Regulating homosexuality in Soviet Russia, 1956–91

A different history

Rustam Alexander

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781526155764
• eBook ISBN: 9781526155757
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: LGBT Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This ground-breaking book challenges the widespread view that sex and homosexuality were unmentionable in the USSR. The Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras (1956–82) have remained obscure and unexplored from this perspective. Drawing on previously undiscovered sources, Alexander fills in this critical gap. The book reveals that from 1956 to 1991, doctors, educators, jurists and police officers discussed homosexuality. At the heart of discussions were questions which directly affected the lives of homosexual people in the USSR. Was homosexuality a crime, disease or a normal variant of human sexuality? Should lesbianism be criminalised? Could sex education prevent homosexuality? What role did the GULAG and prisons play in homosexuality across the USSR? These discussions often had practical implications – doctors designed and offered medical treatments for homosexuality in hospitals, and procedures and medications were also used in prisons.

1

Homosexuality in the Soviet GULAG (1956–59)

On 27 January 1956 the head of the corrective and labour camps and colonies of the MVD, Sergei Yegorovich Yegorov, signed a new decree featuring an unusual subject.1 The document drew the attention of GULAG directors to the growing problem of homosexuality in colonies and prisons, which, as Yegorov wrote, was ‘likely to have serious consequences’, if measures to prevent it were not taken:

The Central Administration of prison camps and colonies of the MVD USSR has information about increased instances (among both male and female prisoners) of sodomy (muzhelozhstva), lesbian love and other types of sexual perversion, including rape and syphilis infections resulting from this. Considering that this state of affairs is abnormal and that it is likely to have serious consequences, I request that you study this phenomenon on the ground and in detail and then submit an elaborate report (dokladnaya) to the Central Administration of prison camps and colonies of the MVD USSR by 15 March 1956.2

Yegorov went on to specify a list of the issues which he expected the chiefs of the GULAG colonies across the Soviet Union to address in their reports. Among other matters he required that they provide statistics on ‘frequency of the instances of sexual perversions among prisoners’, ‘types of sexual perversions’ and ‘instances of mental, venereal and other illnesses due to this (na etoi pochve)’ and information on ‘the cohort of prisoners engaging in sexual perversions, their age, gender, physical state and the type of conviction’.3 Furthermore, Yegorov sought suggestions on ‘the measures of the regime (rezhimnyi), educative or whatever measures of influence on prisoners, required to be employed in the struggle with sexual perversions’. The head of the GULAG also suggested that apart from prison officers, specialists in psychiatry, forensic medicine and venereology should also be engaged in the effort to eradicate homosexuality in the GULAG system.4

Yegorov’s decree represented, in Michel Foucault’s words, an ‘institutional incitement’ to speak about homosexuality and a ‘determination on the part of the agencies of power to hear it spoken about’.5 It was also apparently one of the first serious and massive attempts of the Soviet officials to bring same-sex desire ‘under the authority of the language’ and ‘take charge’ of it through discourse after Stalin’s death. Indeed, Yegorov’s decree gave rise to fruitful discussions on homosexuality among GULAG directors and doctors which I will explore in the sections to follow. In their reports GULAG directors framed homosexuality as not just a crime against morality, but a problem that had implications for the inmates’ health and the GULAG’s economic productivity. Same-sex activity was a source of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) which threatened to go beyond the barbed wire and spread to society at large. It also provoked gruesome acts of violence among prisoners, fomenting the establishment of informal prisoner hierarchies and destabilising camp discipline and work. GULAG directors proposed to tackle homosexuality with discourse: they stressed the importance of educational work with prisoners and individual discussions between the doctor and the prisoner on the harm of this phenomenon. GULAG doctors, often underestimated and neglected, seized the opportunity to demonstrate the utility of their profession to the GULAG leadership by studying lesbianism, offering scientific solutions to the problem and, most importantly, emphasising the crucial role they played in the fight against it.

Yet, despite their use of discourse against homosexual activity, some GULAG directors still contended that camp authorities should continue to punish male same-sex activity in the camps with prison terms, and that lesbianism should be criminalised too. Doctors, while not opposing the prosecution of male homosexual activity, had a different opinion on lesbianism, preferring to examine it through a scientific lens. According to them, female homosexuality was a temporary phenomenon which in most cases would disappear once the prisoner was released, and only hardened lesbians should be tackled with punitive measures.

GULAG crackdown on homosexual sex: reasons and background

So why did the issue of homosexuality become a matter of urgency for the GULAG leaders in early 1956? Dan Healey tells us that the sexual culture of the Soviet GULAG was no different from that of tsarist prisons, where same-sex activity flourished and was deplored by penal experts.6 In the Stalin GULAG, male and female homosexual activity was highly visible too. Although male homosexual relations were often marked with rape and sexual abuse of younger inmates at the hands of older or more ‘criminal’ inmates, some same-sex liaisons could be consensual.7 Lesbian relationships, according to the GULAG memoirists, were less violent and often gendered – ‘masculinised’, tougher women cohabited with more submissive ‘feminine’ partners – and such couples mounted stiff resistance to the authorities’ attempts to separate them.8

A handful of indictments and terse summaries of GULAG sodomy cases from 1943 to 1953 demonstrate that camp authorities routinely prosecuted same-sex relations between men. Such cases were tried in special camp courts, which were created in 1944 and dealt specifically with the crimes committed in the corrective labour colonies.9 Courts relied on the testimonies of eyewitnesses and camp guards who caught the defendants red-handed. Medical examinations of the suspects appear to have been conducted occasionally: only one indictment contains a reference to this procedure.10 It also seems that inmates playing an ‘active’ role in sexual intercourse were likely to be penalised more severely than their ‘passive partners’. For instance, inmates Sherbakov and Golubev from the Khabarovsk GULAG, who were found guilty of consensual sodomy which they engaged in during January and February 1951, received different sentences. Sherbakov, who played an active role, received five years in prison and Golubev three years.11 Sherbakov twice tried to appeal the court’s decision, arguing in his complaint to the USSR Supreme Court that his ill-wishers deliberately gave false testimony against him, but his complaints were eventually rejected.12 Judicial decisions in sodomy cases could also be affected by special state occasions: Mark Dubovitskii, convicted for sodomy with minors in one of the prisons of the city of Nal’chik in August 1945, had the charges against him revoked and was released as part of Stalin’s 1945 amnesty.13

After Stalin’s death it became obvious to his heirs that the GULAG was in urgent need of reform. The system of prison camps and colonies was indeed in deep crisis: it was economically inefficient, and due to the rapid growth of the prison population, it was becoming more difficult to control. Prisoners actively sought to undermine the camp administration’s authority, taking part in acts of mass disobedience, refusing to work and instigating uprisings.14 Messages about the GULAG system’s degradation were quickly reaching the Party leaders, who received numerous complaints from prisoners about their dire living conditions and the rampant criminality in the camps.15

One of the Party’s earliest responses to this crisis was the amnesty decree in 1953, which triggered the release of 1.2 million prisoners from the camps and colonies.16 Far from resolving the GULAG crisis, this led to more problems and concerns. The mass exodus of an able-bodied ‘positive contingent’ (polozhitel’nogo kontingenta) from camps and colonies led to a deficit of a qualified labour force in the camp system, while the sharp increase in the remaining cohorts of especially dangerous criminals (osobo opasnykh prestupnikov) further intensified tensions in the GULAG and led to more prisoner uprisings.17 A wave of crime overwhelming the entire country was another undesirable consequence of the mass exodus of prisoners.18 Despite this, the Soviet leadership continued reducing the size of the GULAG, placing the blame for the crime wave on the camp officials, who had ostensibly failed to re-educate prisoners and prepare them for life outside the GULAG.19

Yegorov’s decree was a product of these massive reforms: it reflected the GULAG leadership’s anxiety about the mass release of prisoners into the society, which could have unforeseen consequences. In particular, camp authorities and medics were anxious about the possible spread of the prisoners’ homosexual relations beyond the barbed wire, along with a spread of STIs such as syphilis, believed to be a consequence of sodomy.20 Yegorov’s call for educative measures also appears to be a result of Stalin’s heirs’ determination to ‘diminish the economic focus’ of the GULAG ‘in favour of re-education’ of prisoners, as demonstrated by Jeffrey S. Hardy.21 GULAG inmates were no longer to be perceived as merely a labour force; instead, camp administrators were encouraged to view them as ‘wayward citizens in need of encouragement, support, trust, training and edu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Homosexuality in the Soviet GULAG (1956–59)
• 2 Same-sex desire and sex education under Khrushchev (1956–64)
• 3 From sodomy to homosexuality: same-sex desire and the rise of Soviet sexopathology in the 1960s
• 4 Soviet legal and criminological debates on the decriminalisation of homosexuality (1959–75)
• 5 Between disease and crime: sexopathology and prison homosexuality (1970–80)
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index