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Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia: the Regulation of Sexual and Gender Dissent
By Dan Healey University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2001 Dan Healey
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0226322343
1 Depravity's Artel'
TRADITIONAL SEX BETWEEN MEN AND THE
EMERGENCE OF A HOMOSEXUAL SUBCULTURE
The place of sex between males in traditional Russian culture has generally been neglected by historians. Igor' Kon characterizes Russia's sexual culture, even in the nineteenth century, as having been divided between "high" and "low" culture more deeply than were Western European sexual cultures. The popular, everyday (bytovoe) sexual patterns and practices of the mass of Russians were marked by pagan survivals (orgies, nonreproductive sex acts), which Russian Orthodoxy, with its comparatively weak institutions and priesthood, had been incapable of eradicating. Ecclesiastical authorities "turned a blind eye" to popular sexual culture with resigned indulgence, while publicly the Church "compensated with a strengthened spirituality and unworldly asceticism in its religious doctrine" on sexuality and marriage. Sexual folklore as expressed in erotic tales, verse (chastushki), and profanity (mat) reflected values utterly at odds with Christianity. Kon does not speculate on how this chasm between sacred and profane affected Russian understandings of sex between men. Yet it seems plausiblethat the apparent ease with and (from a Western European perspective) tolerance of male same-sex eros grew from the popular repertoire of earthy narratives of "sexual mischief " and from the relative weakness of early modern Orthodox regulation of sexual matters generally. Foreign observers of pre-Petrine Muscovy reported the widespread practice and talk of "sodomy," apparently unfettered by any religious sensibilities or sense of civic dignity. Russian Orthodoxy's formal penalties for "sodomy" (muzhelozhstvo) had been indulgent in comparison with Western European canon and secular law, prescribing penances equal to those for adulterous male-female relations. Mutual male relations not involving anal penetration were regarded as little worse than masturbation in this ecclesiastical tradition. Nevertheless, Eve Levin rightly emphasizes that in this same tradition, all sexuality was regarded with suspicion as a source of impurity and sin, even intimacy within marriage.
The state in Russia only turned its attention to the regulation of sodomy later than Western polities and did so as part of efforts to introduce new forms of social control. The military prohibition of sodomy introduced by Peter the Great in 1716 imposed on soldiers and sailors new forms of discipline patterned after the lessons of the European "military revolution." Extending this regulation to the civilian male population in 1835, Nicholas I sought to instill those religious sensibilities and civic virtues that Russian males apparently still lacked.
Efforts to instill these sensibilities imply that a masculine tradition indulgent of mutual eros continued to exist into the nineteenth century. Medical, legal, and diaristic sources from the years after 1861 demonstrate that such a tradition flourished. Men who experienced same-sex desire expressed it according to the social roles they played. Workshops, bathhouses, and large households were sites for same-sex relations within this tradition, and significantly, both provinces and capitals provided such sites. Masters and servants, coachmen and their passengers, bathhouse patrons and attendants, craftsmen and apprentices, and clergy and their novices exploited the opportunities of their positions to obtain or offer sexual favors. These men and youths should not be mistaken for homosexuals in a modern, European sense; their culture of masculinity included indulgence in same-sex eros, and it did not enforce the necessarily severe penalties associated in a later era with the stigmatized, medicalized condition of homosexuality.
Depravity's Artel'
Russia in the mid-nineteenth century remained a society relatively untouched by the forces of industrialization and urbanization transforming Western Europe. The vast majority of the population were peasants, and some twenty million remained serfs until the Emancipation Edict of 1861. Relations between gentry landlords and their servants and peasants were patriarchal, with landlords frequently intervening in the sexual and intimate lives of their charges. Similarly, patron-client hierarchies dominated the worlds of work and worship in Russia's towns and church establishments. Same-sex eros between males occurred in these environments and reflected their characteristic patterns of domination and subordination.
The sexually available subordinate male was found in numerous settings. Men of means, often exploiting the license that money and vodka conferred, made use of such youths or men. A Moscow merchant (himself of the peasant estate) provides a rich example of these relations. In 1861, Pavel Vasil'evich Medvedev kept a diary recording his emotional and sexual experiences. Unhappily married, Medvedev sought consolation alternately in church and at the tavern. When drunk, he indulged in "lustfulness" with both males and females--and recorded these encounters in his diary. The document speaks chiefly of a traditional masculine culture indulgent of sex between men. Yet the cash exchanges accompanying some of Medvedev's encounters and their location outside the household point to the seeds of a transition to a modern homosexual subculture.
Medvedev and his companions repeatedly turned to subordinate males for sex when lust was unleashed by vodka. An account of an evening of theater, dining, and drinking "to excess" ended with Medve-dev's reflections on how to satisfy one's arousal during the journey homeward:
For some time now my lust leads me to pick a younger cabdriver, who I make fun of along the way--with a little nonsense you can enjoy mutual masturbation. You can almost always succeed with a fifty-kopek coin, or thirty kopeks, but there are also those who agree to it for pleasure. That's five times this month. <
