Soviet policy toward male homosexuality: its origins and historical roots

Sodomy was a crime under tsarist criminal law. Having abrogated the tsarist legal codes in the name of socialist justice, the new Soviet regime did not at first impose criminal sanctions on sodomy. It was only in 1934, after Stalin had consolidated power, that an anti-sodomy statute was added to the Soviet criminal code. Although Russian radicals had never been friendly to variant sexual practices, which they viewed as the product of capitalist decadence, Soviet sexologists in the 1920s participated in the international movement for sexual reform and criminologists deplored the use of penal sanctions to censor private sexual conduct. The 1934 return to legal prosecution represented the recovery of two traditions: the radicals' disregard for issues of sexual freedom and tsarist legal custom. It was not, however, a clear reversal of the seemingly enlightened legal practice of the 1920s. This essay examines the trial of a group of homosexual men and the investigation of a lesbian couple, both from 1922, which show that Soviet courts tried to repress sexual variation even when homosexuality was not a crime. These cases and the status of homosexuality in general reflect on the murky status of the law and on the ambiguities of Soviet politics in the early years of the new regime.