LGBT rights in Russia

As of 2008, Russia has no criminal law directed at LGBT people and has refused to enact legislation to address discrimination or harassment on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. Public opinion about LGBT topics and people tends to be negative, although there is a visible LGBT community network, including nightclubs and political organizations.

Tsarist Russia

In 1716, Tsar Peter the Great enacted a ban on male homosexuality in the armed forces. The prohibition on sodomy was part of a larger reform movement designed to modernize Russia and efforts to extend a similar ban to the civilian population were rejected until 1835 [http://www.glbtq.com/social-sciences/russia,2.html] . Furthermore it is unclear how serious this initial ban was, given that Peter the Great himself was known to had had female and male lovers.

Prior to Tsarist policy, homosexuality and cross-dressing were punished by religious authorities or militias. Ivan the Terrible was accused of being gay, in an attempt to discredit him. When Tsar Dmitry was overthrown his broken body was dragged through the streets, from his genitals, alongside his reputed boyfriend [http://www.glbtq.com/social-sciences/russia,2.html] .

In the 1830s, Russia czar, Nicholas I, added Article 995 which outlawed "muzhelozhstvo". While this could have created a ban on all forms of private adult, and voluntary homosexual behavior, the courts tended to limit its interpreted to anal sex between men, thus making private acts of oral sex between consenting men legal. The law did not explicitly address female homosexuality or cross-dressing, although both behaviors were considered to be equally immoral and may have been punished under other laws [Karlinsky, Simon. P. 349 "Russia's Gay Literature and Culture: The Impact of the October Revolution". Hidden From History: Reclaiming The Gay and Lesbian Past. 1989] .

Persons convicted under Article 995 were to be stripped of their rights and relocated to a Siberia for four to five years. It is unknown how many Russians were sentenced under this law, although their were a number of openly gay and bisexual Russians during this era; i.e. the conservative Nikolai Gogol and homoerotic rites were popular among some religious dissidents in the far north of Russia [Karlinsky, Simon. P. 350 "Russia's Gay Literature and Culture: The Impact of the October Revolution". Hidden From History: Reclaiming The Gay and Lesbian Past. 1989] . The relativily high number of openly gay or bisexula artists and intellectuals continued on into the late nineteenth century.

The Russian naturalist Nikolai Przhevalsky brought along a new male lover on each of his world famous travels. Author and critic Konstantin Leontiev was bisexual, and one of the most famous couple in the late nineteenth century Russian literary was a lesbian couple; feminist-lawyer Anna Yevreinova and author Maria Feodorova. Another notable Russian lesbian couple were author Polyxena Soloviova and Natalia Manaseina [Karlinsky, Simon. P. 351 "Russia's Gay Literature and Culture: The Impact of the October Revolution". Hidden From History: Reclaiming The Gay and Lesbian Past. 1989] . Other notables included poet Alexei Apukhtin, Peter Tchaikovsky, conservative author and publisher Prince Vladimir Meshchersky, Sergei Diaghilev, who had an affair with his cousin Dmitry Filosofov and, after the breakup, with Vaslav Nijinsky. Mikhail Kuzmins "novel "Wings" (1906) became one of the first "coming out" stories to have a happy ending and his private journals provide a detailed view of a gay subculture, involving men of all classes.

While their was a degree of governemnt tolerance extended to certain gay or bisexual artists and intellectuals, especially if they were on friendly terms with the tsarist family, the prevasive public opinion, greatly influenced by the Eastern Orthodox Church, was that homosexuality was a sign of corruption, decadence and immorality. Russian author Alexnader Amfiteatrovs novel titled "People of the 1890s" (1910), reflected this prejudice with two gay characters; a masculine lesbian attorney and a decadent gay poet.

Leo Tolstoy's "Resurrection" introduces a Russian artist, convicted for having sex with his students but given a lenient sentence, and a Russian activist for gay rights as examples of the widespread corruption and immorality in Tsarist Russia [Karlinsky, Simon. P. 349 "Russia's Gay Literature and Culture: The Impact of the October Revolution". Hidden From History: Reclaiming The Gay and Lesbian Past. 1989] .

These two depiction of gay men and women in liteature, suggest that the governemnt's selective tolerance of homosexuality, was not widely expressed among the Russian people and that it was also divorced from any endorsement of LGBT-rights. While other nations, most notable Germany, had an active gay rights movement during this era, the most visible example of Russian homosexuality, aside from literature, was prostitution.

Russian urbanization had helped to ensure that St. Petersburg and Moscow both had gay brothels, along with many public places where men would buy and sell sexual services for or from other men. [http://www.glbtq.com/social-sciences/russia,3.html] . While their certainly was lesbian prostitution, and some allegdged lesbian affairs, less was publically said, good or bad, about gay or bisexual women [http://www.glbtq.com/social-sciences/russia,4.html] .

Anarchists & Kadets

Most of the Russian revolutionaries were generally prudish, if not reactionary, about all matters pretaining to human sexuality. Among the few exceptions, who would also support the legalization of private, adult and consensual homosexual relations, were the anarchists and centrist Constitutional Democratic Party or the Kadets.

Anarchist Alexander Berkman softened his prejudice against homosexuality through his relationship with Emma Goldman and his time spent in jail, where he learned that working class men could be gay, thus rebuking the idea that homosexuality was sign of upper middle class or wealthy exploitation or decadence [Karlinsky, Simon. P. 353 "Russia's Gay Literature and Culture: The Impact of the October Revolution". Hidden From History: Reclaiming The Gay and Lesbian Past. 1989.]

One of the foundes of the Kadets, Vladimir Nabokov Sr., had written a research paper on the legal status of homosexuality in Russia, published by early gay rights advocate Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld in Berlin. Yet, most Russian reformers and revolutionaries did not share the opinions of Goldman, Berkman or Nabokov.

Pre-Stalin Soviet Russia

The Russian Communist Inessa Armand openly called for feminism and sexual liberation. The Russian Communist Party effectively legalized no-fault divorce, abortion and homosexuality, when they abolished all the old Tsarist laws and the initial Soviet criminal code kept these liberal sexual polices in place [Hazard, John N. "Unity and Diversity in Socialist Law".]

Yet, the legalization of private, adult and consensual homosexual relations only applied to Russia itself. Homosexuality or sodomy remained a crime in Azerbaijan (1923) Soviet Georgia, Central Asia and Uzbek throughout the 1920s [Healey, Dan. "Masculine purity and 'Gentlemen's Mischief': Sexual Exchange and Prostitution between Russian Men, 1861-1941". "Slavic Review". Vol. 60, No. 2 (Summer, 2001), p. 258.] Similar criminal laws were enacted in Uzbekistan (1926), and Turkmenistan (1927)" [Dan Healey GLQ 8:3 "Homosexual Existence and Exisitng Socialism New Light on the Repression of Male Homosexuality in Stalin's Russia" p. 349 - 378 2002] . Why homosexual was legal and illegal in different parts of the Soviet Unions is not all together clear. Some historians have speculated that it was made illegal in certain parts of the Union to help "civilize" the population, while the initial view within Russia itself was that it harmless disability.

The Soviet Union sent delegates were the German Institute for Sexual Science, and to some international conferences on human sexuality, who expressed support for the legalization of adult, private and consensual homosexual relations. However, In the 1930s, LGBT themes faced official government censorship, and an uniformly harsher policy across the entire Soviet Union.

Stalin

In 1933, Article 121 was added to the criminal code, for the entire Soviet Union, that expressly prohibited male homosexuality, with up to five years of hard labor in prison. The precise reason for the new law is still in some dispute.

Some historians have suggested that Stalin's enactment of the anti-gay law was, like his prohibition on abortion, was an attempt to increase the Russian birthrate and build a better relationship with the socially conservative Eastern Orthodox Church. Some historians have noted that it was during this time that Soviet propaganda, began to depict homosexuality as a sign of fascism, and that Article 121 may have a simple political tool to use against dissidents, irrespective of their true sexual orientation, and to solidify Russian opposition to Nazi Germany, who had broken its treaty with Russia [Karlinsky, Simon. P. 362] .

More recently, a third possible reason for the anti-gay law has emerged from declassified Soviet documents and transcripts. Beyond expressed fears of a vast "counterrevolutionary" or fascist homosexual conspiracy, their were several high profile, arrests of Russian men accused of being pederasts, and homosexuality had become more visible with the "limited capitalism" that Lenin legalized, but Stalin despised [http://www.workers.org/ww/2004/lgbtseries1007.php] . Whatever the precise reason, homosexuality remained a serious criminal offense until it was repealed in 1993 [http://www.workers.org/ww/2004/lgbtseries1007.php] .

The Soviet government itself said very little publicly about the change in the law, and few people seemed to be aware that it existed. In 1934, the British Communist Harry Whyte, wrote a long letter to Stalin condemning the law, and its prejudicial motivations. He laid out a Marxist position against the oppression of homosexuals, as a social minority, and compared homophobia to racism, xenophobia and sexism.

While the letter was not formally replied to, Soviet cultural writer Maxim Gorky, authored an article, published in both Pravda and Izvestia titled "Proletarian Humanism", that seemed to reject Whyte's arguments point by point. He rejected the notion that homosexuals were a social minority, and argued that the Soviet Union needed to combat them in order to protect the youth and battle fascism ["Proletarian Humanism" May 23, 1934] .

A few years later, 1936, Justice Commissar Nikolai Krylenko publicly stated that the anti-gay criminal law was correctly aimed at the decadent and effete old ruling classes, thus further linking homosexuality to a right-wing conspiracy, i.e. tsarist aristocracy and German fascists [http://www.workers.org/ww/2004/lgbtseries1007.php] .

1950s - 1960s

When Joseph Stalin came to power, homosexuality became a topic unfit for public depiction, defense or discussion. Homosexual or bisexual Russians who wanted a position within the Communist Party, were expected to marry a person of the opposite sex, regardless of their actual sexual orientation. Even then, their was a strong risk of being caught up in the purges, publicly denounced, imprisoned, banished or executed.

One of the rare exceptions was the Russian film director Sergei M. Eisenstein, who despite his homosexuality managed to survive by leading a double life, he had affairs with men while married to a woman, and producing films that were politically pleasing to Stalin. After Stalin died in 1953, he was replaced by Khrushchev who proceeded to liberalize the Stalin era laws regarding marriage divorce and abortion, but the anti-gay law remained.

Some historians have speculated that the anti-gay law was kept, because it was an effective tool against artistic, intellectual or political dissidents, irrespective of their sexual orientation.

Other historians have speculated that the institutional, often exploitative, homosexuality that existed in Soviet prisons prompted Khrushchev to keep the anti-gay law for fear that his release of many Gulag prisoners might lead to an increase in homosexuality in the general population.

1970s - Glasnost

In the 1970s - 1980s censorship rules regarding homosexuality slowly began to change. Russian gay author Yevgency Kharitonov illegally circulated some gay fiction before he died of heart failure in 1981. Author Gennady Trifonov served four years of hard labor for circulating his gay poems and, upon his release, was allowed to write and publish only if he avoided depicting or making reference to homosexuality [Karlinksy P. 363] . David Dar and Edward Limonov only came out after they defected from the USSR. Vicktor Sosnora was allowed to write about witnessing an eldery gay actor being brutally murdered in a Lenigrad bar in "The Flying Dutchman" (1979), but the book was published in Eastern Germany. Kozlovsky was permitted to include a brief interior monologue about homosexuality in "Moscow to the End of the Line" (1973). Perhaps the first public endorsement of gay rights since Stalin was a brief statement, critical of Article 121 and calling for its repeal, made in the "Textbook of Soviet Criminal Law" (1973) [Ref. Karlinsky P. 362 [http://community.middlebury.edu/~moss/RGC2.html] . In 1984 a group of Russian gay men met and attempted to organize an official gay rights organization, only to be quickly shut down by the KGB. The number of Russians arrested under Article 121 in a given year is still in some dispute, but it was roughly a thousand per year in the 1980s. In the late Glasnost period, some public discussion was permitted about re-legalizing private, consensual adult homosexual relations. In 1989-1990 a Moscow gay rights organization lead by Yevgeniya Debryanskaya was permitted to exist, with Roman Kalinin given permission to publish a gay newspaper, "Tema". After the fall of the Soviet Union, the new criminal code adopted in 1993 decriminalized private, adult and consensual homosexual relations [http://community.middlebury.edu/~moss/RGC2.html] .

Post-Soviet

On May 27, 1993, homosexual acts between consenting males were legalized although no formal process was developed to release those Russians imprisoned under the old, anti-gay law. The reform was largely the result of pressure from the Council of Europe. While President Boris Yeltsin signed the bill into law, neither he nor the parliament had any interest in LGBT rights legislation [http://www.glbtq.com/social-sciences/russia,8.html] and none of the Russian political parties endorsed LGBT rights.

In 1996, a Russian LGBT human rights organization called "Triangle" was formed, with several new LGBT themed publications and local organizations arising in light of the fall of the Soviet Union [http://www.glbtq.com/social-sciences/russia,8.html] . Yet as was the case with the groups to arise in 1989-1990, many of these organizations, including "Triangle" folded due to lack of funding as well as legal and social harassment [http://www.glbtq.com/social-sciences/russia,8.html] .

In 1999, homosexuality was formally removed from the list of Russian mental disorders, but in 2001 the longest circulating LGBT publication became a victim of an anti-pornography campaign and was shut down.

In 2002, Gennady Raikov, who led a conservative pro-government group in the Russian Duma, suggested outlawing homosexual acts. His proposal failed to generate enough votes but the suggestion generated public support from many conservative religious leaders and medical doctors. [http://www.glbtq.com/social-sciences/russia,8.html] .

In 2003 the Russian armed forces stated that it formally bans homosexuals, even conscripts, from serving in the armed forces. That same year Grand Mufti Talgat Tadzhuddin was quoted as saying about Moscow gay pride marchers, "If they come out on to the streets anyway they should be flogged. Any normal person would do that - Muslims and Orthodox Christians alike..." [cite web|url=http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-fg-gays26may26,1,4091141.story|title=Gay Pride Parade Polarizes Moscow|author=Kim Murphy|publisher=Los Angeles Times|date=2006-05-26]

Similar comments were made in 2006 when one of Russia's Chief Rabbis, Berl Lazar, joined Tadzhuddin in condemning the march, saying that it "would be a blow for morality", but he didn't go as far as saying that marchers should be beaten. [cite news|title=Russian Chief Rabbi Echoes Muslim Leader in Protesting Gay Pride in Moscow|publisher=Moscow News|date=2006-02-16|url=http://www.mosnews.com/news/2006/02/16/rabbytoo.shtml]

In late April and early May 2006, protesters blockaded some popular gay clubs in Moscow. After initial complaints that police had failed to intervene, later blockade attempts were met with arrests. [cite web|url=http://gayrussia.ru/en/homophobia/detail.php?ID=4816|title=Moscow Gay Club Blockades|date=2006-05-02|publisher=GayRussia.ru]

In May 2006, a gay rights forum was held in Moscow. An accompanying march was banned by the mayor in a decision upheld by the courts. Some activists tried to march despite the ban and attempted to lay flowers at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. This act and the presence of non-Russian activists aroused a nationalist reaction in addition to a religious condemnation of homosexuality, leading to the presence of both neo-Nazi groups and Orthodox protesters threatening the gay activists. Anti-march protesters beat the marchers, and about 50 marchers and 20 protesters were arrested when riot police moved in to break up the conflict. [cite news|url=http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/5023466.stm|title=Banned Moscow gay rally broken up|date=2007-05-27|publisher=BBC News]

In the midst of a row over the decision by Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov to ban a gay rights parade in Moscow, Russian President Vladimir Putin was asked for his opinion on homosexuality at a press conference on February 1, 2007. Putin said:

"With regards to what the heads of regions say, I normally try not to comment. I don’t think it is my business.

My relation to gay parades and sexual minorities in general is simple – it is connected with my official duties and the fact that one of the country’s main problems is demographic. (Applause.) But I respect and will continue to respect personal freedom in all its forms, in all its manifestations."

[ [http://www.kremlin.ru/eng/speeches/2007/02/01/1309_type82915type82917_117600.shtml Transcript of Press Conference with the Russian and Foreign Media] , February 1, 2007] [cite web
url=http://gaycitynews.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=18352281&BRD=2729&PAG=461&dept_id=569346&rfi=6
title=Moscow Pride Banned Again]

On May 27, 2007 a gay rights demonstration banned by Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, who had earlier branded it as "satanic", was held in Moscow again and for the second year running degenerated into violent clashes with anti-gay protestors. For the second time police failed to protect gay rights activists. Italian MP Marco Cappato was kicked by an anti-gay activist and then detained when he demanded police protection. British gay rights veteran Peter Tatchell and Russian gay leader Nikolay Alexeyev were detained as well. [ [http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6695913.stm Arrests at Russian gay protests] , BBC News, May 27, 2007.] [ [http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6696329.stm Eggs and punches at Russia gay march] by Mike Levy, BBC News, May 27, 2007.]

On June 1, 2008, gay demonstrators in Moscow again attempted to hold a gay parade. Some 13 Orthodox opposers were held by police for violent actions against protesters.

Support for gay marriage in Russia is at 14% [http://www.angus-reid.com/polls/index.cfm/fuseaction/viewItem/itemID/5986]

Transgender Issues

In Tsarist Russia, young women would sometimes pose as men or act like tomboys. This was often tolerated among the educated middle classes, with the assumption that such behavior was asexual and would stop when the girl married [http://www.glbtq.com/social-sciences/russia,8.html] . However, cross-dressing was widely seen as immoral behavior, punishable by the Church and later the government [http://www.glbtq.com/social-sciences/russia,8.html] .

In Soviet Russia, sex change operations were first tried during the 1920s but became prohibited until the 1960s, when they were often done by Russian endocrinologist Aron Belkin, who was something of an advocate for transgender people until his death in 2003 [http://www.glbtq.com/social-sciences/russia,7.html] .

References

Moscow Gay Pride

External links

* [http://www.gayrussia.ru/en/ Gay Russia]
* [http://www.gay.ru/ Russian National Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transsexual Website]
* [http://old.exile.ru/2007-June-15/russophobe_homo.html Is HOMO what OMON sees in the mirror?] The eXile
* [http://www.glbtq.com/social-sciences/russia,8.html LGBT History: Russia]