Russian Homophobia from Stalin to Sochi by Healey Dan (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 577 Mills writes incisively on the influence of English and Italian subculture and hooliganism on Yugoslav football in 1980s; it would be useful in light of the Tito-Stalin split of 1948 to consider how the post-war development of the game in Yugoslavia differed from that in countries of the Eastern Bloc. However, this highly original study undeniably makes a valuable and scholarly contribution to our understanding of Yugoslav history, and a thoughtful and convincing case for the continued examination of the overt and covert means by which sport is politicized. Durham University Guy Woodward Healey, Dan. Russian Homophobia from Stalin to Sochi. Bloomsbury Academic, London and New York, 2018. xxii + 286 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Selected further reading. Index. £21.99 (paperback). Seventeen years have passed since the publication of Dan Healey’s groundbreaking book, Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia. It remains one of the most masterfully researched investigations of queer subcultures and attitudes towards homosexuality in the first half of the twentieth century. Healey’s latest book focuses more directly on homophobia in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russian Federation. Its ‘niche’ focus should fool no one: this book is a valuable tool for any modern historian. The book’s universal value is in its sophisticated methodology. Healey must not only contend with stereotypes about Russia by outsiders, but with presentday attempts to control the historical narrative by internal forces hostile to queers. He dissects and analyses archival material with the theoretical and empirical knowledge at his disposal, despite obstructive elements within archival institutions, deliberate destruction or redaction of sources and false or hostile interpretations of restricted-access material by homophobes within the historical profession. He does this while reflecting critically on what meanings can be drawn from different types of sources — memoirs, official reports, Gulag records, ‘confessions’ given to police, or the pre-digital gay magazines of the 1990s — depending on the circumstances and context of their production and preservation. The disputed biographies of three samesex attracted cultural figures — the poet Nikolai Kliuev (1884–1937), poet and diarist Mikhail Kuzmin (1872–1936) and the Soviet singer Vadim Kozin (1905–94) — serve as examples of aggressive historical instrumentalization or erasure, and the tenacity of queer life stories. The book is organized into three parts — Homophobia in Russia after 1945, Queer Visibility and ‘Traditional Sexual Relations’, and Writing and SEER, 97, 3, JULY 2019 578 Remembering Russia’s Queer Pasts — each of which Healey uses to address a set of thematic or methodological questions. Temporally the book covers three periods, from Stalin’s assumption of power to the Second World War (mid1920s to late 1930s), the post-war Soviet period (1945 to 1991) and the post-Soviet period (1991 to the present). Healey identifies three ‘sexual revolutions’ over this time, not all of which were part of a liberalizing trend. 1968, for example, was not a progressive moment in Soviet history: there was no Stonewall, feminism was shunned and police persecution intensified in the 1970s and 1980s. This idea of a sexual revolution that conservatizes, rather than liberalizes, is compelling. Healey links the history of homophobia not only to moral discourses but material and systemic trends and circumstances, and to the social organization of gender and reproduction. This allows him to grapple with seemingly contradictory empirical evidence. Within the Gulag system which operated from the mid-1930s to the mid-1950s as a cornerstone of the Soviet economy, heterosexuality posed an unequally high risk compared with homosexuality. Despite its ostensible function to uphold the law and the moral code, the Gulag ‘was mainly destructive of “normal” family ties; many [heterosexuals] found it psychologically and practically impossible to restore lost relationships’ once sentences were served (p. 50). When the Gulag was dismantled after 1953, three quarters of the 25 million former prisoners were men, precipitating a crisis of heterosexuality. Contemporary policy-makers saw the Gulag not only as a place into which homosexuality was brought, but as ‘homogenic’ (p. 36), that is, generative of homosexuality. Yet homosexuality could also be a stabilizing factor that guaranteed a higher rate of labour productivity and, in the case of women, reduced maternity costs (p. 38). Healey offers several gems of...