Raid at Shans. Gays triumph.

This piece announces a 1996 victory for the gay night club Shans in what in the early 1990s had been a familiar scenario: police raids of gay night clubs for purposes of intimidation and extortion.

Unsurprisingly for a gay nightclub in 1990s Moscow, Shans has a rather murky history. By most accounts, the club was opened in 1993 by a “businessman” named Michael Morgenstern, and closed in 2002. In 1993, the new Constitution of the Russian Federation was introduced, leading to the repeal of a longstanding law stipulating prison sentences of up to five years for consensual sexual relations between adult males.

Legal status notwithstanding, gay, transgender and sexually fluid or gender-fluid men were still a very vulnerable group in 1990s Russia, where the broader culture remained hostile toward these modes of male identity and behavior. Meanwhile, the reintroduction of private enterprise produced a post-Soviet Russian take on a Western classic—the gay bar or gay night club. Before the “Pride” era in the West, these establishments had long been semi-clandestine, at times semi-legal establishments, often operated by organized criminals. Russian versions of these businesses sprout up in the legally murky and culturally destabilized environment of the 1990s, when new private business interests recognized an opportunity afforded by the recent decriminalization of sexual relations between men.

Shans was located next to the fourteenth-century Anronnikov Monastery in a huge structure built between 1929 and 1933 as an arts and recreation club for workers of the Serp i Molot (Hammer and Sickle) factory. The originally constructivist building was modified in the 1950s to bring it more in line with the neoclassical aesthetic of that era. In the 1980s the run-down structure became one of the main performance venues for Soviet rock music.

The operators tried to advertise in strategic ways that would draw their specific target audience without alerting people outside that target audience, but ultimately this was not sustainable. The club did a massive business, was a draw for celebrity visitors domestic and foreign, a came to enjoy the cachet of a semi-secret, semi-hidden glamorous underground scene. Visibility became increasingly difficult to control, which entailed an imperative for more robust security; wide notoriety and visible profitability made Shans a target for anti-gay aggressors, corrupt law-enforcement agents, and other hostile categories. Possibly because of these burdens, and because the owners of the building increased the rent substantially, Shans is said to have closed in 2002.

Some years later, rumor had it that a new club was to open in the same space under the name “Diaghilev,” for the early twentieth-century openly gay ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev. This new venue was to be a second iteration of a club in Moscow’s Hermitage Garden that was destroyed by fire in 2008. These plans were never realized.

The police raid described in this issue of the Triangle Center bulletin on the one hand recalls repressive action from an earlier era of Western history—for instance, the raids that provoked the Stonewall Riots in New York in June 1969. But it also points to the persistence in post-Soviet Russia — three years after repeal of the sodomy law — of this type of persecution, perpetrated by law enforcement agencies accustomed to homosexuality as an illegal category, and to homosexual men as a group without the means to resist harassment, extortion, and other abuses. In the case of Shans, the officers tried to film club patrons with a video camera in an apparent attempt at blackmail, which the Triangle Center bulletin in 1996 describes as an act of “nostalgia” for a time when gay men’s shame and fear was easier to exploit. The mention of the man of “Caucasian ethnicity” singled out by the officers points to a wider prejudice against ethnic minorities, who, even when not part of LGBTQ communities, were very vulnerable to individual and organized harassment in post-Soviet Russia.