“Olga: Love and Faith Have Not Disappeared”

The journal Risk appeared on the cusp of the Soviet and post-Soviet eras. It belonged to a category of LGBTQ+ publications that saw Russia as part of a 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, resuming an interrupted cultural evolution toward Western norms—including the West’s then-recent turn towards sexual- and gender-identity pluralism. 

 

In this 1991 article, the subject, Olga Ganeeva, tells the 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 substances that provoked 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 left and the damage it did not only to the deeply valued relationship that precipitated her incarceration, but to her relationships to people more generally, and to her ability to trust people and form attachments. 

 

In documenting Soviet persecution of women who pursued sexual relationships with other women, this piece simultaneously testifies to the gender divide in the 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 the receptive partner 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 instead 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.” 

 

Although lesbians’ sexual behavior was not criminalized and their social status not necessarily jeopardized to the same extent as those of gay men, 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 the hope that a post-Soviet rapprochement with the West could produce an intellectual evolution and better understanding, and treatment, of LGBTQ people in Russia.