Soviet Homosexuals: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow

By Gennady Trifonov

The topic addressed in the title of these notes certainly deserves serious attention and could become the subject of in-depth research. Materials for such work can already be found in Soviet periodicals—in the writings of lawyers, sociologists, journalists, psychologists, infectious disease specialists, and sexologists. Today, homosexuals themselves have become more open and provide more complete answers to sociologists' questionnaires, although such surveys are conducted anonymously, not only because Soviet criminal law still provides for rather severe punishment for homosexual contacts, but mainly because our public opinion regarding homosexuals is still based on old dogmas and perceptions of homosexuals as people deserving public condemnation. Breaking this condemnation in favor of common sense, humanity, and tolerance seems almost impossible in our country for many reasons, which we will discuss further.

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The outside world already knows the general outlines of yesterday's—that is, pre-perestroika—situation of Soviet homosexuals. And it knows quite a lot.

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In the late 1930s, this issue interested the French writer André Gide when he visited the USSR. Even though the Nobel laureate chose a rather inappropriate time to visit the Soviet Union, unlike R. Rolland and L. Feuchtwanger, he left behind a scorchingly truthful book explaining to the Western world the components of the Soviet system, all its hypocrisy and cruelty, the nature of our sanctimonious morality, the treachery of our moralists, and the inhumanity of our laws. And although Western intellectuals have written mountains of sometimes superficial but often quite objective articles and books about us since Gide, their authors never or almost never touched upon our topic of interest in their writings. And certainly no one has ever counted the number of victims of criminal prosecution of homosexuals in the Soviet Union. Soviet human rights defenders of the so-called "stagnation" era didn't do this, and didn't even try to do it. Moreover, Soviet dissidents, finding themselves in prisons and camps, were most concerned about the status of political prisoners and always spoke of all other criminals with obvious contempt, forgetting that in this case, those in confinement were the same as them—living people, victims of the Soviet punitive system, capable of pursuing its goals guided by blind necessity.

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Having called the criminal article of the Criminal Code "filthy" in his "Archipelago," Alexander Solzhenitsyn did not consider it necessary to find words of sympathy for this category of GULAG martyrs.

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Varlam Shalamov went even further in this sense in his terrible Kolyma prose. With astonishing ruthlessness, calling things by their real names, with unprecedented artistic power, he exposes the slave morality and psychology, illustrating the horror of camp existence with numerous human fates, and where he considers it necessary, he always refers to the homosexuals of the GULAG with unprecedented hatred, apparently sharing in this sense the state policy towards these people. At one time, these pages of Shalamov's books and manuscripts made a depressing impression on me, prompting me to stop my research on the work of this major master of Russian artistic prose.

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For a long time, the detention of those convicted under Article 121 of the Criminal Code in our "correctional" institutions fell outside the field of public attention. The West addressed this topic only when it intersected with the general political context. The fundamental works of American scholars S. Karlinsky and V. Kozlovsky stand apart in this respect. Both touch upon this problem only in the cultural-historical aspect, and the publication of their research here, in the absence of domestic ones, could add much to our knowledge of the problem, help dispel existing myths, and develop correct guidelines for the "sexual majority" in relation to the carriers of sexual exclusivity in our country.

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However, the rare publications on this topic that have appeared in recent years in our magazines Ogonyok, Neva, Literaturnaya Gazeta did not cause reader bewilderment, not to mention indignation at the situation of these people behind barbed wire. And such reactionary publications as Molodaya Gvardiya, Nash Sovremennik, Sovetskiy Voin, touching on this issue, not only march in step with the traditional Russian dislike of homosexuals generally accepted in Russia, but also incite additional hatred in society for homosexuals among "ordinary Soviet people." It should be especially noted that the ideas of homophobia spread by these publications are very closely connected with the ideas of anti-Semitism, giving rise to the most nightmarish associations in any thinking person. But if the Jewish author Lev Razgon insists that in the period from January 1, 1935, to June 22—the beginning of the Second World War—7 million people were shot in our country, no one even mentions the number of homosexuals who died during this period. The circumstances of the death of such outstanding figures of Russian culture as Boris Yarkho, the artist Yurkun, the diplomat Chicherin, and others, are modestly hushed up in our country. Mikhail Kuzmin miraculously avoided the camp. "How we, contemporaries, were born, that he died in his own bed!" Nikolai Klyuev ended his days in unrelenting torment. The famous Vadim Kozin miraculously survived and now lives in Magadan.

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To somehow smooth over this impression, the casuistic thought of today's exposers of Stalinism hurried to label "a prominent Soviet state and party figure, participant in the October Revolution," a member of the presidium of the Cheka since 1919, and since 1925 the chairman of the OGPU, Vyacheslav Menzhinsky, as a pederast. To this, however, they immediately hasten to add that Menzhinsky was a highly educated polyglot and connoisseur of ancient literature, and by profession—a researcher of the history of world ballet.

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Avoiding attributing lofty aspirations to the odious figure of Stalin's executioner Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov, his former colleagues now accuse him "of an addiction to pederasty," informing the modern public that Yezhov "learned this craft in fascist Germany" when he was there on an exchange of experience.

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With such and similar nonsense, our airwaves and the pages of the so-called independent press are filled today. How can "new thinking" emerge in the minds of Soviet people whose lives are oversaturated with the daily need to answer the question "Who is to blame?" for their everyday problems?

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The current economic situation and political instability, one of the lowest living standards in the Eurasian world, do not at all dispose Soviet citizens to new approaches in solving old problems, but rather generate new problems of an economic, nationalistic, and moral nature. The current Soviet concept of human rights has not affected the existing and operating legislative norms as applied to the field of private morality. The universal values that our parliamentarians (read: people's representatives) care about still have a declarative character, and are more aimed at tempting the gullible West to extend a helping hand to us as soon as possible, before we all stretch our legs from universal impoverishment. The new government, using the old legislative paraphernalia, has allowed the much-desired multi-party system. Among other parties, the libertarian party emerges, if I am not mistaken...

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The new party very quickly brought to the orchestra of the political establishment a leader of a new type. He turned out to be a nice young man who very soon found himself among the contenders for the role of head of the Russian state and, apparently, concurrently the publisher and editor of a strange little newspaper. Having found equally nice sponsors for it, but experiencing an obvious deficit in publications of any balanced material on its pages, the publisher is now replicating—so far quite modestly—portraits of other people's buttocks of the worst quality. And expects the sympathy of the reading public in doing so! Thank God that the editorial board of this truly pederastic sheet warns in advance: "The sale of the newspaper to boys and girls under 18 is prohibited." For neither the young nor the mature reader can this sheet, alas, offer or invent new ideas, fresh aesthetics, established ethical norms, artistic and printing innovation, or serious answers to many questions. But how cleverly the West is comforted!!! Both in America and in Europe, where I first happened to pick up Tema, interested people and organizations immediately gush: at last, freely convertible currency in our country has found a worthy application. The West in this case, as in many others, could retain the right to repeat Pushkin's words: "Ah, it's not hard to deceive me. I myself am glad to be deceived."

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Against the backdrop of nascent democracy in the former Leningrad, the Tchaikovsky Foundation was organized. Without advertising convulsions, licking the new government, the need for universal persecution of yesterday's oppressors, throwing Communist idols off pedestals, and demonstrating genitals, the Foundation's activists without false shame and pathos deal with the real problems of real people—those infected with AIDS, prisoners in local colonies, street youth obsessed with permissiveness. True, for the same purposes in the reviving Petersburg, "Wings" was created on the initiative from above. But in this case, we can only be interested in the result, which is still too early to discuss today.

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An important action seems to me to be the holding of a Soviet-American symposium on human rights for homosexuals and lesbians and the fight against AIDS in Leningrad and Moscow this summer. The Soviet press in this case also considered it possible to comment on the event in the most ironic expressions, thereby tuning the average citizen to perceive what happened in a playful tone. While completely dissociating itself from the presence of "sexual minorities" in the country, the Soviet mass media—in this case television and the press—seemed to inform the public about homosexuals: "Yes, they are far, very far from the people." The same position towards homosexuals is taken by the official Soviet culture. That is why it seems appropriate to briefly outline its current state here.

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Let's start with literature, which has always been of paramount importance for Russia and the Russian consciousness, has always been its spiritual mentor and an expression of the national spirit.

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As if abandoning the principles of well-known realism, our literature, having genuine masters in its arsenal, does not consider it necessary to portray the living life of people in all their diversity. Its heterosexual clichés equally depict everything high and low, and the authors of these clichés, with their artistic vision, are not able to penetrate beyond the known stereotypes and offer the intelligent Russian reader proper ideas about alternative human connections and relationships. Homosexual domestic authors with their values, moral concepts of good and evil, their artistic vision of life, their human and sensual experience still prefer to be published abroad. Meanwhile, having reached a commercial level, such literature (including book graphics) would undoubtedly be in demand here and could offer us an unknown aesthetics based on the best examples of world artistic culture. Of course, vulgarity, cheap naturalism, frank pathology, all kinds of consumer goods and "nonsensical Russian stereotypes," quasi-literary crafts on a given theme, joint efforts of publishers and the public would most naturally be blocked. The literary market in this case would become not only diverse (as it turns out, its diversity today is extremely monotonous), but would acquire the features of a civilized market that forms intellectual needs. But we, as always, are lazy, incurious, sluggish, cowardly, and morally unshakable. Such a purely English phenomenon as Oscar Wilde is unthinkable in Russia for the next three hundred years, because the number of Moseses ready to lead us out of our own Egypt, although increasing daily, our soul still cherishes native darkness, wandering in which and crushing each other, we assert ourselves with enviable self-forgetfulness.

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By the way, all the same can be said about our cinema, about our theater, about our fine arts, as long as they are measured by the standards of officialdom and sensuality free from prejudice. I do not doubt that homosexual art has always been and will be elitist among all peoples, but if there is no elite, there is no society. And what we today strive to call society is a community of equally destitute men and women, old people and adolescents. The homosexual culture of the modern West is not isolated from general cultural processes. It interacts magnificently with universal human culture, enriches it with new colors, feeds it with new ideas, inserting its own page into the register of Western prosperity, polishes human thought, adorns itself with the achievements of the civilized world. And if we are knocking today on the pan-European house, we must understand this and prepare ourselves to be perceived by the West somewhat adequately.

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Among Soviet homosexuals, in relation to Western freedoms, there is a common opinion that their Western like-minded people have been prospering since the time of Adam. The long, often tragic, frequently even bloody history of the struggle of sexual minorities in Western countries for their rights has its chroniclers. And if in wonderful Sweden, for example, any persecution of homosexuals since 1947 is a criminally punishable act, and in England only with the departure of Mrs. Margaret Thatcher from the post of head of government did our British like-minded people breathe a sigh of relief, and in the freedom-loving United States, local gays and lesbians in New York and San Francisco annually march to defend their rights, still afraid to openly declare themselves in the towns of "one-story America" and in flowering Japan approximately the same picture, we in the former USSR and future CIS should also get busy, and not hope that along with humanitarian aid from the West, homosexual aid will descend upon us. Individual landings of Western volunteers at best will enlighten us in legal and hygienic terms, but will not solve our own problems for us. That is why it seems to me that these problems should begin to be discussed at the parliamentary level. For examples to follow, one does not need to travel far—nearby is picturesque Finland, populated by beautiful, hardworking, and intelligent people. In the same vein, it is advisable to turn to the German experience.

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It is well known that Germany and Russia were infected with the virus of socialism almost simultaneously. The inventor of the Solovetsky concentration camps gladly shared his discovery with the celestial beings of the Third Reich. Homophobia and anti-Semitism became state policies of the two countries almost simultaneously. In Himmler's gas chambers, by the end of the war, 6 million Jews and as many homosexuals were exterminated /*/ . Since the introduction of the well-known article into the Soviet Criminal Code, how many Soviet homosexuals—by inclination or coercion—have perished in the Kolyma ice? Who has counted? /**/. Meanwhile, our most quiet and kindest Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin warned future historians: "History must have a long memory for evil." However, in our country, the oppression of homosexuals is considered the highest civic virtue, has always been considered so, and has not been recorded in historical annals by anyone.

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Discussing Germany, it is appropriate to recall Solzhenitsyn, who once wrote: "Western Germany was filled with a cloud of repentance before economic prosperity came there." We Russians should comprehend the necessity of repentance with special diligence, bring to the burial mounds of our murdered, along with icons and flowers, some moral obligation to search for peace within ourselves and to acquire peace in the world of people. Only then will some kind of enlightenment smile upon us in the darkness of our sinfulness, and our material life will acquire approximate features of possible well-being. Then crowds of crazed seekers of foreign counters will not tear out of the country, and those who remain will not have to crush each other in bread lines, humiliate each other, hate, wish each other only evil. And to reject the claims of commissioned patriots to our exclusivity, which for more than seventy years has shielded us from the normal course of life of European peoples.

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Advocating for the abolition of the notorious article in our country, I am not at all convinced that this abolition will change anything in the psychology of the Soviet person. And here it must be said that the overwhelming number of homosexuals in our country, both through their rejection and sometimes forced deviant behavior, have contributed to the exasperation against themselves from the heterosexual part of society. This question is very serious and requires separate reflection, separate analysis, separate sociology, and can be somewhat objectively illuminated when we have at least relative data on the police and judicial practice of prosecutions for sodomy. My pessimism is based on the fact that for a long time the Soviet authorities seriously considered homosexuals as political criminals, because such cases were always investigated by state security agencies, apparently also because the KGB bodies hoped to more easily recruit informers among homosexuals (it cannot be said that they did not succeed!) /***/ . The question of the politicization of homosexuality in the USSR has its roots in the early 30s. Let's listen to the then Prosecutor General of Russia N. Krylenko:

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"In our environment, the environment of workers who stand on the point of view of normal relations between the sexes, who build their society on healthy principles, we don't need gentlemen of this kind. Who are mainly our clients in such cases? Workers? No! Declassed riffraff. Declassed riffraff either from the dregs of society, or from the remnants of the exploiting classes. [...] Together with them, alongside them, under this pretext, in secret filthy dens and brothels, other work often takes place—counter-revolutionary work. That is why we hand over these disorganizers of our new social relations, which we want to create among people, among men and women, among workers, these gentlemen to court and establish for them a punishment of up to 5 years of imprisonment..."

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This moral and political justification for repression against a certain part of his clients was substantiated by Krylenko literally a year before his own execution in a report published in the journal Soviet Justice No. 7 for 1936. Since those distant times, in every textbook of Criminal Law, the necessity of persecuting homosexuals in the USSR is based on the same principles, excellently assimilated by Soviet society and not changed even in the liberal years of Khrushchev's "thaw." Here we must give credit to Soviet journalism, which until very recent times wrote about homosexuals in line with the above. And the magical effect of the printing press on Russian minds was noticed by Pushkin! Today, it is true, completely different voices are heard. But they belong, alas, not to modern thought leaders, not to those in power, not to outstanding actors on our political scene, but to all the same "clients" of the Soviet prosecutor's office:

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"Only in our country do they persecute homosexuals, what could be simpler—ban or imprison, and if not imprison, then not promote to a position, not let abroad. We, the 'blues,' are forced to hide our relationships. This phenomenon, hushed up before, has now come out. How long can one be hypocritical? It's time to repeal the article..." (Ogonyok, No. 44, 1991).

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Due to well-known and generally understood reasons, our remarkable society is permeated from top to bottom with criminal morality. The founder of our state, citizen V. Ulyanov, with his associates, spent a considerable number of years in prisons and exile. After recovering in emigration and returning to their historical homeland, they transformed from defendants into plaintiffs and according to these claims in the first post-revolutionary years led the people to happiness along the steepest routes. The initiative that had fallen from the hands of the founder was immediately picked up by J.V. Stalin. This initiative has somewhat faded in our days, but with the explosion of criminal activity in our country, the current number of prisoners in our prisons and camps will soon increase from a million to the required amount. True, now economic necessity has replaced political necessity. How the new classes will behave in the new situation—there is no need to guess. The August 1991 revolution has just as little to do with law as the October Revolution. For the morality of any revolution is inescapable. What awaits Soviet homosexuals after the hypothetical repeal of Article 121 is difficult to imagine, because no one except homosexuals themselves is concerned with their legal status. Without the support of the morally and mentally healthy part of society, the existence in our country of public organizations fighting for human rights for homosexuals and lesbians brings additional irritation to society. Let us not deny that the carriers of sexual exclusivity in our country, as elsewhere, are people who, due to the indicated reasons, think non-standardly. And sexual dissent, unlike political dissent, has always been suppressed more successfully in our country, because it was supported literally by all segments of society. The processes of democratization have not changed anything in this sense in the national consciousness. That is why instead of the abolished article of the law directed against homosexuals, in my opinion, there should appear, as in Sweden, a law protecting their rights. The morality of the Swedes did not suffer from such a law in any way, and the so-called Swedish socialism, which we very much like to refer to, has led the country to a flourishing state. All the same can be said about other European countries.

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The legalization of homosexual relations in our country between people of all ages would greatly change the physiology of our society, would change the face of the country, the facial expression of each of its citizens. Tolerance towards individual morality would save society from universal moral laxity, would free our art, would revive our literature, our cinema, would make people's everyday life more aestheticized. Such tolerance would be a solid guarantee of understanding that democracy is not a fair distribution of material goods, but an even distribution of personal responsibility of citizens to each other and to the law. The number of sexual and any other violent crimes would sharply decline. Juvenile delinquency with its incredible aggressiveness would be softened by the very fact that the problems of youth development would be dealt with by people who profess values different from those that exist. What would return to people is that without which any life of any person is meaningless, dull, and insignificant—Love. The pediatrician and writer, the greatest pedagogue of our century, Janusz Korczak, wrote about this long before me and in conditions not at all conducive to this.

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I finish these notes on a cheerless note. I guess about their untimeliness. I know that the considerations expressed in them will not find the desired response even in those hearts that I would like to count on. But my own sorrowful experience in my country, the trips I have made in recent years to America and Western Europe, my return from them to the same country, torn apart by poverty and madness, multiply my despair, increase my anxiety for those who will be destined to repeat my experience and independently return to the need to comprehend it. However, not to interfere in the existing state of affairs is even less forgivable.

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St. Petersburg, November - 1991.

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EDITORIAL NOTES:

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* According to the English philosopher David Fernbach, the number of homosexuals who passed through Nazi camps and prisons during the 12 years of fascist rule is slightly more than 50 thousand people (see the afterword to the memoirs of H. Heger in the next issues of our journal) 

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** According to Valery Chalidze (The Advocate magazine from December 3, 1991) and Sergei Shcherbakov (Collection of materials from the Conference on Sexual Cultures of Europe, Sexual Cultures in Europe, Amsterdam, 1992), annually in the USSR under Article 121 (both parts) from 800 to 1400 people were convicted, that is, for 59 years of the existence of the law on sodomy, the number of its victims exceeds 60 thousand people. 

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*** According to the newspaper "Top Secret" for August last year (article "The Bluest Case of the KGB"), this secret department only in exceptional cases dealt with homosexuals—primarily those who had access to state secrets and numerous contacts with foreign countries.