Lesbian Lives and Real Existing Socialism in Late Soviet Russia

Abstract

This chapter contributes to current debates about queer presences and absences by focusing on a notable absence in both queer and Russian studies, namely that of the lives of women involved in same-sex relations in Soviet Russia (1917-89). Until very recently, in existing accounts of Soviet society, queer lives, and lesbian lives even more so, have been notable by their absence and invisibility. Since the 1990s, a handful of pioneering studies has begun to uncover their hidden history; however, existing work has almost exclusively focused on state-enforced mechanisms of regulation of same-sex desire by exploring medical and legal discourses on homosexuality, or same-sex desire in Soviet prison camps (Engelstein, 1995; Zhuk, 1998; Healey, 2001; Kuntsman, 2009). While offering very valuable insights into the lives of Soviet queers, existing research has mostly been based on archival and documentary sources such as police records, court documents, medical studies and the memoirs of GULag prisoners. Thus, with few exceptions (Rotkirch, 2002), the literature has privileged the perspective of professionals or witnesses, rather than queers themselves, and focused very heavily on the environments of the clinic and the prison camp, where homosexuality was symbolically confined by the Soviet state.