Olga. Love and Faith Are Not Dead

The journal Risk appeared on the cusp of the Soviet and post-Soviet eras. It belonged to a category of LGBTQIA publications that saw Russia as part of Western culture from which it had been violently severed by the Soviet experiment. These periodicals envisioned a post-Soviet Russia that would rejoin the West and resume an interrupted Western cultural evolution. This included adoption of the West’s recent turn towards sexual and gender-identity pluralism. In this 1991 article the subject Olga Ganeeva tells her story of being subjected, against her will, to inpatient psychiatric treatment, including being confined to a ward with grievously mentally ill patients and injected with a number of substances provoking adverse reactions. These events were set in motion when it was discovered that Olga — a student living in a dormitory — was involved in a romantic relationship with another woman. She describes the deep psychological wounds this experience has left and the damage it has done not only to the deeply valued relationship that precipitated these events, but to her relationships to other people generally, to her ability to trust people and form attachments. This piece is a document of the way women who pursued sexual relationships with other women were persecuted in the Soviet Union, and it testifies to the gender divide in the Soviet system’s response to homosexuality. Male homosexuality was criminalized and punished via the criminal justice system, if somewhat selectively. There was a hierarchical dimension to sexual relations between men, and in the penal system and military, homosexual activity was a means of subjugation. Whereas “passive” homosexual behavior (meaning, being on the receiving end of penetrative sex) consigned men to persecution and ostracism, “active” homosexuality could enhance an inmate or soldier’s masculine status.

By contrast, because it did not interfere with the masculine prestige on which patriarchy is predicated, lesbianism was not criminalized but pathologized. Understanding lesbianism as an illness rather than a crime or vice, the Soviet system treated sexual relations between women as a single undifferentiated category. Absent was the preoccupation with distinguishing between “masculinizing” and “feminizing” behaviors, the view of specific female homosexual acts as mechanisms of social elevation or humiliation, or the notion that sexual behaviors could compromise a woman’s “feminine identity.” Nonetheless, while their sexual behavior was not criminalized and their social status not necessarily jeopardized, women whose same-sex attraction and relations came to light suffered the traumas associated with forced, often residential “treatments” or “care,” invasive surveillance, and the destruction of crucial relationships. The article’s author expresses hope that a post-Soviet rapprochement with the West could produce an intellectual evolution and better understanding and treatment of LGBTQ people in Russia.