1917–1927: Don’t ask, don’t tell.

According to Wayne R. Dynes, some sections of the Bolsheviks of the 1920s actively considered homosexuality a “[social] illness to be cured” or an example of “bourgeois degeneracy” while other Bolsheviks believed it should be legally/socially tolerated and respected in the new socialist society.

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.

Under Joseph Stalin, the Soviet government recriminalised sex between men through a decree that was signed in 1933.[14] The decree was part of a broader campaign against “deviant” behavior and “Western degeneracy”. On 7 March 1934, Article 121 was added to the criminal code of the Soviet Union. It expressly prohibited male homosexuality, punishing “muzhelozhstvo” with the sentencing of up to five years of hard labour in prison. There were no criminal statutes regarding sex between women. During the Soviet era, Western observers believed that between 800 and 1,000 men were imprisoned each year under Article 121

1953–1964: Nothing would fundamentally change.

After Stalin died in 1953, he was replaced by Nikita Khrushchev, who proceeded to liberalise Stalin-era laws regarding marriage, divorce, and abortion, but the anti-gay criminal law remained. The Khrushchev government believed that absent of a criminal law against homosexuality, the sex between men that occurred in the prison environment would spread into the general population as they released many Stalin-era prisoners. Whereas the Stalin government conflated homosexuality with pedophilia, the Khrushchev government conflated homosexuality with the situational, sometimes forced, sex acts between male prisoners.

1964–1982: Homosexuality is a disease.

Those legal scholars, who believed that consensual homosexuality should not be a crime, argued that it was a disease, which had to be dealt with by medical knowledge. They also contended that homosexuality was a congenital condition and therefore gay people were not guilty of being different from others. Finally, these scholars argued that investigating sodomy cases, where both partners had consensual sex, was not only pointless, but technically difficult. Other legal scholars, mainly those who worked for the Interior Ministry educational institutions, opposed the idea of decriminalising consensual homosexuality. They criticised their pro-decriminalisation colleagues and argued that such propositions were ill-timed and dangerous, since homosexuality could easily spread if not controlled by the law. Likewise, they believed that homosexuality was inconsistent with the Communist Morality

1982–1991: Don’t ask, don’t tell.

In 1983, a group of 30 Russian gay men met and attempted to organise a gay rights organisation under the name «Гей-лаборатория» («Голубая лаборатория») “Gay lab” / (“Blue lab”). At this point, homosexual relations were still punishable by a term of up to five years in prison. The group was put under pressure by the KGB and finally broke up in 1986.[43] Public discussion about re-legalizing private, consensual adult homosexual relations was not permitted until later in the glasnost period.

A poll conducted in 1989 reported that homosexuals were the most hated group in Russian society and that 30 percent of those polled felt that homosexuals should be “liquidated”.[18] In a 1991 public opinion poll conducted in Chelyabinsk, 30 percent of the respondents aged 16 to 30 years old felt that homosexuals should be “isolated from society”, 5 percent felt they should be “liquidated”, 60 percent had a “negative” attitude toward gay people and 5 percent labeled their sexual orientation “unfortunate”.[44] From 1989 to 1990, the Moscow gay rights organisation «Ассоциация сексуальных меньшинств» (“Association of Sexual Minorities”), led by Evgenia Debryanskaya, was permitted to exist, with Roman Kalinin given permission to publish a gay newspaper, Tema.

But eVeRyThInG i WrOtE wAs PrAcTiCaLlY wRoNg.