Homosexuality in Soviet Prisons and Camps

The early post-Soviet years saw the inversion of Soviet-era social and cultural hierarchies. This process of re-evaluation involved revising the historical record to redress the erasure of previously “undesirable” perspectives. Already during perestroika, formerly classified archives of Soviet state agencies and the Communist Party were opened and explored as part of these efforts. After 1991 this enterprise was to some extent sponsored by Western research institutions. The lives of LGBTQ people (or “sexual minorities,” as they were called in 1990s Russia) were largely excluded from this broader revisionist historiographic project. Homosexual males, subjected to horrific abuses as the lowliest inmate category within the Soviet penal system, appeared ineligible for the solemn reverence accorded to other persecuted minorities, including political, religious, and cultural dissidents. At a moment when legacies of dissident suffering conferred righteous prestige, this article by LGBTQ activists Slava Mogutin and Sonja Franeta attempts to claim due recognition for the homosexual men in Soviet prisons and camps. The authors argue that homosexuals are not only dissidents in their own right, but dissidents among dissidents, dissidents still repressed in the post-Soviet era. They point to a corpus of writing on Soviet LGBTQ lives that has, by the time of writing, appeared abroad, and juxtapose this record of memoirs and historical accounts with the “few meager pages” devoted to these figures within the still marginal contemporary domestic Russian LGBTQ press. Tamizdat — the publishing abroad of literature, memoirs, and other speech unpublishable in the Soviet Union — had been crucial for post-Soviet efforts to reconstitute a Russian history and cultural identity scattered by the Revolution and the rest of the Soviet experiment. This article suggests a de facto Soviet-like censorship largely persists for LGBTQ persons in post-Soviet Russia. The reference to the meager, marginal post-Soviet Russian LGBTQ press seems intended as an index of the hostility of the broader contemporary culture to a public reckoning with gay men’s plight. The authors’ references to Nazi camps and fascism, and especially the application of the epithet “fascist” to the Soviet order, point to the reassessment of Soviet values after 1991. Mogutin and Franeta target the Soviet legacy of hypocrisy—the betrayal of its early promises of total gender equality in a return to patriarchal attitudes toward gender roles and sexuality in the Stalinist 1930s and thereafter. As the sodomy law is repealed, Mogutin and Franeta’s article claims the newly revered “dissident” status for a category still widely despised even among dissident celebrants. They do this in a lengthy article spanning 2 issues of the widely circulated, general-audience magazine Novoe vremia. It is noteworthy that this article would have been unpublishable in Russia a full half-year before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Legislation enacted in July 2021 outlawed comparisons of the Nazi and Soviet regimes in print.