GLR July-August 2023

there.’ He never allowed the activists to enter the prison.” In Gessen’s eyes: “The repeal of Article 121.1 fell far short of guaranteeing gays and lesbians equality before the law in the area of private conduct.” And in June 2013 the Russian Federal Parliament, “controlled by Vladimir Putin,” unanimously adopted a law pro hibiting “propaganda” of non-traditional sexual rela tions “among minors.” Putin did this, in Alexander’s view, to “increase his popularity and distract public at tention from declining living standards by unleashing a campaign of hatred towards LBGTQ people, casting them as a great threat to Russian society on Russian state controlled television and newspapers.” But was it only that? It may seem incredible that Putin invaded Ukraine because he’s afraid that West ern tolerance of transpeople and homosexuals will in fect Russia, but he has said so in speeches denouncing the “godless” West. If Russia still seems to bear traces of a religious, feudal, martial society—with a history of a society based on conquering its neighbors, “gath ering” land, crushing its enemies—what could be worse than a man attracted to other men? A recurring motif in RedCloset is the Russian scorn for unmanly men. As far back as Anna Karenina , one finds a scene in which the virile Vronsky, on the day of his disastrous horse race, runs into two effeminate fellow soldiers back at the officers’ club. Even Tolstoy, apparently, found queens repellent. And yet, Russia has a tradition of late 19th-century artists like Konstantin Somov, who have left us with stunning paint ings of the male nude. In 2009, an art gallery in Moscow opened a show of nineteen prints of naked men on which Stalin had scrawled commentary in his old age. Apparently this may have stemmed from a Bolshevik custom of drawing cartoons of each other as they sat deliberating and then passing the drawings around under the table—quite like schoolboys. Stalin, it turns out, was among many things an enthusiastic editor who loved to wield his red and blue pencils. On one list of people jailed by the forerunner of the KGB, he simply scrawled the words: “Exe cute everyone.” On the prints of male nudes he perused at age seventy he scrawled all sorts of things: jokes about masturbation and intercourse, even—the eeriest—messages to former col leagues he’d had executed. “Radek, you ginger bastard, if you hadn’t pissed into the wind, if you hadn’t been so bad, you’d still be alive,” reads one caption, placed alongside a muscular nude drawn from the back by Vasily Surikov, a famous 19th century Russian artist. Psychologists who were shown these an notated prints say they do not indicate repressed homosexual desires, but one cannot help but wonder. When the home of Genrikh Yagoda, the head of the OGPU who convinced Stalin that he must recriminalize homosexuality, was raided in one of those purges that characterized Stalin’s rule, the police found a collection of four thousand pornographic pho tographs and movies, “countless pieces of women’s clothing— stockings, hats, silk tights ... and even a rubber dildo.” After Yagoda’s conviction at a show trial, he was forced to sit in a chair and watch twenty other Party functionaries shot before he was beaten to a pulp and shot himself. It’s hard to exaggerate the vir ulence of Russian homophobia. The attitude seems to be that of the father who tells his son, when asked about homosexuals:

that it was either a crime, a pathology, or a perversion.” So many of these transcripts—doctors’ notes, patients’ narratives—end with Alexander noting that we have no idea what happened to these men; they simply vanish, like Henry Whyte’s friend Ivan. Where did Ivan go? Was he shot, imprisoned, sent to Siberia? Did he return to some rural village, marry, and have children? Where did any of these young men desperate to be normal, un afraid, free of suspicion, end up? Like so many figures in Russ ian history, they are lost. During the Brezhnev and Gorbachev periods, the West was changing its laws and attitudes toward homosexuals, but Russia was not. Even though Alexander carefully provides the dates on which homosexuality was decriminalized in former Soviet satellite countries, we’re not told how conscious individual Rus sians were of what was happening outside its borders, or what effect this had on individual LGBT Russians. The saying goes that Russia never changes. The U.S., you might say, is based upon change. The Stonewall Riots had no immediate effect on Russia—although in the last stages of perestroika, when the So viet Union was falling apart, gay people began forming organ izations and publishing their own newspapers, and in July 1991 an International Gay and Lesbian Symposium and Film Festi val took place in Moscow and Leningrad. But it was not until 1993 that Boris Yeltsin, Gorbachev’s successor, “facing pres sure from the Council of Europe,” repealed Article 121.1, which had criminalized consensual sex between men. What’s so remarkable about the depth and intensity of Russ ian homophobia is that even after the anti-homosexual law was repealed, when gay activists like Masha Gessen tried to track down all the people imprisoned for homosexuality in Russia, they found that some prison overseers still refused to free them. Writes Alexander: “When Yuri Yereyev, president of the Tchaikovsky Foundation for Cultural Initiative and the Defence of Sexual Mi norities, visited Yablonevka prison with a Western journalist, the prison director stepped outside and screamed, ‘I don’t care what has been repealed. They are still in there, and they will stay in July–August 2023 Drawing by 19th-century artist Vasily Surikov, with Stalin’s annotations on the right.

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