I don't typically get into it with MLs on here, but this concerns my special interest very specifically, so sure, let's talk about the recriminalization of homosexuality under Joseph Stalin. For the record, I would not consider myself to be an anti-communist, but I would consider myself anti-Stalin.
First of all, itās important to understand the context of which homosexuality was decriminalized by Lenin and the Bolshevikās in the first place. It wasnāt because of any movements, or any personal preference on his partārather, it was a political move.
First of all, I think that it is inaccurate to say that homosexuality was decriminalized post-Revolution by "Lenin and the Bolsheviks." There is no evidence that Lenin had anything to do with it. I think it's fair to say that if he had agitated against it, he presumably could have prevented such a change from coming about, but he may not have even known this was happening. He had already gotten very ill by '22. Maybe he would've hated it if he'd known about it. Maybe he knew about it, and rolled his eyes at it, and was disgusted, but didn't care enough to agitate against it. Maybe he heard about it and said "Good job, comrades, getting rid of this regressive and cruel law!" We don't have the evidence to understand what his opinion was or would have been - but I do personally think that the absence of evidence suggests that he was not personally lobbying in favor of decriminalization.
Secondly, I don't really know what it means to describe the decriminalization of homosexuality as a "political move." Of course any change to the laws of a country is necessarily political. If you mean that the Bolsheviks didn't do it out of a concern for human rights, I don't agree. Certainly the decriminalization, if such it can be called, of 1917, was not an intentional choice - it was just a mass repeal of all laws. But in 1922, after the Civil War, when they were writing up new laws, they did deliberately choose not to include a sodomy law. Sodomy laws were proposed and discussed at various stages of the process (and indeed, the 1922 legislation did include anti-queer laws - just not for Russians. More on this later). They didn't just forget to criminalize homosexuality, they deliberately chose not to do so.
A Soviet jurist wrote, "Science [...] had taken the view that the commission of the act of sodomy with adults infringed no rights whatsoever, and that [adults] were free to express their sexual feeling in any form, and that the intrusion of the law into this field is a holdover of church teachings and of the ideology of sinfulness." The USSR published an encyclopedia which crowed about the decriminalization of homosexuality and said that no civilized, rational, community country like the USSR would ever have a sodomy law. The Soviet Health Commissioner went to visit Magnus Hirschfeld's gay rights institute in Weimar Germany and told all the gay people how cool it was that they were making homosexuality legal. The proponents of decriminalization knew they were passing a human rights law based on the understanding that sodomy laws were cruel and regressive, and they were successful. This is a win for your guys, right?
[Citation for this section: Dan Healey, Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia]
This decriminalization was upheld until the 1934 article 121, which is said to have outlawed homosexuality, but was specifically naming and targeting pederasty. Pederasty is the act of an adult male having a sexual relationship with a young male.
The 1922 criminal code explicitly included, in article 167, a prohibition on āsatisfaction of sexual lust in perverted formsā with sexually immature persons. That is to say, it was already illegal for an adult man to have sex with a boy, so it doesn't make sense to propose that the 1934 legislation established that. The Soviets did a lot of things I don't approve of, and we're about to get into a bunch of them, but they didn't just, like, forget to make child rape illegal for a solid decade until Stalin came along. [Citation: Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia again]
Your characterization of the text of the 1934 legislation and your characterization of the word "pederasty" in the Russian context are not accurate. Firstly, "pederasty" in the Russian context is even vaguer than in the English context. It is a weasel word even in English, where the word itself conflates homosexuality and pedophilia. But in Russian, it carries an even stronger implication of homosexuality and anal sex. There are historical documents in Russian describing an adult cisgendered man having sex with his adult cisgendered wife as "pederasty" because of the manner in which they did it. "Pederasty" was very commonly used as a crude term for homosexuals in Soviet times (probably still is in modern Russia), very much including adult men sleeping with other adult men.
But also, while Soviet officials apparently used the term "pederasty" to describe the law behind the scenes, the actual text of the law does not say "pederasty" (ŠŠµŠ“ŠµŃŠ°ŃŃŠøŃ). You can read the text of the new law here, in the original Russian. If you don't read Russian, you can consult Google Translate, a dictionary, or a bilingual friend.
The actual word used is "Š¼ŃŠ¶ŠµŠ»Š¾Š¶ŃŃŠ²Š¾", muzhelozhstvo, which is closer to "sodomy" in translation. As far as I know, the term "muzhelozhstvo" does not carry the connotation of pedophilia, but we don't need to wonder about the definition of the term, because the Soviet lawmakers helpfully define it for us as "sexual intercourse between a man and a man." The law is also divided into two categories: a penalty of up to five years in prison for muzhelozhstvo, and a penalty of up to eight years for muzhelozhstvo "committed by exploiting the dependent position of the victim, or by violence, for a fee, by profession or in public." Because it's divided into two separate types of muzhelozhstvo, we can see that the penalty of up to five years is explicitly for consensual sex between equals that is not sex work and is done in private.
In the resolution to change the law, the explicitly states Presidium of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR that they are "[extending] criminal liability for sodomy, i.e. sexual intercourse between a man and a man, to include voluntary intercourse, regardless of whether one of the participants has not reached puberty." They understood that child rape was already illegal and were explicitly acting to criminalize consensual sex between adult AMAB people.
Nonetheless, in 1922 legislation, homosexuality was decriminalized specifically in the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. This did not account for the entirety of the USSRāit was divisive, and remained a crime in a majority of the Soviet Union.
I believe when you say "It was divisive," you're referencing this claim from your source (Sangha Kommune):
The old anti-homosexual laws were retained in the Islamic Republics, and Christian Georgia, even after 1917, apparently as a means not to offend religious sensibilities in the area, at a time of otherwise great social upheaval.
This is an incorrect and, frankly, racist interpretation of the evidence. In the absence of any evidence, this blog assumes that the Islamic republics are more religiously homophobic than the Slavic republics, and that the Bolsheviks merely bowed to pre-existing local biases. This is ahistorical. While the current party line of the West is "those damn Muslims are just too homophobic and that's why we need to do a colonialism to them", in the 18th through early 20th centuries, it was the opposite: the Islamic world was considered a hotbed of perverse homosexuality which needed to be colonized in order to indoctrinate them in "healthy sexuality. This did to some extent originate from social norms in Islamic countries that were more open to same-sex desire - although those social norms were problematic in their own ways. I'm not gonna get into this in depth because the actual sexual norms of 18th-19th century Islamic countries are only peripherally relevant, but if you're interested, you can read Women with Mustaches and Men Without Beards by Afsaneh Najmabadi. Great book, really opened my mind.
The 1922 anti-sodomy laws in the Islamic republics were not sorted under sex-crime legislation. Rather, they were were sorted under "crimes constituting survivals of primitive custom," along with the bride price and polygamy. These are laws which existed specifically to stifle local customs which the Bolsheviks disapproved of. Now, some of these customs are ones I disapprove of too - the bride price is bad, but the most relevant one is the practice of young male prostitution in Central Asia. I don't know exactly how old some of these boys were, maybe some of them were college-aged young men, but there is no doubt that some of them were very young. This is pederasty in the English sense. This is, of course, horrifying, and the Bolsheviks were not wrong to outlaw it.
But in 1922, the Soviet government did to the Islamic republics what it would do to the Slavic republics in 1934. They did not just outlaw child prostitution or child sexual abuse or even age gaps. They outlawed all sexual contact between AMAB persons.
Dan Healey puts it thus: "Certain nationalities in the Caucasus region and Central Asia were also believed to be unsuited to biomedical models of anomalous sexualities." Homosexuality in the Slavic republics was seen by modernists as a medical issue, something probably inborn, which required scientific study and medical treatment rather than criminalization. Homosexuality in Islamic republics was seen by those same modernists as a backwards, primitive, barbaric cultural practice which could and should be wiped out by legal force.
You and I understand that child sexual abuse, adult consensual homosexual practices, cultural customs in an Islamic-majority country, and Islam itself are all three completely separate things. But to the people passing these laws, there was no difference. The practice of child prostitution by Islamic cultures and the (real or imagined) tolerance of adult homosexuality by Islamic cultures is all the same to these people. Soviet activists, like many modern day Western anti-Islam activists, perceived the local culture of historically Islamic countries as a mistake, an obsolete technology, an evil that the inhabitants of this country needed to be saved from.
Odessa jurist E. P. Frenkelā viewed the prohibition of sodomy in Azer-
baidzhan as a means of protecting the innocent āin view of its [sod-
omyās] extreme prevalence.ā A ānew cultureā would replace the old
ways of life as sport and education brought health to sexual relations, and assaults on young persons would become rarities ascribed to pathologies of character.
It is worth mentioning that Soviet officials in the Islamic-majority republics, always had a higher proportion of ethnic Russians of Christian background than the country they ruled over. That is not to say that the Soviet regimes of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, etc etc, were only Russians exerting colonial power over the local culture. But it is also inaccurate to imagine these regimes as resulting entirely from the local culture. They were heavily peopled with ethnic Russians, and many of the non-ethnic-Russians in their numbers had spent significant portions of their lives in Russia. (In Vladimir Lenin's words, "it is common knowledge that people of other nationalities who have become Russified over-do this Russian frame of mind".)
No regime basing itself in Moscow, in Russia, can ever fully separate itself from the legacy of Russian imperialism, in the same way that no regime basing itself in the US could simply choose to not be affected by white supremacy. Lenin knew this: he expressed a fear that "the 'freedom to secede from the union' by which we justify ourselves will be a mere scrap of paper, unable to defend the non-Russians from the onslaught of that really Russian man, the Great-Russian chauvinist, in substance a rascal and a tyrant, such as the typical Russian bureaucrat is. There is no doubt that the infinitesimal percentage of Soviet and sovietised workers will drown in that tide of chauvinistic Great-Russian riffraff like a fly in milk." Citation: [X]
In my opinion, this fear came to pass. It is admirable that Lenin and the Bolsheviks were trying to rid themselves of the psychological legacy that imperialism left in their own minds, but the failure of this enterprise is evident in the way they openly describe the non-Slavic republics and their cultural practices as "backwards," "primitive," in need of replacing by a "new culture." Even if you do not, in your heart of hearts, hold hostility against the people who comprise a marginalized ethnic group, you cannot truly be an ally to them if you regard their culture as universally a threat to them, rather than a complex and living organism which they shape and are shaped by in turn.
It is estimated by the West that between 800 and 1,000 men were taken into custody for breaking the laws set in article 121 each yearāout of a population of nearly 300 million. There is no specific provable statistic on how many of these arrests were related to pedophilia.
A nearly thirty-year-old document from the US government does not really represent the current consensus by scholars, Western or otherwise. You can read the recent research on this in Criminal Prosecution of Homosexuals in the Soviet Union (1946-1991): Numbers and Discourses. There are large gaps in the available evidence, so most historians are hesitant of giving a solid estimate, but it looks in the available evidence like the yearly numbers peaked at 2,000-3,000 early arrests in the 80s.
I think that something important to note is that holding specific historical figures to modern values is unrealistic. Stalin was not a hateful bigot who despised the gays, but he probably wasnāt exactly the most progressive when it came to the subject matter, either. You can criticize his legislation without condemning everything he ever didā¦ thereās nuance in these subjects that I think people struggle to find.
There's nuance in every historical figure, but not every nuance is exculpatory. One can understand, for example, that Robert E. Lee had some complex opinions on slavery and was not a literal devil with no human feelings, while also condemning his actions in the strongest terms. Robert E. Lee was a man of his times, but he was also a man who was in active conflict with other men of his time who were trying to make things better. In this conflict, one can see that the past was not a monolith. The people trying to get slavery banned in the US were not perfect anti-racists, and the people trying to decriminalize homosexuality in the USSR were not perfect queer allies, but they were both trying to make the time they lived in a little less awful. And people like Robert E. Lee and people like Stalin were trying to stop them from doing that.
Stalin was not a hateful bigot who despised the gays, but he probably wasnāt exactly the most progressive when it came to the subject matter, either.
If calling for homosexuality to be a criminal offense doesn't constitute being a hateful bigot, I don't know what does. We don't really know what Lenin thought about the decriminalization of homosexuality, but we have some documentation on what Stalin thought about the recriminalization.
The impetus for recriminalization came from Genrikh Yagoda, head of the Soviet security service, and Stalin himself. Yagoda forwarded Stalin his notes on a case in which the security service had arrested 130 queer AMAB people on charges of anti-Soviet activity. Two of the arrested people had contacts in foreign embassies, which Yagoda alleged was evidence of a network of queer spies bent on undermining Soviet power. This is a mirror image of the Cold-War era American conspiracy theory that Western queer people were spying for the Soviets en masse.
In response, Stalin forwarded these notes to Kaganovich with the note "These scoundrels must receive exemplary punishment, and a corresponding guiding decree must be introduced in our legislation." That is to say, it was Stalin's idea to recriminalize homosexuality, and it was carried out.
[Citation: The Recriminalization of Homosexuality under Stalin: New Sources, New Answers, by Irina Rodulgina]
After the law was adopted, Stalin also faced a personal challenge from a queer communist. A queer reporter, Harry Whyte, who had come to the USSR because he believed in Soviet communism, asked Stalin to justify the law that had already resulted in the arrest of Whyte's (adult, consenting) boyfriend. āCan a homosexual be considered a person fit to become a member of the Communist Party?ā he asked Stalin in a long letter. He told Stalin that the law persecuted a harmless minority in much the same way that oppressive regimes in other countries oppressed black people or women, and that it ignored the contemporary science on the issue. It was a long, thoughtful letter which drew on half a century of Marxist theory and on a significant knowledge of history.
Stalin scribbled "An idiot and a degenerate" on this message and had it archived. In this context, it seems clear that "a degenerate" was a reference to Whyte's homosexuality.
Whyte left the USSR soon after, never to return. The fate of his arrested boyfriend is unknown to history.
[Citations: Dan Healey in Homosexual Desire, as well as Jeff Meek in "The Scot Who Challenged Stalin"]
I think it would be amiss to criticize the USSR and Stalin for policies without criticizing quite literally any other regime for discriminatory policies that were, in essence, much more violent. Especially the United States of America.
Certainly, it is always amiss for someone to criticize another country's policies while ignoring the harmful policies of their own country. There is a lot to be said about the US's shitty policies, and I have said it. One could reasonably say that from 1922-1934, the USSR was handily outdoing the USA on queer rights. If you're saying that US policy on queer people was much more violent in 1922-1934, I agree. However, if you refer to the years 1935-1991, I'm not sure how you're getting that. At best, you could argue that Soviet and US policy on queer AMAB people was essentially the same in those years - it was illegal and you got sent to prison. Yes, the available numbers we have for sodomy convictions per year seem to be higher in the US than in the USSR, but the data is incomplete, the US decriminalized homosexuality in many states between 1962-1991, and one must also consider respective mortality rates in prison.
It's hard to get good numbers on this, but for example, in April of 1933, the year before the re-criminalization of homosexuality, Abram Yakovlevich Belenki, a high-ranking security service officer, inspected a prison camp in Central Asia called Sazlag and reported a 25% fatality rate for that year. He also ordered a number of seriously ill prisoners released at this time; the count would have been higher if those prisoners were included. The fatality rate spiked during WWII and dropped afterwards. [Citation: The Gulag's "Dead Souls": Mortality of Individuals Released from the Camps, 1930ā55, Mikhail Nakonechnyi]
US mortality rates during this period are, again, difficult to find, but more modern data suggests a mortality rate of 3% to 4% [Citation: Government can't say how many people die in US Jails and prisons] for 2018. To be frank, I don't think mortality in US prisons has dropped precipitously since the 1930s, I think things have been getting worse due to the massive spike in the number of people imprisoned in the US over the course of the 20th and now 21st century.
But I also think that playing "well, they did it worse" when we're talking about imprisonment and persecution on a national scale is kind of in poor taste. You'll notice that that article on mortality in US jails and prisons, which is agitating against US mass incarceration, does not stop to consider how many people die in Russian prisons. Equally, when I write about the persecution of Jewish people in the US in the 30s and 40s, I don't stop to go "but they were still better than Nazi Germany!" This is because it is not relevant. The US has a duty to its people and its prisoners, irrespective of how badly other nations treat their people and their prisoners. The US does not get to play "well, Russia does it worse!" because no one cares.
Equally, when we're talking about the treatment of the Soviet people by the Soviet government, it isn't really exculpatory to say "the US also arrested gay people." The fact that the Soviet Union decriminalized homosexuality and then suddenly, without notice, walked it back ten years later and started arresting people is bad on its own, in comparison to its own record. We don't really need to do comparisons to say that.
If you're interested in reading more about the history of queer people in the USSR, I have a bibliography of resources here.
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