Analysing the treatment of Queer people within the early Soviet Union

Abstract

This essay employs a broad historical approach to complexify common narratives around the treatment of queer people within the early Soviet Union. By examining how structures of control surrounding, and competing conceptions of, factors such as modernity, sexuality, race, location and gender intersect, it challenges notions of a decline from liberatory post-revolutionary policy into oppressive Stalinist policy. It also reveals a more nuanced picture of the treatment of queer people in the Soviet Union, one which highlights the variety of ways in which queer expression was legalised, medicalised, and criminalised, and the resulting plurality of queer experience during this period. As an essay centred on the experiences of queer people, it also serves to prevent the all too common erasure of queer people from historical narratives, which is essential to creating a nuanced historical tradition that itself challenges misconceptions of the nature and existence of queer people.