Tsentr treugol’nik informatsionnyi biulleten’, 1996 no. 1
Item about a police raid at a gay nightclub from the LGBTQ community bulletin Центр треугольник информационный бюллетень
Post-Soviet
1996
The gay nightclub “Chance” or “Shans” (Шанс) has a rather murky history, which is unsurprising for a gay night club in Moscow in the 1990s.
Most accounts have the club opening around 1993 and closing around 2002. 1993 was the year the new Constitution of the Russian Federation was introduced and a longstanding law stipulating prison sentences of up to five years for consensual sexual relations between adult males was repealed. It would be another twenty years before the law criminalizing “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relationships in the presence of minors” (“пропаганда нетрадиционных сексуальных отношений среди несовершеннолетних”) — Federal law 135-F3 — would be enacted. Federal law 135-F3 has been widely decried by LGBTQ activists as a cynical instrument of oppression and an effective criminalization of the expression of LGBTQ identities.
Legal status notwithstanding, gay, transgender and sexually fluid or gender-fluid men were still a very vulnerable group in 1990s Russia, where the broader culture was generally still hostile toward these modes of male identity and behavior. In this historical moment a newly reintroduced private enterprise produced a post-Soviet Russian take on a Western genre — the gay bar or gay night club. In North America and Western Europe these privately owned establishments were havens where men and women could express homosexual desire and gender identities of which wider society was largely intolerant. These were private places that allowed for anonymous socializing for people who, merely by being there, tacitly self-identified as members of a group afflicted by the same illicit or taboo desires. They were destinations disconnected from broader social networks, where colleagues or acquaintances meeting by chance enjoyed the mutual protection of a shared secret. Throughout most of their history, these establishments prohibited photography to protect the privacy of their patrons. In times when laws prohibited expressions of homoeroticism, they were clandestine establishments for illicit activities often owned and operated by organized criminals. The history of the founding and ownership of Chance/Shans is, thus, not surprisingly, obscure. Operating in a new constitutional environment in which male homosexuality was no longer illegal, gay bars and nightclubs in the Russian capitals nonetheless had to be very discreet and creative with advertising strategies that would reach their target audience without making the venues and their patrons targets of violence or harassment. The police raid described in this piece (of the type that provoked the Stonewall Riots in New York in June 1969) is representative of a kind of harassment frequently suffered at the hands of law enforcement agencies accustomed to homosexuality being an illegal category and homosexual men a vulnerable group without recourse against harassment, extortion, and other abuses. In the piece the officers’ attempts at using a security camera to film and blackmail customers in the club is described as an act of “nostalgia” for a time when the shame and fear of gay men could be more easily exploited for gain. The mention of the man of “caucasian ethnicity” who was singled out by the officers is indicative of a wider prejudice against ethnic minorities who were themselves very vulnerable groups in post-Soviet Russia.
Bars and night clubs, certainly privately owned ones, were generally not a phenomenon of Soviet life, a circumstance that likely precluded the formation of the kinds of alternative LGBTQ social milieus that had long existed in Western Europe and North America. As destinations external to and insulated from people’s wider social networks of family, friends, and colleagues, they were a necessary precondition for the formation of an active LGBTQ subcultures in the West.
For those with some knowledge of of Moscow history and lore, Chance/Shans had some peculiar diachronic resonances The site on which the building sits is adjacent to the fourteenth-century St. Andronicus Monastery (Андронников монастырь), which contains the oldest surviving church in the city — Church of the Holy Mandylion (Спасский собор). The monastery and its cemetery are reputed sites of several mass graves, including those of soldiers from the battle of Battle of Kulikovo (Куликовская битва), and may be the burial site of the celebrated fifteenth-century icon painter Andrei Rublev. In the early 1920s it was the site of one of the early concentration camps run by the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission to Combat Counterrevolutionary Activities and Sabotage (Всероссийская чрезвычайная комиссия по борьбе с контрреволюцией и саботажем, “ВЧК”). The camp housed opponents of the new Bolshevik authorities and was the site of mass executions by firing squad. In 1928 it was given over to the factory collective Sickle and Hammer (Серп и молот) and monastery structures were converted into dormitories for the workers. Between 1929 and 1933 a massive constructivist complex was built on land adjacent to the monastery site (land later discovered to contain mass graves) to house an enormous club for the factory workers. That structure included enormous spaces for facilities that included a theater and a gymnasium. In the 1950s the building was modified to bring it more into line with the neoclassical aesthetic of that era (columns, balustrades, and other ornaments were added). In the 1980s the run-down structure held one of the main performance venues for Soviet rock music. The post-Soviet remnants of the complex housed the enormous gay nightclub Chance/Shans. In this life the structure included multiple dance floors on multiple levels, many separate lounges featuring different decors and different styles of music, a huge outdoor terrace, and, perhaps most famously, a lounge known as the “Fish Room” (Рыбный зал) with aquariums of different sizes build into the walls, each featuring a different species of fish, and one enormous floor-to-ceiling aquarium displaying naked male (human) swimmers. There is some anecdotal evidence that, some years after Chance/Shans closed, there were plans to open a new club there named “Diaghilev” (for the early twentieth-century openly gay ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev) — a second iteration of a club in the Hermitage Garden (Moscow) that was destroyed by fire in 2008. These plans were never realized.
Russia
Tsentr treugol’nik informatsionnyi biulleten’, 1996 no. 1, p. 1