The Break-Free Trajectory: Queer Topics in the Soviet Magazine Ogonek

This article examines how queer topics were rendered unspeakable in the Soviet official public sphere through a case study of the magazine Ogonek (1923-1993). Drawing on Michel Foucault's conceptualization of silence as productive power, the study approaches it as a regime that authorizes specific ways of naming, framing, and feeling about prohibited subjects. Based on a corpus of Ogonek publications that mention queer topics, the analysis combines a quantitative mapping of keyword frequencies over time, an affective coding of emotional orientations, and a thematic discourse analysis of the dominant contexts in which queerness was articulated. The findings identify a "break-free trajectory," unfolding as a slow accumulation of constrained discursive possibilities that became legible only after censorship weakened in the late 1980s. Rather than treating Ogonek as representative of the Soviet media as a whole, the article theorizes it as a node within a broader censorship ecology, where discursive legitimacy was negotiated under shifting political conditions. By tracing how queer subjects were produced through frameworks of foreignness, criminality, pathology, and eventually vulnerability, the article contributes to queer media debates on how authoritarian regimes structure, rather than simply suppress, public discourse on sexuality.