GLR July-August 2023

ESSAY

From Russia, with Love A NDREW H OLLERAN

I N 1932, a 25-year-old Russian-speaking journalist from Scotland named Henry Whyte moved to Moscow to take a job at an English-language newspaper called Moscow News —in part because he was a Communist, in part be cause he was a homosexual, and there was no law against homosexual acts in Russia like the one in his native coun try. At that time, homosexuals in Moscow found one another the way they had in the 19th century—in public parks, toilets, and bathhouses, which was how Henry met a man named Ivan. At tracted to one another, they began taking long walks together around the city, until one day Ivan disappeared. Upset, Henry tried to find out what had happened to him, and in his research discovered that the Soviet Union was no longer the lodestar of free love it had been under the Bolsheviks. Its new leader, Joseph Stalin, had secretly passed a law criminalizing homosexual acts after his secret police, the OGPU, raided a drag party in Moscow one night in 1933, and the head of the OGPU, Genrikh Yagoda, convinced Stalin that there was a homosexual underground in Russia that threatened the stability of the state. Until then, homosexuals had been tolerated in the govern ment as long as they did their jobs well. Some Russian doctors ones Stalin saw.) “Dear Comrade Stalin!” it began. “Although I am a foreign communist, I think you, the leader of the world pro letariat, will be able to shed light on the question, which is of great importance for a great number of communists both in the USSR and other countries of the world. The question is—can a homosexual be a member of the Communist Party?” This letter, one of the many fascinating documents repro duced in Rustam Alexander’s deeply researched book, Red Closet , went on to present Whyte’s reasons for answering in the affirmative. In his view, it was capitalism that was “inherently against” homosexuality because capitalist states required man power for its wars. But Stalin never answered. Instead, the So viet dictator scrawled on the letter “ IDIOT AND DEGENERATE ,”and had it sent to the archives. Henry Whyte left Moscow for good in 1935, and the reader of Red Closet , alas, never learns, any more than Henry did, what happened to Ivan. What happened to Ivan, and countless homosexuals like him, is the subject of Red Closet . Rustam Alexander’s first Andrew Holleran’s latest novel is The Kingdom of Sand (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022). were even ahead of the West in considering homosexuality a natural sexual variant, not the “mental illness” that American psychia trists deemed it at this time. So, after discov ering the new law, Henry Whyte wrote a letter to Stalin asking for clarification on the subject. (Lots of people wrote Stalin letters. His staff sifted through them and chose the

book, Regulating Homosexuality in Soviet Russia: A Different History (1956-91), was based on his doctoral thesis and written for fellow scholars, but, he says in the preface to his new book, he has chosen to write this one for the general reader, because he wants this story to be known by a wider audience. Inter viewing homosexuals in Russia, he claims, is difficult, because most are too ashamed to speak on the subject, and the rest are deceased. So, along with secondary sources, he has taken ma terial he found in the Moscow archives—police reports, letters, narratives of Russian men trying to be “cured” of same-sex de sires by doctors in a country where most Russian people felt that such “perverts” should be shot or exiled to Siberia—and either paraphrased them or presented them as they were written by the participants. And they are spellbinding. After Stalin died—lying alone on the floor of his bedroom, because his staff was too terrified to knock on the door—his suc cessor, Nikita Khrushchev, commissioned a report exposing his predecessor’s crimes (which included mass starvation in Ukraine). But homosexuality continued to be illegal. In fact, one of Khrushchev’s worries was that freeing prisoners from the Gulag (the network of prisons that Stalin had filled during his Leonid Brezhnev, inaugurated a period of such corruption, cyn icism, and stagnation that the gay liberation movement occurring at that time in the West was unimaginable in Russia. It wasn’t until Mikhail Gorbachev—whose policy of “perestroika” (re structuring) and “glasnost” (openness) led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union—that homosexuals had hope. Each of RedCloset ’s chapters is presented chronologically by dictator (Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Gorbachev), and each begins with a brief overview of the socio-economic situa tion in Russia when these various dictators assumed power. But the chapters themselves are mostly devoted to the stories of in dividuals whose records Alexander found in the Moscow archives. Many of these are painful to read, especially the tran scripts of patients hoping to be “cured” of their homosexuality. The shame, alienation, fear, and self-loathing are all too famil iar—even now, to an American reader—though the Russian ver sion seems worse. The USSR was a culture in which, as Alexander puts it, Russian men “did not want to fall in love with another man. Indeed, they never allowed themselves to think love between men was possible. They did not wish to identify themselves with their desire—since society was telling them reign) would flood the country with homo sexuals. Khrushchev’s main effect on the lives of homosexuals was his effort to im prove the lives of the average Soviet citizen by building affordable housing, which freed urban homosexuals from their dependence on finding partners in public toilets. But nothing else improved, and Khrushchev’s successor,

If Russia still bears traces of a religious, feudal, martial society, then what could be worse than a man attracted to other men?

TheG & LR

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