Russia LGBTQ History
Ira Roldugina noted that "in Russia until the beginning of the 18th century there was no secular law against sodomy at all, not to mention the fact that later cases of such lethal persecution in Russian criminal practice were not uncommon. unknown. In Orthodox church practice, "sodomy" was not a key or even a first-line problem for spiritual authorities....
"The first fears experienced by Russian experts (and therefore the public) when faced with partly self-formulated homosexual identity in the second half of the 19th century were associated with a widespread and influential concept of degeneration. Homosexuality was perceived as a product of the disease (it was not the only, but at first the most popular approach to the phenomenon), the result of the moral and physical disintegration of society. ...
Russian laws against homosexuality have a long history. Orthodox clerics condemned sex between men and youths. They also condemned men who shaved, used make-up, or wore gaudy clothing as devotees of the "sodomitical sin." It was only with Peter the Great in the late 17th and early 18th centuries that Russia's first secular law against sex between men was adopted, in his Military Code of 1716. Relations between men in the army and navy were punished by flogging, and male rape, by penal servitude in the galleys.
But Nick Mayhew noted, "the concept of "sodomy" was ambiguous until the end of the 19th century, and that during the 18th and 19th centuries the attitude towards it in Russia was less strict than in northern Europe." The authorities in tsarist Russia avoided enforcing the law against upper-class homosexuals. There was no major homosexual scandal in pre-1917 Russia to match those of Britain's Oscar Wilde, Austria-Hungary's Colonel Alfred Redl, or the German Prince Eulenberg. Powerful supporters of the Romanov dynasty, and members of the tsar's family, were flagrantly gay, and received patronage and immunity from the throne.
In his later years, composer Pyotr Tchaikovsky was open about his homosexuality. Researchers rule out that the composer was persecuted due to his sexual preferences as the upper echelons of Russian society were quite tolerant of homosexuals. "Nowadays, when I read and hear that Tchaikovsky's homosexuality was a fiction invented by unpatriotic researchers, I can only laugh," said Polida Veydman, director of the Tchaikovsky Museum in Klin, outside of Moscow. "Denying his homosexuality is absurd." Even President Vladimir Putin commented on the issue in a television interview in September 2013: "People say Tchaikovsky was a homosexual. But we don't love him because of that." Then a press campaign was kicked off to protect the composer's reputation. Worried mothers asked at the ticket office if Tchaikovsky's "Nutcracker" was suitable for children. State funding of a film about Tchaikovsky was also withdrawn, even though Russian theater director and gay community cult figure Kirill Serebrennikov repeatedly argued that his movie about the composer would not be "told from the perspective of the bed."
"The Bolshevik Revolution, with its boldly emancipatory rhetoric in the field of sexuality, had a huge impact on Russian homosexuals, especially those who did not belong to the cultural and political elite of the czarist era. The abolition of the criminal article by the Bolsheviks for "sodomy" was not an accident, the criminal article was absent in the first two Soviet Criminal Codes, but was a meaningful part of the abolitionist sexual policy aimed at undermining gender. In part, the authorities were interested in this for practical reasons - the Soviet woman needed to be "included" in the new Soviet order both in practice and ideologically, and to do this as quickly as possible."
In communist times, homosexuality would be called a "vestige of capitalism". In the Soviet Union, this issue became a dividing line between Stalinists and National Bolsheviks on the one hand and reformers and revolutionaries on the other. In 1922, same-sex relations in the USSR were officially decriminalized, but already in the early 1930s, under Stalin, criminal responsibility for "sodomy" was reintroduced.
Ira Roldugina stated "The turning point occurred in the early 1930s and was part of the right-wing Stalinist turn, when the criminal article for “sodomy” was successively recriminalized, abortion was banned, and the divorce procedure was complicated. The forcibly introduced “tradition”, to which the defenders of the law “on propaganda of homosexuality” appeal, comes from there.... At the same time, the practice of blackmailing convicted male homosexuals and involving them in informing work took shape."
In September 1933, deputy chief of the secret police Genrikh Yagoda proposed to Stalin that a law against "pederasty" was needed urgently. Police raids had been conducted on circles of "pederasts" in Moscow and Leningrad. They were supposed to be guilty of spying; they had also "politically demoralized various social layers of young men, including young workers, and even attempted to penetrate the army and navy." Stalin forwarded Yagoda's letter to Lazar Kaganovich, noting "these scoundrels must receive exemplary punishment" and directing that a law against "pederasty" be adopted. The new law was adopted for all the Soviet republics in March 1934.
After the fall of communist regimes, attitudes toward homosexuals became one of the first fault lines between East and West. Nationalist politicians, usually opposing the "tolerance" of the inhabitants of their countries "the arrogance" and "missionary attitudes" of the West, began to instill an aggressive intolerance towards lesbians and gays. To strengthen the authority of a weak, unstable state, it is necessary to draw a parallel between the state and the family and talk about them in the same context.
|
NEWSLETTER
|
| Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list |
|
|
|
