Novoe vremia, 1993 no. 35 pp. 44-47, 1993 no. 36 pp. 50-54
An article by Russian LGBTQ activist Slava Mogutin and American LGBTQ activist Sonja Franeta on the history of homosexuality in the Soviet penal system
Post-Soviet
1993
In the early post-Soviet years there was something of a social and cultural revolution, in the sense that an inversion of social and cultural hierarchies was taking place. There was a bringing down of categories that had been elevated in Soviet society and a converse raising up of formerly repressed categories, such as dissidents imprisoned or otherwise persecuted under the Soviet regime. These processes involved revision of the historical record of the Soviet period to redress deliberate exclusion or erasure of the perspectives of persecuted categories and to restore voices silenced in the tightly controlled official Soviet historical record. This was taking place on a massive scale, as formerly classified archives of Soviet state agencies and the Communist Party were being opened up and explored, largely with the sponsorship of Western research institutions. LGBTQ categories (often referred to as “sexual minorities” in the 1990s in Russia) were largely if not totally excluded from the broader revisionist project. “Passive” homosexual males, who were subjected to horrific abuses as the lowliest category among the inmates of the Soviet penal system, seemed somehow ineligible for the kind of solemn reverence enjoyed by other persecuted categories in the post-Soviet era, represented in the article by Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Varlam Shalamov. In Solzehnitsyn and Shalamov’s highly impactful memoirs of life in the Soviet penal system, “passive” homosexuals as a category are either passed over in silence, or their status as despicable marginals is reaffirmed. There is a failure on the part of these celebrated champions of those persecuted and oppressed in the Soviet state to empathize with, and to recognize the injustice of the violent humiliation and abuse of, this category of person whom they appear to regard as unlike themselves in ways they find repulsive. In this moment of reckoning with the Soviet legacy of repressive violence against its own citizens, a moment of celebration of dissidents, the persecution suffered by LGBTQ people (to use contemporary terminology) seems either not to merit mention or to be judged as not unjust. At a moment when specific legacies of suffering confer a certain righteous prestige, a prestige more or less directly proportionate to their degree of degradation in the Soviet order, Mogutin and Franeta seem here to try to claim due recognition for the unjust abject humiliation and violent abuse of “passive” homosexual men in Soviet prisons and camps, who found themselves at the lowest level of the inmates’ hierarchy — as “опущенные.”
More than once the article explicitly makes the point that homosexuals should be thought of as dissidents. The belonging of this group to the new, in some sense élite, dissident class is implicitly underscored by the references to historical or memoiristic accounts of the lives of LGBTQ people in the Soviet Union published outside Russia, and the “few meager pages” of the contemporary domestic Russian LGBTQ press. Termed respectively tamizdat and samizdat, the publication outside the Soviet Union and the improvised D-I-Y publication inside the Soviet Union of literature that could not be published or distributed via official Soviet channels were widespread cultural phenomena in the second half of the Soviet era. These publications came to carry an aura of forbidden truth, of truths the authorities wanted to suppress. The tamizdat phenomenon was crucially important for later-Soviet and post-Soviet efforts to reconstitute a Russian cultural identity scattered by the Revolution and the rest of the Soviet experiment, efforts we see instantiated in impulses to reassemble dispersed pieces of a Russian LGBTQ identity and culture (again, to anachronistically apply current terminology). For more on this see the notes for the artifact “The Unknown Diaghilev,” an article by Simon Karlinsky, who is pictured in this article with one of the authors, Yaroslav (“Slava”) Mogutin. The reference to the meager, struggling Russian LGBTQ press suggests the improvisation and precarity of samizdat, of publications forced to operate outside the mainstream by a wider culture that is averse to their truths.
The references to Nazi camps and to fascism here, and especially the application of the epithet “fascist” to the Soviet order, are characteristic of the early 1990s’ processing of a Soviet legacy of hypocrisy, including betrayal of its early promises of total gender equality in its retrograde and even tyrannically patriarchal attitudes toward gender roles and sexuality. In a cultural and political moment that is broadly celebrating Russia’s emergence from the Soviet experiment and seeking a democratic way forward, Soviet communism looked a lot like the twentieth century’s other dominant totalitarian system — fascism. Fascism was, of course, the ostensible arch-conservative diametric opposite of the supposedly ultra-progressive Soviet order, but the ahierarchical collectivism and ethnic and gender equality that Marxist-Leninist ideology promised failed to materialize and the Soviet society ultimately backslid into a tyrannical patriarchy that aggressively promoted a very narrow definition of masculinity (likely the reason male homosexuality was a criminal offense, while lesbianism was treated as an illness). The worldviews of the two totalitarian powers were congenial enough that, in spite of their fundamental ideological differences, they were for a time during World War II allied against the democratic powers.
Homosexuality (https://lccn.loc.gov/sh85061780)--Russia (Federation) (https://lccn.loc.gov/n92056007)
Gay men (https://lccn.loc.gov/sh85061798)--Russia (Federation)
Gay rights (https://lccn.loc.gov/sh94009215)--Russia (Federation) (https://lccn.loc.gov/n92056007)
LGBT rights in Russia (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q2300774)
LGBT history in Russia (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q4204645)
Gay prisoners (https://lccn.loc.gov/sh2014000004)
Prisoners--sexual behavior (https://lccn.loc.gov/sh85106962)
Homosexuality--Law and legislation (https://lccn.loc.gov/sh85061781)
Dissenters (https://lccn.loc.gov/sh85038488)--Soviet Union (https://lccn.loc.gov/n80126312)
Political activists (https://lccn.loc.gov/sh88005959)--Soviet Union (https://lccn.loc.gov/n80126312)
Soviet activists (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q7888903)
Political activists (https://lccn.loc.gov/sh88005959) --Russia (Federation) (https://lccn.loc.gov/n92056007)
Russian activists (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q7036389)
Mogutin, Slava (https://lccn.loc.gov/no94038036)
Mogutin, Slava (http://viaf.org/viaf/10753888)
Slava Mogutin (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q2094353)
Novoe vremia, 1993 no. 35 pp. 44-47, 1993 no. 36 pp. 50-54