Attempting to manage homosexuality before and after the Bolshevik revolution.

Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia: The Regulation of Sexual and Gender Dissent. By Dan Healey. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001, 376 pages. Cloth, $40.00.

Often, book titles promise more than the book delivers. Healey's very impressive history delivers considerably more than its title promises. Almost half the book discusses homosexuality before the 1917 revolutions, and more than a quarter of the book discusses homosexuality after the revolutionary period ended with the consolidation of power in the hands of Josef Stalin. Moreover, it contains fascinating and pointed discussion of attempts to extirpate "traditional" pederasty in non-Russian (Central Asian) republics.

Before getting beyond the (sub)title, I have to challenge the interpretation of acting on homosexual desires as "dissent." There is a bit in the book about gender nonconformity, but "dissent" and "dissident" connote a self-conscious and politicized challenge to a status quo that is not supported by what is reported in the text. Neither those dallying with bachi dancer-prostitutes in Uzbekistan nor those cruising the Nevskii Prospekt in St. Petersburg/Leningrad challenged the regime, and many of both seem to have viewed their same-sex sexual activity as unremarkable. (To think of it as "natural" requires reflection on conduct as problematic and in need of rationalization that is often absent, and not just in Russia.)

Rather than attempting to extirpate "sodomy" as the Roman Catholic Church did, the Russian Orthodox Church "turned a blind eye" to nonmarital sex and did not differentiate homosexual from heterosexual relations outside marriage. Bathhouses and workshops were recurrent sites for Russian male-male sexual relations that were not problematic to those involved or to the courts or to very many modernizing moral entrepreneurs. Although I am unsure of what Healey means by "mutual," he makes the case that "during the late Imperial era a Russian, urban, male homosexual subculture developed from indigenous patterns of traditional mutual masculine sexuality" (p. 48; whatever he may mean by "mutual," it is not "reciprocal," and does not even seem to mean that both parties enjoyed their sexual encounters).

A consciousness of kind (of being a sodomite or having genitals not matching one's gender) was mostly missing for those in female salons, for the young soldiers and servants who could be cajoled or paid to have sex, or for their patrons. This does not mean that those Russians failed to notice that they were frequenting certain locales, meeting and having sex with others of the same sex. Some left diaries that marked their conduct as "sinful," but they did not display anxiety about masculinity. For women, "it was a woman-centered sexuality, rather than gender [masculine self-presentation] that formed the basis for identity" (p. 63), though some adopted a masculine style "to attract other women" (p. 62).

Especially with the measures of liberalization of society after the 1905 revolution, consciousness of kind developed: "Some men having erotic relations with their own sex now referred to themselves and their friends as tetki or `our own kind,'" (p. 49). Male prostitution became better organized and there were tetki cabarets, restaurants, and bars as well as bathhouses catering to tetki. Even after the revolution, "individuals continued to strike up acquaintances and have both voluntary and paid sex wither on the premises or after meeting there" (p. 35). The revolution drove male homosexual relations underground; in particular into public toilets, parks, and street cruising. Open homosexual entertainment also tapered off in Russia, while that in the Central Asian republics was actively combated. Loss of control over any private space made it difficult for women interested in women to find each other or to party, though some welcomed and were exhilarated by the official promotion of women as workers, soldiers, and revolutionaries.

Healey challenges the widespread view (most forcefully put by Simon Karlinsky) that the decriminalization of sodomy was inadvertent. He shows that, despite negative attitudes expressed by Lenin (and similar sentiments from Marx) about sexual freedom and rationalizing "personal abnormality or hypertrophy in sexual life" as a diversion from revolutionary work, socialists in Russia and in Germany followed August Bebel in support of repealing paragraph 175 of the German civil code. Healey shows that there were liberals, notably Vladimir D. Nabokov, advocating repeal of sodomy as an offense in the draft Russian criminal code of 1903. After the February 1917 revolution, the provisional government set up a commission that included Nabokov to review and implement a reformed criminal code. Healey admits that "the trail of evidence leading from the potentialities of 1917 to the first Soviet Russian criminal code of 1922, which decriminalized sodomy, is rather unclear. There are no records of substantive debate among the framers" (p. 115).

Healey's discussion of the drafts of M. Iu. Kozlovskii, appointed in 1920 by the Justice Commissariat to devise a scheme of chapter headings for the criminal code does not demonstrate the "clear intention to remove the act [sodomy] from the Bolshevik criminal code," as he claims it does (p. 121). Moreover, "the path from these proposals to the final language of the 1922 RSFSR criminal code on crimes against the individual remains obscure" (p. 121) and Healey's epic archival research did not turn up evidence of discussion of decriminalizing sodomy or establish who deleted the tsarist legal terms for sexual misconduct from the Kozlovskii draft. While it is plausible that the precedent of the French revolutionary regime's decriminalization was known to the law codifiers, and although it is clear that this decriminalization was trumpeted in propaganda about the new social order for western consumption, "explicit decision" is something of a leap of faith in Bolshevik enlightenment about homosexuality.

From 1922 to 1933 there was no single official position on homosexuality, at least in the Slavic heartlands, but it was treated with suspicion as being "unproletarian;" i.e, decadent bourgeois behavior that would naturally disappear from the social revolution and the suppression of monasteries. The socialist German sex-reformer Magnus Hirschfeld, visiting in 1926, "realized that no open, organized group of homosexuals existed in the new Russia and that Soviet journalism and literature were silent about the question" (p. 138). This contrasts with the first two decades of the twentieth century in Russia, during which literature and sexology openly portrayed homosexuality. There does not appear to have been any attempt to produce a Marxist theorization of homosexuality, though some psychiatrists claimed male passivity was caused by congenital homosexuality and that males taking penetrative roles was an acquired habit. For all the attention that Healey gives psychiatry (in the tradition of Foucault's emphasis), psychiatry seems to have mattered very little in either tsarist or in pre-Stalinist Bolshevik Russia.

At the peripheries of the USSR, in the Caucasuses and in Central Asia, Bolshevik social engineers set out to eradicate pederastic traditions as "survivals of primitive custom," that, being socially generated, could be eliminated (along with brideprice and polygamy) by paternalistic modernizers. The decriminalization of the conduct of a minority in the European/Slavic heartland did not extend to the "primitive" societies of the peripheries, and the "contradiction between the Soviet Union's declared sexual vanguardism and its policies in outlying regions seemed unproblematic to jurists" sent out to modernize Turkic-speaking Muslim peoples in particular.

Relatively soon, sodomy was recriminalized for the Slavs as well. There were "loud attacks on `biologizing' scientists, accused of looking for the roots of social ills in individual biology" (p. 175) and official pressure on psychiatric institutions to force "labor therapy" on hospitalized mental patients. Social "cleansing" accelerated from 1929 through 1932 as part of forced rapid industrialization and collectivization necessary for "socialism in one country."

A deputy chief of the secret police (OGPU) proposed recriminalizing sodomy in 1933, because homosexuals "using the castelike exclusivity of homosexual circles for plainly counterrevolutionary aims, politically demoralized various social layers of young men, including young workers, and even attempted to penetrate the army and navy" (quoted, p. 184; Iagoda used "pederasty," but not in the age-structured sense). Stalin noted that "these scoundrels must receive exemplary punishment and a corresponding guiding decree must be introduced in our legislation" (quoted p. 184). Iagoda sent Stalin a draft 13 Dec. 1933 that was approved by the Politburo 16 Dec., promulgated by various republics within three months, and defended by the cowed cultural spokesman Maksim Gor'kii in Pravda and Izvestiia on 23 May 1934 as necessary to block the moral degradation and seduction of the nation's youth, particularly its military personnel (as war with Nazi Germany loomed).

Although finding hardly any paper trail of discussion of recriminalizing sodomy, Healey found an interesting May 1934 letter from a British Communist, Moscow resident, and Moscow Daily News employee. Harry Whyte wrote to Stalin, making a Marxist case against sodomy laws and arguing that a homosexual could be a good communist. Stalin wrote that the author was "an idiot and a degenerate," but Gorkii's article seems to have been a direct response to Whyte's letter, clarifying that a good communist could not be a homosexual.

Recriminalization of sodomy was part of pro-natalist preparation for war, along with measures encouraging procreation and the general repression of non-normative behavior in the Stalinist reign of terror. Sex between women was judged to be so rare as not to require legal proscription, even as part of what Healey aptly characterizes as "pronatalist coercion" and "compulsory heterosexuality." As dogged as are his attempts to find evidence of female homosexuality being persecuted, his material provides another instance of "lesbian impunity" and of not considering female homosexuality as being serious or as being nearly as common as male homosexuality, insofar as the two are even cognized as one phenomenon ("homosexuality" instead of "sodomy," "pederasty", and "tribadism").

Healey concludes his ambitious book with consideration of a "sample" (he does not specify the criteria for sampling) of sodomy prosecutions from the 1930s and 1940s, the prison culture (that seems transnational) of demasculinized sexual insertees deserving to be mistreated, the lack of liberalization of enforcement of sodomy laws after the death of Stalin (indeed, official statistics from the 1960s and 1970s indicate climbing rates of conviction), the lack of pressure from dissidents within Russia and human rights advocates from elsewhere to protect homosexuals, and the surprise 1993 decree from Russian President Boris Yeltsin eliminating the sodomy law of 1934 (confirmed in the 1996 adoption of a new criminal code for the Russian Federation).

I have already suggested that Healey overemphasizes the importance of Russian psychiatrists in the decades before World War II and he seems to me to romanticize the Leninist state a bit, but this book is an impressive analysis of both lived experience of homosexuality and of official social control vacillating (dialectically?) between tolerance and repression. He has sifted through mountains of paper, both Russian specialist publications and the holdings of many Russian archives previously closed to researchers. There are 88 pages of endnotes and 31 illustrations, including two of bachi dancing in Samarkand, circa 1913, and three of Egorov bathhouse interiors, circa 1910. Except for insistent repetition of "commodification" and "dissent" and some not-always-specified acronyms, and the mystifying use of "mutual," the text is clearly written. With some archives still closed to researchers, no account can be definitive. However, Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia is a major contribution to cultural history in general, and attempted social control of homosexuality in particular.

Stephen O. Murray, Ph.D., El Instituto Obregon, 1360 De Haro, San Francisco, CA 94107-3239; e-mail: [e-mail].