This article has been written for Easy History by Sophie Watkins.
NOTE: This article refers to homophobia, sexual violence and other sensitive topics of a similar nature.
The Full Stalinist Society Series:
- “Women and Children First”: Traditional Family Values and Motherhood
- “The Opium of the People” Marxist-Leninist Atheism and Persecuting Religion in the Soviet Union
- The Fine Line Between Love and a Life Sentence
Introduction to Homosexuality in the Pre- and Early Soviet Era:
Many historians, academics and theorists have credited Lenin and his Bolsheviks with the decriminalization of homosexuality, and therefore an acceptance of it, following the fall of the Tsars who had persecuted homosexuals and made same-sex relations illegal. Under the Tsarist regime, the Russian legal system rested upon the Criminal Code, which among other things, outlawed homosexuality. Article 995 of the Code specifically banned muzhelozhstvo – ‘men lying with men’ – which the courts proceeded to interpret as any instance of ‘anal sex’, meaning that regardless of violence or non-violence, consensual or non-consensual, the act was punished with up to five years in exile.
In 1917, as the Bolsheviks took control of the state and begin to establish themselves, they agreed that Russia needed to start from scratch, and that any trace of the previous monarchy, their rules and their regulations, had to be removed. Part of this ‘de-Tsarification’ involved abolishing the previous Criminal Code and revising a new one according to the laws that resonated with the communist ideology. By removing all the previous laws, the Bolsheviks unintentionally legalized homosexuality. It remains relatively unclear to this day whether Lenin or the Party cared about the legality of same-sex relations, but regardless, the abolition of its criminalisation led to a sexual revolution in the Soviet Union as it formed.
The Soviet Union’s new edition of the Criminal Code was not ready until 1922, the Bolsheviks entirely preoccupied by the Civil War alongside the birth of a nation. However, even when 1922 came around, the new Criminal Code made no mention of muzhelozhstvo or homosexuality, and it remained, most likely by accident, entirely legal until 1934, when Stalin would re-criminalise it.
A Note of Sources
This article was of particular, personal interest and was a pleasure to write, as it directly relates to my undergraduate dissertation on the comparison between Lenin and Stalin’s regime on the question of homosexuality in the Soviet Union. There is much to say on the topic which, academically, is largely understudied. As a result, my paper has been one of my key reference points. Particularly helpful as a primary source was the full Criminal Code of the RSFSR (1934), uploaded to Wikipedia Commons, which can be found here.
The following article also provides a useful, generalised outline on the situation for homosexuals immediately after the October Revolution through visual media. Other sources of policies and social attitudes towards same-sex relations and queer individuals in the Soviet Union were incredibly useful in devising this piece, and they are referenced at the end.
Stalin Re-criminalises Homosexuality in 1934
In 1934, during Stalin’s tenure as leader of the Soviet Union, Article 121 was added to the Russian Criminal Code:
Article 121. Pederasty
Sexual relations between men (pederasty) — shall be punished by deprivation of freedom for a period not to exceed five years.
Pederasty when committed with physical violence, a threat, or with respect to a minor, or when taking advantage of the dependent position of the injured party — shall be punishable by deprivation of freedom for a period not to exceed eight years.
Many discussions have been had surrounded the intentions behind Article 121, with a consensus often reached that the Article was included in Criminal Code to protect against sexual violence and harassment; on this basis the argument that sexuality was intolerable to the Soviet Union is dismissed.
However, there are two aspects of this Article and the wider Code that are important to highlight. First, provisions were already in place in Soviet law to protect against sexual violence.
These pages, from the original 1934 edition of the Russian Criminal Code, list a range of Articles covering ‘The contraction of venereal disease; Illegal abortion; Rape; Coercion of a woman into sexual intercourse; Sexual relations with a person who has not reached puberty; Acts of perversion’ before reaching Article 121 – Pederasty. Under Stalin’s rule, sexual violence and coercion were divided into two categories – heterosexual and homosexual. This legal framework justified the social alienation of homosexuality, and the cultural shift towards the Soviet familial archetype – which we discussed in the first article of this series – being strictly heterosexual and having a sense of productivity and purpose by producing children (a labour force) for the state.
Second, Article 121 itself is divided into two separate charges – the second half of the Article criminalizes ‘Pederasty when committed with physical violence, a threat, or with respect to a minor, or when taking advantage of the dependent position of the injured party’ with a sentence of eight years exile. The first half, however, simply criminalizes pederasty itself, with its own sentence of five years.
Social Implications Towards the Family and Women
With a legal framework to justify him, Stalin was able to create an enemy out of same-sex relations and homosexuals within the Soviet Union, which shifted its social outlook away from any form of sexual revolution, as it had strived for in the 1920s, towards outright
persecution and alienation of anybody that didn’t meet the norm of a family or couple, out of fear of the state. The fate of women was greatly impacted by the changing attitudes towards sexuality. In the first piece of this series, we discussed the ideal Soviet family under Stalin, with an emphasis on patriarchal structure and a function of having children, attributing women as nothing more than mothers, responsible for fuelling the Soviet state with the labour of labour itself. Stalin’s Soviet Union promoted nothing more and nothing less than a husband and wife, whose relationship was for the purpose of having as many children as possible to bolster the population and workforce of the Soviet Union.
It wasn’t just male same-sex relations affected either, as lesbians existed in the Soviet Union, though there is significantly less source material on their existences and experiences. The general approach of the Soviet Union, however, was that while gay men were criminals, gay women were mentally disturbed, and many were sent to institutions to be ‘cured’ of their urges, so that they could be productive and pliable members of society. This position on childbirth and the sexual role of women is inherently Stalinist in nature, and very defining of his regime and the social implications he had which strayed further and further from the ideas of Karl Marx:
“… the Marxist understanding of the family was one that revoked the idea of the social unit only being used for productive means – Stalin’s policies here went directly against this” – A Comparative Analysis of Lenin and Stalin’s Approaches to Sex and Sexuality in the Former Soviet Union
A Threat to National Security?
The state even took the position that homosexuality was a form of Western degeneracy, an Americanized phenomenon, as the Cold War began in earnest, which made homosexuals a perceived threat to national security. Just as in the United States, the word ‘communist’ became interchangeable with ‘enemy of the state’, the same occurred with ‘homosexual’ and ‘muzhelovstvo’ in the Soviet Union.
Conclusion
The important thing to note about the Soviet Union’s stance on this issue as a state is that at no point were homosexuals not persecuted, and the revoking of the Tsarist Criminal Code and subsequent lack of any restriction on homosexuality under the 1922 redraft were not instances of a sudden acceptance of homosexuality. They did, however, give queer people within the Soviet Union more freedoms to explore their sexuality and lead to what many Leninists refer to still as a ‘sexual revolution’, and it was agreeably a precursor to social developments to emerge later in the century. Despite all of this ambiguity, under Stalin, homosexuality was directly persecuted and seen as a form of Western degeneracy and unproductive for the state.
Sources
- Watkins, Sophie. (2024) “A Comparative Analysis of Lenin and Stalin’s Approaches to Sex and Sexuality in the Former Soviet Union”
- Khoroshilova, Olga. (2017) “1917 Russian Revolution: The gay community’s brief window of freedom” https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-41737330
- Criminal Code of the RSFSR, 26 May 1961. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8a/Criminal_Code_of_Russian_Sovie t_Federative_Socialist_Republic%2C_1961.pdf
- Egan, S. (2017) The Bolsheviks and the Sexual Revolution pp.36-41.
- Err-Soon Tay, A. (1972) The Status of Women in the Soviet Union. The American Journal of Comparative Law, 20(4), pp.662-692.
- Healey, D. (2016) Russian Homophobia from Stalin to Sochi. Bloomsbury Publishing.
- Marx and Engels (1848) Manifesto of the Communist Party, pp.14-66.
About the Author:
I am currently completing my Masters degree in History at the University of Lincoln, where I graduated from last year with my undergraduate degree in Politics and International Relations. I have always loved reading about history and retelling it in my own words, analysing events and people and ironing out the hidden details. My main area of interest is the Russian Revolution, Soviet Union and Cold War and I’m also greatly interested in the history of sexuality and gender, and social history!
Leave a Reply