Life for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people varied greatly under the Soviet Union. Throughout its existence (1922 to 1991), criminalisation of homosexual relations shifted. After the October Revolution of 1917, homosexuality was decriminalised in Soviet Russia with the repeal of the legal code of the Russian Empire, and this decriminalisation was confirmed with new criminal codes in 1922 and 1926. Under Joseph Stalin, the Soviet government reversed course in the late 1920s and promoted harsher policy against LGBTQ rights. In 1933, homosexuality was recriminalised in the Soviet Union, and Article 121, which prohibited male homosexuality, was added to the Soviet penal code in the following year. Following the death of Stalin, attitudes toward sexual issues in Soviet Union were liberalised, but discrimination against and persecution of LGBTQ individuals persisted. The LGBTQ rights movement accelerated during the glasnost period in the late 1980s, and in 1993, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union Article 121 was removed from the penal code of Russia.
Early history (1917–1927)
The government of the Russian Soviet Republic (later the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic) decriminalised homosexuality in December 1917, following the October Revolution and the discarding of the legal code of the Russian Empire.Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime. E.H. Carr. 1994
The legalisation of homosexuality was confirmed in the penal code of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic in 1922 as well as in its redrafting in 1926. According to Dan Healey, archival material that became widely available following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 "demonstrates a principled intent to decriminalize the act between consenting adults, expressed from the earliest efforts to write a socialist criminal code in 1918 to the eventual adoption of legislation in 1922".[Dan Healey, Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia, 2001]
The legalisation of private, adult and consensual homosexual relations applied exclusively to the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Homosexuality or sodomy remained a crime in the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic, having been officially criminalised there in 1923, as well as in the Transcaucasian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic and the Central Asian republics throughout the 1920s. Similar criminalising laws were enacted in the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic in 1926 and in the Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic the following year.
Despite decriminalising homosexuality in 1917, wider Soviet social policy on the matter of wider homosexual rights and the treatment of homosexual people in the 1920s was often mixed. Official policy in both the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and the wider Soviet Union in the 1920s on homosexuality fluctuated between toleration and support, attempts at legal equality and social rights for homosexual people, examples of open state hostility against homosexuals, and state attempts to classify homosexuality as "a mental disorder to be cured".The Construction of Homosexuality. David Greenburg. University of Chicago Press. 1988. p. 440 During the 1920s, such divergences of opinion and policy on Soviet treatment of homosexuality were also common within the Communist Party, ranging from positive, to negative, to ambivalent over views about homosexuals and homosexual rights. Some sections and factions of the Bolshevik government attempted to improve rights and social conditions for homosexuals based on further legal reforms in 1922 and 1923 while others opposed such moves. In the early 1920s, Commissar of Health Nikolai Semashko for example was sympatheticRussian Masculinities in History and Culture. edited by B. Clements, R. Friedman, D. Healey. Springer, 2001. p.170, see note 52 to homosexual emancipation "as part of the [sexual] revolution" and attempted such reforms for homosexual rights in the area of civil and medical areas."Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia." Healey. 132–133 According to Wayne R. Dynes, some sections of the Bolsheviks of the 1920s actively considered homosexuality a "[social] illness to be cured" or an example of "bourgeois degeneracy" while other Bolsheviks believed it should be legally/socially tolerated and respected in the new socialist society.Dynes, Encyclopedia of Homosexuality, 2016, p. 1137
The Bolsheviks also rescinded Tsarist legal bans on homosexual civil and political rights, especially in the area of state employment. In 1918, Georgy Chicherin, a homosexual man who kept his homosexuality hidden, was appointed as People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. In 1923, Chicherin was also appointed People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs of the Soviet Union, a position he held until 1930.
In the early 1920s, the Soviet government and scientific community took a great deal of interest in sexual research, sexual emancipation and homosexual emancipation. In January 1923, the Soviet Union sent delegates from the Commissariat of Health led by Commissar of Health Semashko"Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia." Healey. 132–133, 309 to the German Institute for Sexual Research as well as to some international conferences on human sexuality between 1921 and 1930, where they expressed support for the legalisation of adult, private and consensual homosexual relations and the improvement of homosexual rights in all nations. In both 1923 and 1925, Dr. , director of the Institute for Social Hygiene in Moscow, published a report, The Sexual Revolution in Russia, which stated that homosexuality was "perfectly natural" and should be legally and socially respected.Die Sexualrevolution in Russland, Berlin: 1925 Grigorri Batkis In the Soviet Union itself, the 1920s saw developments in serious Soviet research on sexuality in general, sometimes in support of the progressive concept of homosexuality as a natural part of human sexuality, such as the work of Dr. Batkis prior to 1928."Sexual Relations and the Class Struggle", Alexandra Kollontai, Selected Writings of Alexandra Kollontai, trans. Alix Holt (London: Allison & Busby, 1977), 241. Such delegations and research were sent and authorised and supported by the People's Commissariat for Health under Commissar Semashko.
Under Stalin (1927–1953)
In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Soviet policy and attitudes shifted against homosexuality and homosexual rights, as did wider social backlash. Alongside increased repression of political dissidents and non-Russian nationalities, LGBT themes and issues faced increasing government censorship and uniformly harsher policy across the entire Soviet Union following Joseph Stalin's rise to power. Homosexuality was officially labelled a disease and a mental disorder in the late 1920s (specifically over a period from 1927 to 1930). In this climate, Commissar Semashko reduced his support for homosexual rights and Dr. Batkis and other sexual researchers repudiated (in 1928) their own earlier scientific reports of homosexuality as a natural human sexuality.The Construction of Homosexuality. David Greenburg. University of Chicago Press. 1988. p. 440, see note 23 This followed earlier Soviet tendencies in sections of the medical and health communities, even in the early 1920s, to classify homosexuality, if not as a crime, then as an example of mental or physical illness. Earlier examples of this type of hardening Soviet attitude towards homosexuality include the 1923 report from the People's Commissariat for Health entitled The Sexual Life of Contemporary Youth, authored by Izrail Gel'man, which stated: "Science has now established, with precision that excludes all doubt, that homosexuality is not ill will or crime but sickness. The world of a female or male homosexual is perverted, it is alien to the normal sexual attraction that exists in a normal person". The official stance from the late 1920s could be summarised in an article of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia of 1930 written by medical expert Sereisky (based on a report written in the 1920s):
Under Joseph Stalin, the Soviet government recriminalised sex between men through a decree that was signed in 1933. The decree was part of a broader campaign against "deviant" behavior and "Western degeneracy". On 7 March 1934, Article 121 was added to the criminal code of the Soviet Union. It expressly prohibited male homosexuality, punishing "muzhelozhstvo" with the sentencing of up to five years of hard labour in prison. There were no criminal statutes regarding sex between women. During the Soviet era, Western observers believed that between 800 and 1,000 men were imprisoned each year under Article 121.
Some historians have noted that Soviet propaganda during this time began to depict homosexuality as a sign of fascismEncyclopedia of Homosexuality, Volume 2 – Marxism and that Article 121 may have been a political tool to use against dissidents, irrespective of their true sexual orientation, and to solidify Soviet opposition to Nazi Germany, which had broken its treaty with the Soviet Union. In a famous article in Pravda on 23 May 1934, Maxim Gorky said: "There is already a sarcastic saying: Destroy homosexuality and fascism will disappear."
In 1993, declassified Soviet documents revealed that Stalin had personally demanded the introduction of an anti-gay law in response to a report from deputy secret police chief Genrikh Yagoda, who had conducted a raid on the residence of hundreds of homosexuals in Moscow and Leningrad in August 1933, about "Pederast activists" engaging in orgies and espionage activities."Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia" Dan Healey, 2001, p.184. Beyond expressed fears of a vast "counterrevolutionary fascist homosexual conspiracy", there were several high-profile arrests of Russian men accused of being pederasts. In 1933, 130 men "were accused of being 'pederasts' – adult males who have sex with boys. Since no records of men having sex with boys at that time are available, it is possible this term was used broadly and crudely to label homosexuality". Whatever the precise reason, homosexuality remained a serious criminal offense until it was repealed in 1993.
The Soviet government refrained from publicizing the new law outside of the Soviet Union, and there was little international response. In 1934, the British communist Harry Whyte wrote a long letter to Stalin condemning the law and its prejudicial motivations. He laid out a Marxist position against the oppression of homosexuals as a social minority and compared homophobia to racism, xenophobia and sexism."Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia" Dan Healey, 2001, p.188. Stalin did not reply to the letter, but ordered it to be archived, and added a note describing Whyte as "An idiot and a degenerate.""Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia" Dan Healey, 2001, p.189.
A few years later in 1936, Justice Commissar Nikolai Krylenko publicly stated that the anti-gay criminal law was correctly aimed at the decadent and effete old ruling classes, thus further linking homosexuality to a right-wing conspiracy, i.e. Tsarist aristocracy and German fascists.