Evolutions and Revolutions

Here is some historical perspective to yesterday's blog entry. According to Dan Healey's book Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia, from way back in the 1840s a belief was held by some that socialism would both end economic exploitation and bring about personal and sexual freedoms. The 1917 fall of the Tsar brought some sexual freedom but Stalin's counter revolution in the 1930s brought an end to this. The Russian Orthodox church was one with the Tsar and promoted sexism and antisemitism. Industrialisation helped lessen some traditions and social control.

After the unsuccessful 1905 revolution, censorship was relaxed and modern ideas of sex, including the concept of sexual preference, started taking hold. The Bolshevik-led revolution in 1917 secularised sexuality. Sex between men was decriminalised, as was abortion and divorce.

The civil war brought with it poverty and starvation.

"But there was a sense there that gay people saw this as their revolution too. I can think of one drag queen in Kursk, written about in a medical article, who really does seem to interpret the events of the civil war and the revolution as a licence to be quite flagrant and outrageous. For a while people seemed to be willing to go along with that."
Dan Healey

All this was reversed in the 1930s. Homosexuality would now get you a three year minimum jail sentence. All that Stalin's regime considered to be independent and out of its control, it tried to oppress. Before 1933, according to Healey:

"It (sexual freedom) was taken as part of the sexual revolution that Russia didn't persecute people the way they do in 'bourgeois philistine' countries, where a religious and moral stricture fuelled an old prejudice"

With Stalin, homosexuals returned to being 'fascists' and 'spies'.