Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) persons in the post-Soviet states face legal challenges not experienced by non-LGBTQ residents.

In January 2019, the Supreme Court of Lithuania ruled that same-sex spouses must be granted residence permits, while cohabitation agreements are pending.

[1] Some sections and factions of the Bolshevik Government attempted to improve rights and social conditions for homosexuals based on further legal reforms in 1922 and 1923, while others opposed such moves.

[9] The Bolsheviks also rescinded Tzarist legal bans on homosexual civil and political rights - especially in the area of state employment.

In the 1920s the Soviet Union sent delegates from the Commissariat of Health, led by Commissar of Health Semashko, in January 1923,[10] to the German Institute for Sexual Research, as well as to some international conferences on human sexuality between 1921 and 1930, where they expressed support for the legalisation of adult, private, and consensual homosexual relations, and the improvement of homosexual rights in all nations.

[14] This followed earlier Soviet tendencies in sections of the medical and health communities, even in the early 1920s, to classify homosexuality, if not as a crime, then as an example of mental or physical illness.

On March 7, 1934, Article 121 was added to the criminal code, for the entire Soviet Union, that expressly prohibited only male homosexuality, with up to five years of hard labor in prison.

Beyond expressed fears of a vast "counterrevolutionary" or fascist homosexual conspiracy, there were several high-profile arrests of Russian men accused of being pederasts.

In 1934, the British Communist Harry Whyte wrote a long letter to Stalin condemning the law, and its prejudicial motivations.

He laid out a Marxist position against the oppression of homosexuals, as a social minority, and compared homophobia to racism, xenophobia and sexism.

A few years later, 1936, Justice Commissar Nikolai Krylenko publicly stated that the anti-gay criminal law was correctly aimed at the decadent and effete old ruling classes, thus further linking homosexuality to a right-wing conspiracy, i.e. tsarist aristocracy and German fascists.

Homosexual or bisexual Soviets who wanted a position within the Communist Party were expected to marry a person of the opposite sex, regardless of their actual sexual orientation.

Yet, during the late 1950s - early 1960s, Aline Mosby, a foreign reporter in Russia at the time, attributed to the more liberal attitude of the Khrushchev government to the fact that she did see some gay couples in public and that it was not uncommon to see men waiting outside of certain theaters looking for dates with male performers.

Perhaps the first public endorsement of gay rights since Stalin was a brief statement, critical of Article 121 and calling for its repeal, made in the Textbook of Soviet Criminal Law (1973).

Author Gennady Trifonov served four years of hard labor for circulating his gay poems and, upon his release, was allowed to write and publish only if he avoided depicting or making reference to homosexuality.