Elena Bonner: "Nothing Interests Me Less than This Problem"

In 1992, the Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen (1967-) interviewed Elena Bonner (1923-2011), a prominent human rights activist and widow of Nobel Prize-winning physicist and celebrated dissident Andrei Sakharov. In this interview Gessen challenges Bonner’s apparent indifference to the plight of Russia’s “sexual minorities,” and Bonner openly defends her right to that indifference.

Their conversation took place in Boston in the same year that Gessen would return to Moscow, where they would live and work for the next twenty-two years. In 2013, the Russian government’s anti-gay legislation—along with targeted, public attacks on Gessen by upper-level Putin administration figures like Vitaly Milonov—pushed the author and their family to leave Russia for the West. At the time of the Bonner interview, Gessen was an editor for The Advocate, an American LGBTQ magazine that began publication in 1967 and remains in print today. What emerges in this exchange between Gessen and Bonner, who had been lauded for her extraordinary courage in defense of the abused rights of Soviet citizens, is her profound disinterest in the rights and challenges facing post-Soviet LGBTQ Russians. Although she evinces no active antipathy towards LGTBQ people, Bonner’s assertive apathy speaks to the predicament LGBTQ Russians found themselves in during the early post-Soviet era. In response to a question re her attitude towards a recent Soviet conference on sexual minorities, Bonner’s response is “utter indifference.” In answer to the question of how she would respond to a request for help from a sexual-minority organization she says “I would tell them this isn’t my issue. Go ask someone else.”

Despite the advent of many new freedoms in the wake of the USSR’s fall, freedom from stigma, shame, and fear of repression remained elusive for those falling outside mainstream sexual norms. Even activists like Bonner, who had made their names championing other subaltern groups, tended to overlook the issue of LGBTQ rights. In her interview with Gessen, Bonner explicitly states, for example, that this issue is less urgently concerning than the plight of Russia’s national and ethnic minorities. As a truly heroic opponent of human rights abuses in the Soviet era, Bonner evidently felt she had to pick her battles—and fighting for LGBTQ rights was better left to others.

Defensible though Bonner’s views may seem, they represent a broader post-Soviet trend in which even famous Soviet and early post-Soviet human rights advocates remained aloof from the LGBTQ cause, as though homosexuality and sexual or gender fluidity were too “transgressive” for these energetic transgressors of Soviet legal and cultural boundaries. In this interview, Bonner is apparently unaware, and initially incredulous, that Article 121 of the Russian Criminal Code—which stipulated prison sentences for consensual homosexual relations between male adults—remains in force (although she ultimately concedes that this law should be repealed).

There is also a note of hesitation in Bonner’s statement that she and her colleagues would probably offer assistance to an LGBTQ Russian who came to them for help or guidance as a victim of discrimination. Her attitude that AIDS is a problem affecting only a marginal subset of the population, rather than an issue to which the broader population should attend, is a sad echo of Reagan-era attitudes in the United States, and also broadly representative of attitudes in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia.

This interview to some extent reads like a dissident changing-of-the-guard. Bonner represents the legitimately venerable old-guard late-Soviet dissident culture with all of its true herioism and also its failures and blind spots. Gessen is carrying the dissident torch into the post-Soviet era and championing the sexually different or sexually dissident — a category ignored by the Soviet-era dissidents preoccupied with other causes and/or themselves conservative in this area of life.