Abstract
Reviewed by: Brian James Baer, Kent State University, Kent, Ohio
Dan Healey’s Russian Homophobia from Stalin to Sochi is a very timely work of historiography, which not only extends Healey’s classic study, Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia (2001), to reflect the research generated by the opening of archives in post-Soviet Russia, but also reframes that history for a new time and for a broader readership. Therefore, it is likely to appeal to a number of different audiences, including graduate students studying Russian and Soviet history and those studying queer history in Russia or any other part of the world, activists involved in AIDS prevention and LGBTQ support, journalists covering the region, as well as general readers interested in the culture and politics of Putin-era Russia.
The book is divided into three parts, ‘Homophobia in Russia after 1945’, ‘Queer Visibility and “Traditional Sexual Relations”’ and ‘Writing and Remembering Russia’s Queer Past’, each containing three chapters. In addition to tracing the continuities and differences between the Soviet and post-Soviet treatment of homosexuality, the book contains a running commentary on the challenges involved in assembling a ‘queer archive’ following decades of Soviet silence on the topic of homosexuality. The spotty nature of that archive presents the historian with a number of interpretive challenges involving the representativeness of an individual incident or artefact. While those limitations can be frustrating and require a good deal of hedging, Healey offers encouragement to historians of Russia’s queer culture in the form of meta-discussion of Russia’s queer archive as well as individual case studies, in which Healey models how to make the most of limited archival resources while resisting the temptation to over-read sources. A good example of that approach is offered in Chapter 3, which is dedicated to Vadim Kozin’s Soviet-era diary. Published for the first time in 1993, the diary of the popular cabaret singer, who was arrested and incarcerated twice for homosexual activity, offers a rare glimpse into the lived experience of Soviet queer subjects. As Healey writes, ‘Kozin devotes fascinating passages to his exploration of the queer “dilemmas of the self”, the problems of queer existence that dogged his everyday life as an infamous “pederast”’ (81).
Kozin’s life as reflected or refracted in the diary becomes something of a leitmotif in the volume, with Healey returning to Kozin in the final chapters of the book. In Chapter 8, he analyses Kozin’s diary alongside those of other Russian queer subjects, such as the poets Nikolai Kluiev and Mikhail Kuzmin, while in Chapter 9, he situates the diary alongside other memorializations of Kozin’s life, such as the museum opened in Magadan in 1993 and the bronze sculpture of the singer erected in the centre of Magadan in 2013, the same year that saw the passage of a national law banning ‘homosexual propaganda’. While the museum dedicated to Kozin’s life makes no mention of the singer’s homosexuality, which in fact led to his exile in Magadan, the sculpture of Kozin sitting on a park bench bears an uncanny resemblance to the bronze sculpture of Alan Turing that was erected in Manchester, England, in 2001, leaving Kozin’s statue provocatively open to a queer reading.
While there are undoubtedly continuities between Soviet and post-Soviet treatments of queer sexuality, Healey makes it clear that there are important differences as well. Those differences are perhaps most evident in Chapters 6 and 7, which deal with the representation of homosexuality in the burgeoning field of Russian pop psychology and in the Russian porn industry, both uniquely post-Soviet phenomena that involve a co-opting and re-semanticization of Western ‘gay’ discourse. In analysing how Russian pornographers tried to market their gay-themed films internationally by invoking traditional Russian cultural motifs, Healey underscores the unavoidably translational dimension of queer representations in a globalized economy and at a time when ‘gay rights’ have assumed a central symbolic position in the post-communist realignment of the world order.
Finally, while one may be dismayed by the similarities between Soviet and post-Soviet treatments of queer sexuality, Healey expresses hope that the opening of archives as well as the dogged efforts of historians will continue to add breadth and nuance to our understanding of the lived experience of queer subjects in Russia. (Healey notes that some of the more important discoveries over the last ten years are the results of historians’ work in remote local archives.) And, true to his activist roots, Healey expresses confidence that an expanded and increasingly accessible queer archive will lend valuable support to queer subjects under conditions of intensifying, state-sanctioned homophobia.