LGBTQ history in Russia
The history of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people (LGBT) in Russia and its historical antecedents (the Soviet Union and the Russian Empire) has largely been influenced by the political leanings of its rulers.
Under the reign of Peter the Great in the 18th century, who introduced a wide range of reforms aimed at modernizing and Westernizing Russia, male homosexual activity was banned only for soldiers in military statutes.
[6] The Austrian royal councilor Sigismund von Herberstein described in his report Rerum Moscoviticarum Commentarii (Notes on Muscovite Affairs) his observations during his travels in Moscow in 1517 and 1526.
[7][8] The English poet George Turberville who visited Moscow in 1568 when Ivan IV ruled Russia during a bloody phase, was not shocked by the carnage, but about the open homosexuality of the Russian peasants.
The prohibition on sodomy was part of a larger reform movement designed to modernize Russia and efforts to extend a similar ban to the civilian population were rejected until 1835.
[18] Other notables included poet Alexei Apukhtin, Pyotr Tchaikovsky, conservative author and publisher Prince Vladimir Meshchersky, Sergei Diaghilev, who had an affair with his cousin Dmitry Filosofov and after the breakup with Vaslav Nijinsky.
Mikhail Kuzmin's novel Wings (1906) became one of the first "coming out" stories to have a happy ending and his private journals provide a detailed view of a gay subculture, involving men of all classes.
While there was a degree of government tolerance extended to certain gay or bisexual artists and intellectuals, especially if they were on friendly terms with the Imperial family, the pervasive public opinion, greatly influenced by the Eastern Orthodox Church, was that homosexuality was a sign of corruption, decadence and immorality.
[15] These depictions of gay men and women in literature suggest that the government's selective tolerance of homosexuality was not widely expressed among the Russian people and that it was also divorced from any endorsement of LGBT rights.
[13] Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich Romanov (the younger brother and uncle, respectively, of Russian Emperors Alexander III and Nicholas II) served as the governor of Moscow from 1891 to 1905.
[21] One of the founders of the Kadets party, Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov, had written a research paper on the legal status of homosexuality in Russia, published by early gay rights advocate Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld in Berlin.
In addition to the legal research, the paper argued that the anti-gay criminal law should be repealed, making him the first Russian politician to publicly express support for gay rights.
According to Dan Healey, archival material that became widely available following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 "demonstrates a principled intent to decriminalize the act between consenting adults, expressed from the earliest efforts to write a socialist criminal code in 1918 to the eventual adoption of legislation in 1922.
Our laws proceed from the principle of protection of society and therefore countenance punishment only in those instances when juveniles and minors are the objects of homosexual interest In 1933, the Soviet government under Stalin recriminalised sex between men.
On 7 March 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 labour in prison.
"[40] In 1993, declassified Soviet documents revealed that Stalin had personally demanded the introduction of an anti-gay law, in response to a report from deputy secret police chief Genrikh Yagoda, who had conducted a raid on the residence of hundreds of homosexuals in Moscow and Leningrad in August 1933,[41] about "Pederast activists" engaging in orgies and espionage activities.
"[45] A few years later in 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.
Yet during the late 1950s and 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.
Author Gennady Trifonov served four years of hard labour 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.
In 1960s Moscow psychiatrist Aron Isaakovich Belkin [ru] met a patient from Tashkent named Rakhim, who desired a sex change to female, while having no intersex conditions.
Belkin didn't permit surgery on his transsexual patients, fearing making irreversible mistakes, but it is known that by 1974 Rakhim had undergone a vaginoplasty and an official name change outside of Moscow.
[53] In 1968 another Soviet doctor, Latvian surgeon Viktors Kalnbērzs [lv; ru] met a suicidal patient named Inna, looking for a sex change to male.
After obtaining verbal consent from Minister of Health of the Latvian SSR Vilhelms Kaņeps [lv], Kalnbērzs performed nine operations on the patient, now named Innokenty, over the span of 1970–1972.
In 1983, the Scientific Center for Social and Forensic Psychiatry published a separate edition of the fifth section of the ICD-9 (“Mental disorders”), adapted in accordance with "the theoretical principles of Soviet science".
In 2010, Russia was fined by the European Court of Human Rights under allegations by Nikolay Alexeyev that cities were discriminating against gays by refusing to approve pride parades.
Putin's justifications for it are to promote "traditional Russian values" in opposition of Western state liberalism in regards to homosexuality, "protect the children" and to boost Russia's falling birthrate.
[93] Despite such criticisms, President Putin has stated that "homosexuals are equal citizens enjoying full rights"[100] and Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev has said that he "[believes] that only a negligible part of the Russian population is actually concerned about [the new law]".
Even in 2012, in the time leading up to Article 6.21's passage the advocacy group Immigration Equality stated that had it won more gay and lesbian asylum cases for Russians than from any other country other than Jamaica in the previous two years.
According to Immigration Equality, the majority of the inquiries come from young (under the age of 30) Russians who fear being harassed, beaten, or even killed by homophobic groups like Occupy Paedophilia.
In October 2013, a pro-LGBT rally meant to observe National Coming Out Day in Saint Petersburg consisting of roughly 15 people had been accosted and harassed by about 200 conservative and religious protestors.
