Stalin recriminalises sex between men
First a pioneer, then a persecutor: how the Soviet Union took back the freedom of the revolutionary years in 1934.
On 7 March 1934, a law was passed in the Soviet Union that made sex between men a crime again. From then on it carried three to five years in prison, and up to eight in cases of violence or abuse of a position of dependence. The law did not mention women.
This ended a short chapter of freedom. After the 1917 revolution, the Bolsheviks had abolished the Tsarist ban. They did not include it in the new criminal codes of the twenties, and Petrograd developed a lively queer scene.
The change was brought about by the secret police. In the summer of 1933, its deputy chief Genrikh Yagoda had more than a hundred men arrested in Moscow and Leningrad and reported an alleged network of homosexual spies to Stalin. Stalin demanded a law. Among those arrested was a couple who had lived together for twenty-six years. Both were sent to the camps.
Propaganda supplied the justification afterwards. In May 1934, Maxim Gorky spread the slogan in "Pravda" that eradicating homosexuality would make fascism disappear too. The British communist Harry Whyte protested in a long letter to Stalin. The dictator did not reply. He merely noted that the sender was an idiot and a degenerate.
The provision, later known as Article 121, outlived Stalin by decades. It hit poets, diplomats and artists such as the filmmaker Sergei Parajanov, and was often used to get rid of inconvenient people. Nobody knows exactly how many men were convicted. Estimates range from sixty thousand to a quarter of a million.
Only in 1993, after the end of the Soviet Union, did Russia remove the ban from its criminal code. It had been in force for fifty-nine years.