Raid at Shans. Gays triumph.

This 1996 piece announces a victory for the gay night club Shans in what, by the early 1990s, was a familiar scenario: police raids for purposes of intimidation and extortion. Unsurprisingly for a gay night club in 1990s Moscow, Shans has a murky history. By most accounts, it was opened in 1993 by a “businessman” named Michael Morgenstern, and closed in 2002. In 1993, the new Constitution of the Russian Federation led 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- 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 been semi-clandestine, at times semi-legal establishments, often operated by organized criminals. Russian equivalents sprouted in the legally questionable 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 Andronikov 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 into 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 club’s operators tried to advertise in ways that would reach their specific target audience without attracting unwanted attention from outsiders, but this strategy was not sustainable. The club did massive business, drawing celebrity visitors both domestic and foreign, and enjoyed the cachet of a semi-secret, semi-hidden, glamorous underground scene. Soon, however, the club’s burgeoning visibility created the need for more robust security, while its wide notoriety and visible profitability made it a target for anti-gay aggressors, corrupt law enforcement, and other hostile agents. Possibly because of these burdens, and also 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 (1872-1929). 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 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. At Shans in 1996, the officers tried to film club patrons in an apparent attempt at blackmail, which the Triangle Center Bulletin 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, remained vulnerable to individual and organized harassment in post-Soviet Russia.