosexual desires by kissing is an insulting level of trivialising homosexuality.
And - more disingenuity, along with childish pretentiousness. The text doesn’t say anything specific in support of your claims. The “depth” required to prove LGBT culture existed in USSR is miniscule, the general methodological considerations that the PDF discusses are irrelevant here.
I don’t remember anyone claiming otherwise. What was being discussed was how the state deals with that urge and, implied, how we evaluate states with regards to how they dealt with it.
This is pure fantasy. You are free to provide actual documentation from that age and prove me wrong - not meta-methodological pontificating of academics but actual traces of that time period from USSR - but as I’ve studied Russian and had some interest in their culture, as well as spent some time in Russian online queer spaces, all I’ve seen is historical silence or erasure, even during the supposed “golden age”. I would be sincerely glad to be proven otherwise, I’d be glad to see that LGBT history hasn’t been as uniformly bleak as it seems to me now.
Maybe. The point is simply that USSR was very far from a queer(-positive) society either way, with a possible window of greater freedom for a short while that doesn’t seem to have left any serious traces in practice.
And - standard defaulting to “liberal societies are equally bad tho!”. Right after desperately trying to prove socialism created a queer “golden age”, as if you don’t believe your own claims about it yourself.
This has nothing to do with the topic. We’re talking about USSR’s sexual politics, not current LGBT activism in Russia.
There’s nothing gay about that, the wiki even shows it was used in Imperial Russia and is an Orthodox Christian thing.
The USSR killed and imprisoned gays, they were not super gay at all. It didn’t take decades of reactionary influencing to do, homophobia was always the norm.
LGBTQ history in the Soviet Union
A history of LGBTQ rights in modern Russia: From progress to despair
Seems like it varied wildly.
The early Soviet period made Russia one of the most progressive countries on earth, only for the Stalin era to radically reverse the gains decades later. Then Glasnost reversed the reversal in a period of general liberalization, only for the late-Yeltsin and subsequent Putin governments to snap back the reforms as a means of purging the state of liberal institutions.
Nonetheless, Eastern Europe and Russia has always been super gay. The prevalence of gay culture in the Eastern Bloc has endured in the hard times and flourished in the good times.
Cause it was gay back then, too.
In the same way that you can point to the Stonewall Riots in the US and say “They’re not gay, look at what the cops did to the gay community!” you can squeeze your eyes shut and proclaim “Russians weren’t gay, because Stalin and Putin both turned on his gay peers”.
What you reject in the positive is revealed in the negative. This is a culture steeped in gayness. The modern state is chronically at war with its gay population because - despite a generation of homophobic media and state violence and denial at every institutional level - they keep on fighting.
1917–1927: Don’t ask, don’t tell.
1927–1953: Go to hell.
1953–1964: Nothing would fundamentally change.
1964–1982: Homosexuality is a disease.
1982–1991: Don’t ask, don’t tell.
Wow, fucking wild variations!
After the October Revolution of 1917, homosexuality was decriminalised in Soviet Russia with the repeal of the legal code of the Russian Empire
One of these things is not like the other.
And of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Practically everything else you wrote is also wrong.
1917–1927: Don’t ask, don’t tell.
Yeah great environment to come out in and go public when the party is debating ‘curing’ you. Legally acceptable, but not worth the risk of making it public considering where it was all heading - hence don’t tell. I was not literally claiming it was the US’ DADT policy.
1927–1953: Go to hell.
1953–1964: Nothing would fundamentally change.
1964–1982: Homosexuality is a disease.
1982–1991: Don’t ask, don’t tell.
But eVeRyThInG i WrOtE wAs PrAcTiCaLlY wRoNg.
How do you explain the continued prevalence of gay culture in a country that has so militantly sought to oppress it?
Oscar Wilde was gay, are you trying to suggest Victorian Britain wasn’t homophobic and repressive because gay culture survived?
Gay people exist across time and space, we are biologically driven to be as such. We can’t be killed off, only driven underground or into repression.
Victorian England was phenomenally gay. The English practically invented “cruising in the park”, because so many homosexual men were looking to hook up with one another in the major metro areas. It was the persistent open and free expression of queerness that prompted a reactionary parliament to try and criminalize it.
You’re staring at a five alarm fire and concluding nothing is hot because so many state bureaucrats are spraying water everywhere.
Oscar Wilde’s huge and lasting popularity was clear evidence of queer English culture persevering over the purdish Protestant ethos.