Filed Under: Topic > Soviet Dissidents > Yelena Bonner: "Nothing Interests Me Less than This Problem"
Yelena Bonner: "Nothing Interests Me Less than This Problem"
Gessen's 1991 interview with Bonner, reprinted in 1992
Elena Bonner — "Nothing Interests Me Less Than This Problem"
The interview was kindly provided to us by Masha Gessen, editor of "The Advocate" magazine. The conversation took place in Boston in the fall of 1991.
Elena Bonner: It seems to me that the preoccupation with AIDS is somewhat excessive.
Masha Gessen: Why?
E.B.: I don't know, apparently humanity needs to always have something that makes masses of people sick.
M.G.: So you think the danger of AIDS is exaggerated?
E.B.: I think the danger exists and specialists should deal with it, but is it necessary to inflict such psychological trauma on all of humanity? I'm not sure. I don't want to talk about AIDS anymore. I'm not a specialist.
M.G.: A conference of sexual minorities was held in the Soviet Union. What's your attitude toward this?
E.B.: Completely indifferent.
[Male voice: What are sexual minorities?]
E.B.: Lesbians, homosexuals—there are fewer of them in society than people living a normal sexual life, so they became minorities. With the degree of freedom that exists in the modern world, everyone can engage in whatever sex they're more inclined toward. There's nothing to discuss here, it seems to me.
M.G.: But in the Soviet Union, people are still imprisoned for this.
E.B.: Not anymore.
M.G.: What do you mean, not anymore?!
E.B.: Not anymore.
M.G.: How do you know this?
E.B.: There simply aren't any homosexuals in prison now!
M.G.: Yes, there are! And when I was there in August, I actually met with imprisoned homosexuals.
E.B.: You were in a camp?
M.G.: I was in a prison in Leningrad.
E.B.: And were there many of them there?
M.G.: About ten people.
E.B.: Well, I didn't even know, I just haven't been interested in this problem. And it's quite possible that I'll be criticized for this.
M.G.: Who will criticize you?
E.B.: Well, someone always will.
Male voice: Did you meet with imprisoned homosexuals or with people imprisoned for homosexuality?
M.G.: With people imprisoned for homosexuality under Article 121. On average for 3-4 years...
E.B.: Were their partners of legal age?
M.G.: Yes, of legal age.
E.B.: Perhaps it's about rape?
M.G.: No... Do you think this article is fair?
E.B.: I believe this law should not exist.
M.G.: What's your attitude toward the fight against this law?
E.B.: None. It's not my concern. I can't be concerned about everything in the world.
M.G.: And what are you concerned about now?
E.B.: Well, more about other problems than about homosexuals. (Laughter). Well, I'm very worried about national conflicts in our country.
M.G.: In that case, I'm very interested in changes in the situation of sexual minorities and national-ethnic minorities.
E.B.: Well, these are completely different situations.
M.G.: In what way?
E.B.: Well, I don't know, I perceive them as different, after all, not everything can be explained in such a way. I perceive them as problems of completely different significance. And I've already said that sexual freedom is a personal matter. Our law is stupid, of course, and I think it will be repealed.
M.G.: It's not in the new draft, but when do you think the new draft will be passed?
E.B.: It's very difficult to say, because they were planning to adopt the new criminal legislation as early as the beginning of summer 1989. But after that, so many changes have occurred, the Union has disintegrated, and each republic has begun to create its own new legislation. I think in Russia this will happen fairly soon.
M.G.: And if an organization of sexual minorities approached you for help?
E.B.: I would tell them it's not my concern—they should go to someone else.
M.G.: To whom, for example?
E.B.: I don't know, absolutely don't know.
M.G.: And have you personally ever known any homosexuals or lesbians?
E.B.: I don't know, because to find that out, I would need to conduct a survey, and I've never conducted surveys on this topic among my acquaintances.
M.G.: You never talk with your acquaintances about their personal lives?
E.B.: Almost never.
Male voice: You have personal acquaintances who are homosexuals.
E.B.: I do? Alyosha says that I have personal acquaintances who are homosexuals. Who are they, Alyoshenka?
Male voice: It doesn't matter, he didn't want to tell you.
Female voice: It doesn't matter. Enough.
M.G.: Let's say you found out that someone among your friends or acquaintances is a homosexual. Would that change your attitude?
E.B.: What business is it of mine? I don't care.
M.G.: And what's your attitude toward this, Alyosha?
Al.: Also indifferent. But if someone approached me for help or advice about real discrimination, I would probably try to help.
M.G.: People live with HIV for 6-10 years, and it's very difficult to find condoms.
E.B.: Sometimes it's difficult to find bread too, but bread is more important.
Female voice: Mom, what does "more important" mean...
E.B.: I haven't always been indifferent to condoms. But when I was pregnant, they were still available.
Female voice: Only because you had medical connections.
E.B.: I remember how in '85 I brought from America such a stack of these boxes with vaginal spirals, and customs absolutely wanted to unwrap them, and I said—You can't, they're sterile.
M.G.: Why did you bring them?
E.B.: There weren't any there, or they were very bad quality. And many people around needed them.
Masha Gessen, "The Advocate" USA
In 1991, the Russian-American journalist M. Gessen (1967-) interviewed Elena Bonner (1923-2011), a prominent human rights activist and widow of Nobel Prize-winning physicist and celebrated dissident Andrei Sakharov (1921-1989). In this interview, Gessen challenges Bonner’s apparent indifference to the plight of Russia’s “sexual minorities,” while Bonner openly defends her right to that indifference.
Their conversation took place in Boston the year before Gessen returned 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 then-Minister of Culture Vitaly Milonov—pushed the author and their family to leave Russia for the West. At the time of the Bonner interview, meanwhile, 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 toward 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 regarding her attitude toward 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. Bonner, speaking in 1991, 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 assertion 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 sentiment in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia.
To some extent, this interview reads like a dissident changing-of-the-guard. Bonner represents the legitimately venerable old-guard late-Soviet dissident culture with all its very real heroism—but also its failures and blind spots. Gessen is carrying the dissident torch into the post-Soviet era and championing the sexually different—a category ignored by the Soviet-era dissidents preoccupied with other causes and/or themselves conservative in this area of life.