The Silenced Citizens of Russia

Abstract

This article draws attention to how citizenship, informed by heteronormativity, is represented in politics, judiciary and public social practices in Russia. I argue that the observed discursive reality affects construction of heteronormative citizenship that restricts full inclusion of lesbians and gay men via silencing. The ideas of the article are taken from literature on citizenship and two empirical research studies that I conducted in 2010 and 2011–2012. The first is dedicated to the uncovering of discursive effects of political argumentation in Russia. The second study centres on the accounts of lesbians and gay men themselves regarding their citizenship rights. Both studies give rise to concerns about Soviet legacy in contemporary Russian debates on homosexuality. This idea is supported by an analysis of that historical context that may be grasped from empirical studies of the Soviet.

Keywords

Heteronormative citizenship lesbians and gay men Russia Soviet legacy

Introduction

After the Great October Revolution of 1917, the government of the Soviet Union based its politics on relatively nouvelle social justice arguments. The Constitution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) therefore announced that the new socialist political order was to be characterised by freedom and equality and that social injustice would no longer exist (Konstitutsya, 1924). Instead, universal peaceful and just cohabitation were guaranteed. This was also one of the first examples in European history of a state introducing clearly articulated social rights into the official political agenda. It was an initiative that entailed particular effects on Soviet society in the attempt to reconfigure class relations and gender structures, articulate ethnicity and redistribute power through constitutional law. In this article, I draw on social science theories of citizenship to analyse how the history of this project influenced the regime of sexual citizenship in contemporary Russia. The socialist period is regarded as oppressive, and the version developed by the Soviet government overshadows the whole idea of socialism. However, as my discussion will show, over a period of 70 years, the history of the USSR was not monolithic. Further, I will argue that contemporary Russia is marked by the legacy of the Soviet period: oppressive trends that stem from this past persist despite the rhetorical commitment to liberal democratic values.

The structure of the article is as follows: the first section highlights those theoretical approaches to citizenship which have influenced my methodology and which inform my subsequent discussion. In the second section, based on analysis of secondary sources, I narrate the changing story of Soviet sexual citizenship. This section describes the context of homosexual experiences in the USSR and underscores those features that persisted after the fall of the socialist state. The third section presents an analysis of law, court decisions and political speeches that relate to homosexuality in contemporary Russia. It reveals those tendencies that characterise the contemporary regime of sexual citizenship. The final section is based on the analysis of the empirical data gathered through interviews I conducted with Russian homosexuals. I draw on this data to uncover those particular effects of governmental discourses that are articulated in these interviews.

Theorising Regimes of Citizenship

To operationalise the notion of citizenship in this empirical study, it is necessary to highlight those theoretical approaches and ideas about citizenship that can illuminate the Russian proclivities in its negotiations of the relationship between the people and the state and citizen status. State bureaucracy is crucial in this process as it controls the basic dimensions of citizenship (Turner, 2001: 190). However, it is also ‘important to put a particular emphasis on the notion of social struggles as the central motor of the drive for citizenship’ (Turner, 2001: 193). Hence, my research into citizenship is a study of the tensions between the state and the people’s claim for inclusion in the system of rights redistribution that the state controls. In this regard, it is necessary to focus on the effects and consequences of this struggle. Inclusion into the state’s welfare does not ensure social justice per se but may rather entail the generation of new forms of inequality (Cossman, 2007: 3). Hence, as Cooper puts it, citizenship is ‘the process of inclusion and exclusion, either in terms of membership of the public realm or as rights and responsibilities vis-à-vis the state’ (Cooper, 1993: 155).

The forms that citizenship takes in different contexts are a matter of concern in this study. Turner depicts different models of citizenship which correspond to various political configurations of a nation state. In his classic study, he distinguishes between passive and active types of citizenship, depending on whether it is based upon prescriptive state ideologies or whether those ideologies are challenged by citizens (Turner, 1990: 206–207). Passive citizenship presupposes that the people are waiting for the state to distribute recognition and rights among them. Active citizenship is based on empowered activist citizens (Isin, 2008: 37) who contest existing inequalities and call on the state to guarantee rights and justice for injured groups. The specific configuration of citizenship that produces effects (whether satisfaction or contestation) I call a ‘regime of citizenship’. Citizenship is never monolithic and is always contingent; hence, an analysis that is informed by an historical perspective has to deal with various regimes and has to address the changes.

As many scholars argue, citizenship is always sexualised and thus citizens’ statuses may be questioned, based on their sexuality (Bell and Binnie, 2000: 10; Halperin, 1993: 418). It is commonplace that a ‘citizen is discursively constructed as heterosexual’ (Johnson, 2002: 319). So long as citizenship is (hetero)sexualised, ‘those whose sexual proclivities are adjudged suspect, dangerous or undesirable may find their civil and welfare rights curtailed as politicians and policy makers seek to redefine the moral boundaries of the nation’ (Hubbard, 2001: 52). Weeks (2007: 11–12) reminds us that, historically, citizenship has been restricted for many different groups of people, including lesbians and gay men, but, at the same time, steps towards full citizenship for homosexuals have been made in many jurisdictions all over the world. Hence, it is important to address a particular disposition of sexuality in a citizenship regime.

When sexuality is an issue of analysis, another tension related to citizenship comes into play: the tension between the public and the private, which is one of the central concerns of citizenship studies. In some citizenship regimes, the state is regarded as ‘the only source of public authority’ (Turner, 1990: 207), whereas, in others, the public sphere might be a rich ‘arena of political action’ for a variety of actors (Turner, 1990: 207). Walby’s pessimistic conceptualisation of gendered citizenship as ensuring a ‘transition from private to public patriarchy’ (1994: 392) largely means that citizenship is always gendered and sexualised so that whatever the regime, heterosexual privilege and the heteronormative gender order are maintained. Thus, the private/public tension in relation to homosexuality and citizenship is a question of the limits of accepted sexually expressive behaviour in public: lesbians and gay men are tolerated so long as ‘they remain in the private sphere and do not seek public recognition or membership in the political community’ (Richardson, 1998: 89).

Authoritarian states monopolise the public sphere and eject anything considered ‘deviant’ into the private sphere, which offers a fragile shelter from the arbitrariness of the authorities (Turner, 1990: 201). The boundaries of the two spheres are therefore the result of whichever group controls the state. A passive regime of citizenship entails hiding one’s ‘deviance’ in the private sphere, away from the oppressive government, whereas an active citizenship means making one’s private political and, therefore, public. In this article, I want to address how these notions help us to understand the Soviet situation where the public/private divide was in many senses eliminated both infrastructurally and rhetorically.

In capitalist countries, the private sphere may also be organised through the market, based on facilitating participation in consumption and the satisfaction of consumers’ desires (Turner, 2001: 194). In this form of citizenship, hegemonic now as a result of neo-liberalism (Bauman, 1993), the market offers a substitute for citizenship rights through its commodification: a sense of inclusion or welfare services are granted in exchange for money, which consumerism promotes (Evans, 1993: 4). This market for citizenship is especially relevant to the situation in post-Soviet Russia that entered the world of the ‘free market’ in the 1990s. As market privileges consumers, it also produces economic inequality and marginalises those who depend on welfare. Markets may entail emancipatory effects for successful consumers, but it is also marked by legacies of heteronormativity.

The last point that I want to emphasise is the practice of resistance associated with active and activist citizenship (Isin, 2008: 37). Even in authoritarian states, there are resistance strategies that might be available to the citizens, regardless of the scale of state oppression. As Stychin (2003: 13) notes, any disciplinary regime is resistible so long as the effects of citizenship and rights politics are unpredictable, and these effects provoke questions to state authority. One of the common understandings of resistance to heteronormative citizenship is the cultivation of a particular cultural and/or political identity by lesbians and gay men that is produced in the public sphere to articulate insistently the demands for inclusion. In this regard, homosexual identity politics seek to break the public/private divide, to challenge the existing order and to claim equal rights (Weeks, 1998: 36). Inclusion is ensured when oppressed sexualities are articulated in the public sphere and gain the ‘right to spaces for subcultural life’ within a common public space (Stychin, 2003: 17). Hubbard argues that ‘a basic right of citizenship is the right to access and use specific kinds of space within a given territory’ (2001: 54), meaning that the right to use them may be restricted. This situation may be contested by different groups of those excluded from citizenship. My study will address the issues of identity and public spaces as they were used by homosexuals in the Soviet era.

A related ground of resistance is provided by the universality of citizenship, ensured through references to universal human rights and the activism of global social movements. In these claims, citizenship loses its straightforward attachment to national borders because human rights activism and claims for social justice make it cosmopolitan (Bosniak, 1999: 450; Linklater, 2002). Universality makes one aware of ongoing struggles for rights around the world and at the same time shapes the universal rights discourse (Brown, 2002: 421). In this situation, a state also promotes citizenship as cosmopolitan, when formal citizenship is based on references to human rights in the Constitution. This is the case with the current Russian Constitution (Konstitutsya, 1993).

All these issues (active and passive citizenship, the heteronormativity of citizenship, forms of contestation of the state’s authority and the multiplicity of actors in citizenship negotiations) entail enquiry into the effects of words and meanings on a citizen’s ‘conduct of conduct’ (Foucault, 1994: 237). I therefore look at citizenship as not only a particular regime but as a process of constant negotiation between the state, a person and other contributors (market, international human rights movements, supranational institutions, etc.). Therefore, further analysis will entail uncovering the disciplinary effects of citizenship regimes in the USSR and contemporary Russia that became enacted through the production of disciplinary subjects out of homosexuals.

Based on these grounds, my empirical research of citizenship takes into account the relations between the law and people’s practices. Therefore, I will analyse at least three dimensions of what constitutes a particular citizenship regime: (1) the institutionalised discourse of the state as articulated in formal documents (law, court decisions and policies); (2) official interpretations of these documents (political rhetoric, law enforcement and court hearings); and (3) the accounts of citizens on their position within this discourse.

The Question of Soviet Citizenship

This section is based on a study of secondary sources on Soviet citizenship: academic literature and research articles. It is notable that the data are not extensive as there was little research dedicated to homosexuality in the USSR. However, the existing information gives a sense of political development of the state after the Revolution and provides an empirical base for important conclusions. The tendencies that are discovered in this section will be used to define continuities and discontinuities regarding the practices of citizenship in Russia after the fall of the USSR.

The ideology of the Soviet state claimed to be supported by the people’s ideas of social justice as interpreted by revolutionary thinkers. Consider the works of the first revolutionaries, such as Lenin (1974 [1918]: 29) or Kollontai (1919), and their theoretical conclusions about the source of power and the need for political modifications in revolutionary Russia. As a relevant example for this study, I quote here Alexandra Kollontai’s accounts of intimacy and romantic love, based on ‘essentially egalitarian’ sexual relations between comrades:

The notion of one’s ownership over the other, the idea of ‘subjection’ and ‘inequality’ of those who belong to the same class contradict the very essence of the main proletarian principle: ‘comradeship.’ This principle is fundamental to the ideology of the coming class. It designates and defines the nouvelle sexual moral code of the proletariat that contributes to the redefinition of the people’s psyche in a way of accumulation of ‘sympathetic sentiments’: freedom instead of ownership; comradeship instead of inequality and subjection. (Kollontai, 1919: 60)¹

Similar rhetoric served as the basis for an important reconfiguration of Russian Imperial law and politics. The Soviet reforms of the first decade entailed destruction of patriarchal hierarchies through legal reforms of family law (Goldman, 1993: 51) and liberation of sexuality through the promotion of sexual freedom (Kon, 1997: 121). However, whether these reconfigurations contributed to the emergence of an active and free sexual citizen is a matter of doubt. I propose to sketch, briefly, three periods of citizenship that scholars in Russia offer in their explanations of the changes that sexual citizens went through in the USSR.

For several reasons, I base my analysis of the history of sexual citizenship during the Soviet era on Russian sociologist Zdravomyslova’s periodisation of citizenship, even though she speaks of different – though related – phenomena: gender and family (Zdravomyslova, 2004: 182). First, I argue that in Russia, the official discourse around homosexuality is not opposed to heterosexuality but to ‘family relations’, which, yet, remain heterosexual (I will further provide examples from contemporary politics). Second, legal restrictions laid upon homosexuality, the sexual freedoms of women and the regulation of families, all coincide with the ban of homosexuality (all modifications are produced in the mid-1930s). Finally, as I will show further, citizenship regimes in the 1920s, in Stalin’s period and finally in the late Soviet epoch, comprise significant differences in relation to homosexuality on the level of practices and law implementation, in spite of the fact that the latter two periods do not produce legal modifications.

The Revolutionary Regime

The Imperial Criminal Code that punished voluntary homosexual intercourse in its Article 995 was abolished in 1917. Soviet revolutionary politicians were not in favour of the criminalisation of homosexuality and believed in promoting sexual freedom in general rather than imposing strict sanctions. The enemy of the Soviet state was bourgeois morality with its notions of shame attached to bodily acts. Hence, the government was open and proud of its progressive sexual politics (Healey, 2008b: 163–164), the foundations of which they drew from popular ideas of intimacy and partnership.

This period is also characterised by a valuable contribution of empirical researchers to the knowledge of homosexuality in Russia. Although the studies were few in number, they disclose some important ideas about homosexuality in the USSR. Kon states that in a study of those times, researchers found out that ‘for workers and peasants it was easier to recognise intercourse with animals (8% of Odessa and Omsk students with peasant descent reported this) than with men’ (Kon, 1997: 130). The data indicate that the young population still adhered to conservative rural values, disregarding the state’s promotion of sexual freedom and the new morality. Traditionally, in Russia, sexual intercourse between men took the form of expressing the power of adult males towards statutory minors through penetrative sexual acts (Healey, 2002: 415). Therefore, recognising homosexual practices for some people meant also recognition of one’s subordinate position. One might have imagined that the huge influx of people from rural areas into the cities and towns in the 1920s would generate changes in these beliefs and in practices, as people adapted to an urban culture. In practice, however, as French demographer Blum argues, this rural exodus brought traditional values to cities:

the documents that we can study today testify … for extreme social rigidness of the Soviet world. Urbanisation was for a long time considered a valuable argument for the huge changes (it is noticeable that in the USSR urban growth was incredibly high). But if we study the [demographic] figures more closely, we can see that they say about ruralisation of Soviet cities rather than urbanisation of the country. (Blum, 2005: 20)

Hence, the Soviet drive of massive industrialisation generated this contradictory effect. Nonetheless, the basis of traditional sexual morality was weakened by the reconfiguration of social institutions such as church and marriage (Yaroshenko, 1999: 19).

Further, in this first period of Soviet statehood, citizenship was negotiated, though only Communist party elites were involved in this negotiation.² The initial active involvement of citizens in these debates (in the form of party cell discussions, public action or social research) was gradually fading away, and all attempts to analyse actual situations ceased by the beginning of the 1930s (Blum, 2005: 19). Therefore, it must be acknowledged that since the very beginning, Bolshevik politics were ‘etacratic’ (statist), the state government was the only source of the legal and political agenda:

In the Soviet state, the regime of citizenship involved rights and obligations that were granted by law to all Soviet citizens. However, citizenship actually required mobilisation of citizens for the purposes of constructing socialism and showing their loyalty. (Zdravomyslova and Temkina, 2003: 28)

These characteristics are indicative of a passive citizenship regime, and this argument is supported if we look at urban community practices. Decriminalisation of homosexuality was applauded by the urban community of homosexuals as they felt liberated from the oppressive legal prescriptions, but, at the same time, they could hardly use the new freedom (Healey, 2008b: 67, 79). One of the main reasons for this was the reorganisation of the institutional and spatial environment following the revolution, which led to certain changes in practices: commercial spaces that had ‘hosted’ homosexuality in Tsarist Russia (such as bathhouses) and commercial sex, which was possible in big cities, went through numerous limitations. Since commerce was considered to be un-Soviet, public bathhouses were reassigned to state management (Healey, 2002: 426) and some cases that involved homosexual prostitution were heard in the Soviet courts as early as 1922 (Healey, 2008b: 215–216). Private houses were amongst the few spaces that remained, but these were soon populated by newcomers as they were transformed into communal flats.

The Regime of Silence

Chronologically, the next period corresponds to some important changes in Stalin’s political career: 1930s–mid-1950s (Zdravomyslova, 2004: 185). In this period, the revolutionary ideas of rights and citizenship were abandoned: serious restrictions were laid upon the whole sphere of relations between the sexes and within sexes (Zdravomyslova, 2004: 185–189). However, it is important to explore the more profound details of the foundations of this new citizenship regime. As Stychin argues, the desire to control homosexuality is rooted in the state’s desire to produce and control a consensus around a normative way of life and the existing order (2003: 100). In this sense, the legal and political reforms of Stalin’s government can be understood as aimed at restoring the pre-existing ‘traditional’ order in Russia and reinventing this ‘tradition’ through comprehensive instruction in citizens’ lives and their relations with the state. It is an attempt to introduce strict adherence to this ‘consensus’ way of life from above. Moreover, the new political elites (‘nomenclature’) had already acquired property and power, and they needed oppressive government to guarantee these privileges (Lebina, 2000: 17).

The process of imposing the new order took place in the beginning of the 1930s. It included institutional prohibitions of suspicious research and legal bans of certain sexual practices as well as the monopolisation of political power and discourse. In 1933, the police reported the arrests of 130 men who were involved in homosexual intercourse and who were accused of counter-revolutionary planning (Healey, 2008b: 223). These measures and actions were supported by the development of anti-homosexual propaganda in the Soviet press.³ Finally, in 1934, the law that criminalised voluntary homosexual intercourse was included in the Criminal Code (1926). Massive arrests of homosexuals in the mid-1930s are reported in studies of the history of the Gulags and homosexuality (Kozlovsky, 1986: 155).

One of the most important effects of this regime is that it contributed to the creation of a veil of silence around sexuality. As theorists claim, this citizenship is characterised by ‘sexophobia’ (Kon, 1997: 4) or silencing of intimacy (Rotkirch, 2011: 11). In this period, the idea of heterosexuality as compulsory and the only sanctioned kind of sexuality is promoted through a propaganda of procreation and family values (Zdravomyslova, 2004: 186). Hence, any ‘deviations’ from this norm were regarded as inappropriate and dangerous for the whole public sphere, which the state claimed to protect. Research into issues related to sexuality was banned and that scientific data that was gathered was subjected to rigorous self-censorship (Blum, 2005: 40). It is however possible to learn something about this period from the stories of those who lived through Stalin’s conservative citizenship regime.

In her study of sexual biographies in Russia, conducted in the 1990s, Rotkirch identified a group of people who tend to silence their sexual experience and, in particular, never speak of homosexuality: those born between the 1920s and 1945 (Rotkirch, 2011: 37). They have neither the vocabulary, nor experience to articulate their sexuality. On the other hand, even in this strict order, there were places of practising homosexual identity. Kozlovsky’s research into homosexual urban subculture in the USSR of the 1970s shows that some public spaces were used by Soviet gay men as specifically ‘homosexual’ spaces (see, e.g. ‘Katka’ in Leningrad or ‘Shlyapka’ in Moscow; Kozlovsky, 1986: 49, 73). These spaces had been known as such since the end of the 19th century (Healey, 2008b: 47). This suggests that they continued to exist even during Stalin’s epoch of silencing and even that awareness of them was spreading among the silent citizens of Russia – through social networking since public means of communication were not available.

This situation provokes reflection on the regime of citizenship established in this period, and its relationship to the public/private tension in citizenship theory, which suggests that this dichotomy should be updated to reflect a more complex and comprehensive explanation of the negotiation of eliminated private space. The repressive regime, the core cement of which was public silencing, split the public sphere into two parts: ‘parallel with the official-public sphere there came into being another public sphere’ (Voronkov and Chikadze, 2003: 243):

every Soviet individual, including those constituting the nomenclature, lived and acted in both spheres, respected the invisible but effective boundary between them, and did not confuse the different rules regulating the official-public and private-public realms. This is the essence of that social schizophrenia which is justly attributed to the ‘common Soviet man’. (Voronkov and Chikadze, 2003: 243)

The official–public sphere is a domain of propaganda and therefore included ideologically correct law, press and governmental programmes as well as the ideologically correct behaviour of the citizens who were expected to perform exaggerated loyalty and commitment to the ‘general line of the party’. However, counterposed to this sphere stood the unofficial public sphere of ordinary life in cities, communal flats and other public spaces (such as squares where Soviet homosexuals gathered). In this public–private sphere, many alternative forms of behaviour were – if not sanctioned – acceptable because this was the place of resistance and civil disobedience in which the official rules of the state were not enacted. The space of this sphere was expanding as I will show in the discussion below.

The Regime of Revolutions

The last period of Soviet citizenship is referred to as the late Soviet era and is described as a time of limited liberalisation of sexual discourse, in which it became possible to form different points of view on sexuality, including those opposed to the official ones⁴ (Zdravomyslova, 2004: 189). Scholars argue that in this period, Russia underwent two sexual revolutions (Temkina, 2009: 35). The first changed sexual practices and made them more varied (Rotkirch, 2002b: 452): this ‘revolution’ occurred in the private–public sphere, which was less dependent on the state apparatus (Temkina, 2008: 14–15). The second ‘revolution’ came with the epoch of glasnost, when different sorts of sexualities were articulated in official–public discourse due to the decrease in censure and promotion of liberal values: in journals and articles, in the political arena and in science (Gessen, 1994: 33; Kon, 1997: 118, 368–372). In other words, societal changes in Soviet Russia preceded government policy.

But the law that condemned voluntary male homosexuality remained in force and was used for different ends: either to control ‘provocative’ behaviour in the official–public sphere or to blackmail political opposition. Hence, the implementation of the law undertaken by the police and other oppressive organs varied and was not exactly directed against homosexuals: instead, anyone could be denominated homosexual if it was necessary to initiate legal persecution against him (Gessen, 1994: 13–16; Kozlovsky, 1986: 16). Meanwhile, female homosexuality, by contrast, was under the jurisdiction of psychological medicine (Gessen, 1994: 17–18).

These conditions generated a variety of strategies, including the silencing and hiding of one’s homosexuality. In her research, Rotkirch collected interviews with Soviet lesbians, including those who were married, and she argues that

conformism of homosexual women to heterosexual norms (such as marriage with men, for example) was motivated by many reasons, and not always hide a sexual lifestyle. Another motive could be the desire to have children or love for their husbands. (Rotkirch, 2011: 274)

Kozlovsky interviewed a young married couple of different sexes in 1973; they both reported they had married in order to hide their homosexualities (Kozlovsky, 1986: 211). Concurrently, the two persons said that they knew same-sex couples who were living together in marriage-like relationships and an underground orthodox priest who conducted wedding ceremonies for same-sex couples in the 1970s (Kozlovsky, 1986: 225–226).

There are two important issues to consider in terms of governmentality that the Soviet regime provoked. First, the state’s and cities’ infrastructures were changing and this involved the expansion of physical private spaces: between the 1960s and 1980s, there was extensive building of individual flats, enabling people to move from their communal homes (Vishnevsky, 1998: 91). These new private spaces hosted a variety of strategies of resistance, since they made possible a change in personal ethos, including the development of political activism, critique of government in the Soviet kitchen (Voronkov and Zdravomyslova, 2002: 57) and disobedience of the Soviet criminal law on homosexuality too. This was the basis of active citizenship, which played an important role when the USSR collapsed, even though the ‘activism’ was not publicly announced as such and performed secretly.

Second, the conservative arrangements of the regime of silence reproduced hierarchies of citizens in terms of class (Gapova, 2005: 116), ethnicity (Blum, 2005: 133) and estate (Kordonskiy, 2008: 45). This situation gave rise to differentiated practices of citizenship in the USSR as people were not regarded as equals. The further one was positioned in the social hierarchy from the source of the redistribution of privileges, the further one could depart from the ‘good’ citizen’s way of life: ‘The principles of “communist morality” were common for all, but the “exemplary” group only included those who were closer to the source of redistribution of power and could use greater privileges’ (Tchouikina, 2002: 117). By contrast, the outcast had the freedom to drop their citizens’ obligations as they were already considered ‘asocial elements’: irregular migrants, political enemies of the regime or lumpenproletariat (Tchouikina, 2002: 122).

This social hierarchy, related to the level of demonstrable commitment to the state’s citizenship regime, is depicted in empirical studies of the 1960s and later: autonomy of sexual practices from the state’s normative discourse is more pronounced in biographies of the lower classes; their sexual life was more various and included marginalised practices (Rotkirch, 2011: 268). At the same time, scholars discovered a bohemian community where homosexual practices were not at all unusual (Rotkirch, 2002a: 160). In biographies of average Soviet citizens, however, homosexuality is reported by lesbians and gay men both as a ‘pathology’ (Rotkirch, 2002b: 458) and ‘a happy same-sex love’ (Rotkirch, 2002b: 466). This shows how ideological propaganda, charged with heteronormativity, penetrated individual narratives and could influence people’s choice of conformism.

Nonetheless, the spaces that hosted homosexual subculture and identity continued to exist and may signify a kind of resistance in the form of exploring alternative sexual practices and presenting them publicly. The squares and parks in the Soviet cities that were used by Soviet homosexuals for occasional meetings included Alexander Garden, the square in front of the Bolshoy Theatre, a public toilet close to Frunze Academy, Sandunov’s bathhouse (Moscow), Lenin’s Monument (Sochi), Katharine II Garden, the Baltiysky Railway Station toilets (Leningrad), October Square (Odessa) and others (Kozlovsky, 1986). Some cafes and restaurants were also popular among the Soviet gay population (Essig, 1999: 82; Kozlovsky, 1986: 39). State officials were complicit in this sort of resistance in that although the law against male homosexuality remained in place, they generally did not intervene in these spaces (Gessen, 1994: 21; Kozlovsky, 1986: 156). This interaction between state officials and the people in the spaces of resistance secured the continuity of the regime of revolutions that finally resulted in the fall of the entire Soviet state, as both groups failed to perform the oppressive laws.

Nouvelle History of Russian Citizenship

I am not going to speculate on what exactly caused the fall of the USSR and delimitation of the Soviet empire. It is important to highlight, however, that growing inequality, the disjuncture between people’s experiences and official propaganda, state monopolisation of the official public sphere and market, censure, shortage of goods and public services all contributed to the political mobilisation of Soviet citizens at the end of 1980s. When the Soviet state was collapsing, there were few who defended it: the citizens had accepted their state’s death. The new government had to address all these issues in its conceptualisation of the coming ‘democratic’ state and to ensure – at least discursively – its commitment to principles of equality and individual freedom once again, but in a substantively new way. Subsequently, the new Russian Constitution of 1993 was explicitly based on human rights and equality. Thus, Russia headed towards integration into the international liberal community and those institutions that support human rights.

As a result of the drive towards liberal democracy (as opposed to its communist past) and integration into the world political community, the new Russian government decriminalised male homosexuality in 1993 (Gessen, 1994: 38) and then, in 1999, joined the World Health Organization’s International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Revision (ICD-10), which depathologised homosexuality (Kon, 2002: 43–44). Nonetheless, these events did not challenge the heteronormative character of Russian law, which still explicitly produces second class citizens out of Russian homosexuals. My analysis will show that while contemporary Russian law uses different words to describe homosexuality, the same heteronormative meanings remain behind those words. Before getting to this analysis, it is important to describe another contextual aspect of the post-communist citizenship regime in Russia: the free market.

The free market contributed to the commercialisation of homosexual identities: gay nightclubs and cafes opened, gay theatre plays were staged and cruising strips to this day continue to attract people (Essig, 1999: 82; Gessen, 1994: 42). It also provided new identities for consumers, including those that question heterosexuality. In this way, homosexuality acquired its specific social place and limited recognition in the public sphere (Zdravomyslova and Temkina, 2007: 223). However, the market has important limitations: so long as it explores and provides identities and commodifies sexuality to produce a consumer, the extent to which it can provide ground for active citizenship is limited, and, moreover, it is a market that aims at cultivating consumers, rather than sexual citizens. So, if homosexuality is not regarded as a viable commodity in itself, then the market gives way to introduce other identities for lesbians and gay people to hide their sexuality better. Hence, it is in many senses dependant on the general structures on which heteronormativity rests.

An analysis of youth journals, undertaken by Omelchenko, shows how commercial publications reinforce heteronormativity even when they tend to promote new homosexual identities. She concluded that while commercial journals promote diversity that includes different styles of sexual life and commercialise homosexual identities (Omelchenko, 1999: 86–88), their ideas of sex are still conservative and ultimately based on heterosexuality as the only legitimate sexuality: ‘In Russia, the idea of “normal” sexual desire continues to be closely related to one important form of sexuality – sex in marriage’ (Omelchenko, 1999: 87). Gessen also reported that in the beginning of the 1990s, publications about homosexuality were refused by editorial boards of Russian newspapers (even when paid), and it was normal for Russian television reporters to make homophobic comments (Gessen, 1994: 38–39).

These remarks demonstrate that post-communist Russia inherited Soviet heteronormative ideas about homosexuality. Further analysis of Russian law, court decisions and political discussions assists with identifying the specific places where heteronormativity appears. As Sullivan argues, ‘heteronormativity does not exist as a discrete and easily identifiable body of thought, of rules and regulations, but rather, informs – albeit ambiguously, in complex ways, and to varying degrees – all kinds of practices, institutions, conceptual systems, and social structures’ (Sullivan, 2003: 132). This sort of heteronormativity constitutes the citizenship regime in today’s Russia.

So Says the Law

While in the 1920s, the Bolsheviks’ project was to create an equal society by eradicating social class, the liberal government of Russia in the 1990s proclaimed a commitment to a society grounded in rights and the Rule of Law, where equality would be built on the idea of equal legal treatment of all citizens. Consequently, I focus particularly on those laws that discriminate against certain groups or distinguish some citizens from others. In terms of sexuality, there are laws, generated by the resilience of heteronormative thinking, which trump ideas of equality or justice. Despite the decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1993, it was returned to the Criminal Code of Russia in 1996. This time, homosexuality enters via Clause 132, which speaks of homosexual rape, and specifies that male and female (‘lesbianstvo’) homosexuality, performed with the application of violence, is punishable. Since rape is already punishable by Clause 131, there is no need to address it in another article unless the legislators are driven by an assumption about homosexuality and heterosexuality as unequal before the law. The thinking behind Clause 132 rests on the constitution of homosexuality as deviant and hence intrinsically criminal rather than just another kind of sexuality.

Similar logic constituted another legal document: the Order of the Minister of Health of the Russian Federation No 311. This law confronts the classification of illnesses accepted by the World Health Organization’s ICD-10 adopted by Russia in 1999; it simultaneously admits ICD-10 and contradicts it. The manual ‘Models of Diagnostics and Treatment of Mental and Behavioural Illnesses,’ introduced by the Order No 311, contained a description of sexual norms in Russia as follows:

The criteria of sexual normality are paired relationship, heterosexuality, puberty of partners, voluntariness of the relationship, tendency to consensus and absence of physical or moral damage to the health of partners and other persons. A disorder of sexual preference means any deviation from the norms of sexual behaviour, irrespective of its displays and intensity, its degree or etiological factors. This notion includes disorder as deviation from social norms and from medical norms, as well.

This description not only excluded homosexuality from the medical norm, but also represented it as abnormal in the social domain. Notably, the criteria did not resemble medical terms, but rather referred to the political realm, where, as discussed above, sexuality was imagined as dangerous and shameful, implying that it might cause harm to the health of ‘other persons’ who witnessed homosexual expression. Hence, this law was constituted by the rationale of protection of the public sphere and spaces from interference from alternative sexualities, and it reinforced heteronormativity by constructing a sexual norm with ideals and assumptions about heterosexual relationships.

Heteronormativity also drives recent legal initiatives to ban the so-called ‘homosexual propaganda’. The idea to find a substitute for the criminalisation of homosexuality has been spreading in legislative circles for many years (Healey, 2008a). In 2013, this idea materialised in the law banning ‘non-traditional sexual relationships’ (Federal Law No. 135-FZ, 29.06.2013), though the story is rooted in similar legal documents that are already enacted in several regions of Russia. These legal innovations usually come as modifications to children’s rights codes.

In 2006, the Ryazan regional parliament adopted the first law in Russia that banned what they called ‘propaganda of homosexuality to minors’. Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) activists have taken the law to the Constitutional Court that upheld it (N 151-O, 2010). In 2011, the same law was enacted in Arkhangelsk, and in 2012, St Petersburg joined these federal units and offered an explanation of what homosexual propaganda means (it was taken from the Constitutional Court decision N 151-O, 2010):

In this article, by public actions directed to propaganda of muzhelozhstvo [male homosexuality], lesbianism, bisexuality, transgenderism to minors, the following is understood: intentional activity that involves uncontrolled dissemination of information in open sources, which might harm the health, morality and spiritual development of minors, including if it might form deviant ideas about the social equality of traditional and non-traditional marital relationships. (The Law of Saint Petersburg N 108-18, 2012)

Using slightly different language, this kind of law also has been adopted in many other regions. The texts of this law and the Constitutional Court decision explicitly state that homosexuality cannot be treated equally by the law, and they place homosexuality in opposition to ‘traditional marital relationships’. This situation effectively denies homosexuals their citizenship, based on the expressed unequal legal treatment of homosexuality. The justification for these measures, which pervades all the political debates and court decisions, is protection of ‘family values’ from homosexual ‘intervention’ and this reasoning is expressed in these two Supreme Court decisions on regional propaganda laws:

Federal legislators considered the harmful information for health and development of children that kind of information which denies family values, including propaganda of homosexuality as it relates to the ahead-mentioned legal rationale. (N 1-APG12-11, 2012)

In accordance with national traditions and international norms, federal legislators do not include homosexual relations, bisexuality and transgenderism in family values. (N 87-APG12-2, 2012)

These legal innovations articulate homosexuality in the same manner as decades ago – in the 1930s – before the introduction of criminalisation of male homosexual intercourse. Simultaneously, this recent emergence of anti-gay measures seeks to silence homosexuality and establish a monopoly of control over public morals. Political accounts would contest this situation, if there was room for diverse understandings of sexuality, but heteronormativity dictates that there can be only one answer to all questions related to sexuality. This thesis is supported by analysis of Russian politicians’ statements on homosexuality.

Politics of Regulating Sexuality

As the above analysis of the law indicates, heteronormative citizenship is related first of all to the political support for the nuclear family and procreation, which asserts heterosexual privilege (Johnson, 2002: 325). Zhurzhenko argues that ‘post-Soviet traditionalism is characterised by the reduction of family to functions of procreation, purposes of childbirth and socialisation of children’ (2004: 272). Those who dissent from fulfilling these functions are excluded from welfare and citizenship. Russian politics and Russian policy clearly fit this pattern. Let us take, for example, a statement made by Vladimir Putin in his interview with CNN’s Larry King:

There is a rather acute demographic problem in Russia, as in the rest of Europe. We are making serious efforts to improve the situation, and we are having success. I think we have the best indicators in Europe in terms of the rate of improvement. For the first time in the last 10 to 15 years, we are seeing a sustainable trend of rising births, and the country’s population has even increased somewhat this year.

As for same-sex marriages, they do not produce offspring, as you know. So we are fairly tolerant towards sexual minorities; however, we think that the state should promote reproduction, support mothers and children, and look after their health.⁵

It is curious that with these words, Putin answered King’s question of whether lesbians and gay men should be allowed to serve in the military in Russia. It seems clear that Putin’s speech was produced by the governmental functions of the dominant heteronormative discourse: he did not even understand the question, but once he heard ‘lesbians and gays’ he reproduced the only thing that he could associate with homosexuality – it is dangerous for the procreation of the nation. Notably, Putin repeated arguments for procreation and the increase in population, which the Soviet government had used to legitimise political success and power decades ago (Blum, 2005: 52). Recently, Putin has also initiated modifications of child adoption law in Russia. His intention is to make adoption by foreign same-sex couples impossible.⁶

Statements made in the heteronormative spirit by other politicians from different state institutions and political parties may be found elsewhere. The concentration of public/private discussion in relation to homosexuality is given in the answers of the Russian government to the European Court for Human Rights in Alekseyev v. Russia (2010). This case involved claims by gay-pride parade organiser Nikolay Alekseyev against the Russian authorities who had not sanctioned the parade. The main idea of the Russian government was to protect public morals from homosexuals (quotes are taken from the decision):

…any form of celebration of homosexual behaviour should take place in private or in designated meeting places with restricted access…(Section 61)

It was thus the authorities’ duty to demonstrate sensitivity to the existing public resentment of any overt manifestation of homosexuality…(Section 61)

The Government admitted, in particular, that the authorities would reach their limit of tolerance towards homosexual behaviour when it spilt over from the strictly private domain into the sphere shared by the general public…(Section 82)

However, the promotion of the regime of citizenship informed by heteronormativity, which entails a strong division between public and private and consequent protection of the public sphere by its monopolisation, is performed by the government in relatively new circumstances. Whilst, as discussed above, this was a key feature of the Soviet past, a closer analysis will show that the significant changes in the context, which generates this division, has produced important differences. These changes relate to the emergence of the market with its effects on the commodification of homosexual identities and also refer to the new possibilities that opened up to Russian citizens as a result of the universalisation of the discourse of resistance – such as possibilities of international travel and global exchange of information through the Internet. Hence, there may be an erosion of the old strategies of passive citizens who conform to the regime, while practices of resistance may emerge from the Soviet public–private domain and be reconfigured as new ones. Further, I want to show what citizens say that they think of their rights and how they tend to explain their practices of citizenship. The analysis will uncover the effects of discourse on the lives of people.

The Life of One’s Own

In my research, which I have been conducting since 2011,⁷ I explored whether lesbians and gay men adjust their practices to the specific regime of citizenship in Russia and what strategies they use to articulate inclusion or resist possible oppression. In order to collect narratives that would express specific accounts of their problems, I conducted group discussions and individual life history interviews with a total of 39 people who identified as lesbians or gay men.

It is important to say from the very beginning that the fall of the USSR is narrated by many respondents as a positive change in their personal lives:

You already don’t remember all those totalitarian barriers which we, especially gays, faced. The damn Soviet regime can go to hell. (male, 1947, professor of maths⁸)

The interviewees interiorised the idea of a significant distinction between the old and the new political governments, which lies in the authoritarianism/democracy dichotomy. In their stories, the USSR is represented as incredibly oppressive and the influence of the criminal law about homosexual intercourse is recognised as an important problem, which was solved by the new government. The Soviet system is counterposed to ‘freedom’, and what is post-Soviet, therefore, is considered to be freedom:

In the Soviet Union, as we know, there was no sex. As my mother once said, ‘I learned what lesbians are, when I was forty.’ We, respectively, heard it all much earlier because there was freedom. (male, 1973, therapist)

Those who compare the existing situation with the USSR tend to depict the present in more positive words, even if they speak of discrimination occurring today in other parts of the interview: ‘Now, I think, we are in a normal situation: civil rights are there’ (male, 1947, professor of maths). However, there is a basis for dissatisfaction, and it obviously lies in facing discrimination in a most unambiguous manner:

When my partner disappeared, I went to the police, but they sent me away because I’m gay, because I couldn’t explain our relationship. I said, we’d been living together for six years, and they said, go out yourself or we’ll kick your ass out right now. (male, 1980, locksmith)

However, the most common discriminatory scenario described was not recounted stories of direct confrontation. Rather, the interviewees evoke their experiences of discrimination with such words as ‘amorphous feelings’, ‘discomfort’, ‘I can’t feel myself comfortable’, ‘negative feed-back’, and so on. These are the subtle effects of regulatory discourses charged with heteronormativity, as suggested by Sullivan (2003: 132):

There’s this feeling that you simply have to control it all, what you say, yes, never speak too much, well, if in a situation I’d say something for sure, I stop myself. (male, 1971, biologist)

There’s always this need to lie, so to say, or hide, in principle, how my acquaintance with people starts: I begin surveillance about what people accept and what they don’t, those sorts of things. (female, 1990, unemployed)

It seems that in certain circumstances, the respondents are consciously ready to lead what they call ‘a double life’ in order to avoid complications in their relations with friends, relatives and the general public:

I led a double life: at school I was an ordinary heteronormative boy, I fought with guys, I wrote valentines and I was doing other sorts of bullshit, and then at night I was visiting this court yard with the boys […] So I continued to play these double games, though there was no need any more, perhaps, it was just a habit. I got used to this scheme: I am one man in the day, and I am another man at night. (male, 1983, PhD student)

It is in my nature that I easily go along with women. So if a woman invites me, I use her to imitate all these moments: to show that you love women, that you date. And when it all goes too far, she says let’s go to my place, then I say I’m tired and I have a headache, it is always possible to annul. (male, 1973, therapist)

The heteronormativity that is felt by the respondents everywhere dictates public behaviour: one must not appear gay at school, university, work or common public spaces. These ideas are, on the one hand, taken from experience (‘when they banned it for the first time, I understood that I’m something that doesn’t fit common norms’ [male, 1983, PhD student]), and, on the other hand, they are presumptions without any reported foundations:

So this double life, just, for two years started to blow my brains up […] And then I spoke to them [my friends to whom I came out] straight from the heart, well, strictly speaking, they knew that I was gay even before I knew it. (male, 1992, student)

The sense of homophobia does not always result from direct intervention and actual events of discrimination, but rather is supported by a general view of Russian society as a homophobic one. As I have showed in previous sections, there are plenty of foundations for this view given that the mass media, politicians and state officials reinforce heteronormative and homophobic prejudices. This situation contributes to the idea of one’s non-homosexual appearance as a reliable shield from public aggression: ‘nobody oppresses me because nobody knows I’m gay, it’s not obvious’ (male, 1987, manager), ‘I’ve never portrayed myself as gay, so it’s never been directed against me’ (male, 1975, physicist). This situation is normalised and does not produce any reflective attitude to one’s social positioning as a second-class citizen. Presumably, it might be explained by this quote, the idea of which was repeated in several other interviews:

I enjoyed the comment of one person, who said: What rights are we talking about in a state without rights in principle? So we are speaking about gay and lesbian rights, while ordinary people in our country don’t have rights, or they have them on the paper, but they don’t know how to use them. (male, 1982, manager)

Hence, the general attitude towards state institutions is that they are not sources of empowerment: there is no point in seeking recognition from the state because it does not empower. Yet, even those who presumably have this recognition as a result of being heteronormative are equally deprived of civil rights. As one of the interviewees put it, ‘heterosexuality does not guarantee happiness’ (male, 1992, student). Nonetheless, heteronormativity plays another important role in lesbians’ and gay men’s attitudes towards citizenship: they start speaking of civil rights when they describe their same-sex families. It seems that the only important deprivation derives from a heterosexual idea of a sanctioned marriage that actually is believed to provide for certain rights and opportunities:

I am open at work, they know I have a girlfriend, all my colleagues know it and nobody says anything against. So the real lack is in legal support. Right now I can live as I want to, I can express myself in any way, but if I’d like to register my relationship, well, if I want to support my family, the law wouldn’t give me this […] Let’s say young couples get flats or credit, or something else, like a divorce, the process, if you’re registered, it has legal basis: fifty-fifty division of property, let’s say. When you don’t have it, it’s upsetting. (female, 1989, designer)

Life history interviews show that the issue of rights and state recognition arises in that particular moment of biographic narration when the interviewee describes her/his permanent intimate relationship. Another point in biographies when rights are mentioned is accounts of LGBT public activism, especially gay pride parades. These accounts are extremely negative: in my sample, Russian lesbians and gay men did not show support for these sorts of actions. I would argue that the issues of marriage and public activism are related, as they demonstrate that for my interviewees the acceptance of the public/private divide was extremely important: claims of recognition for same-sex families belong to the sphere of the private, while public rallies are opposed to it and force public homosexual expression. The latter is something that the interviewees generally did not support as they have no commitment to this kind of active citizenship. Hence, respondents reported using other strategies, and the market appears as a field of security for those who have the financial capital:

A sort of financial gap, which a person has, gives a feeling of security, a feeling that you don’t need to look for a job because you have nothing to eat, well, this all is related to sexuality, too […] you simply care less if someone doesn’t give you a job. Well, fuck them, anyway, someone else will offer one, but I won’t take out my earrings⁹ in order to please an employer. (male, 1983, PhD student)

In this sense, the market inverses the hierarchy of the Soviet regime: if then the poor and the outcast could drop their citizen’s obligations because they were not a focus of the state’s attention, in the new Russia the rich buy indulgence from this attention by arranging their own private citizenship with the help of capital. Certainly, this situation has two important flaws: first, market facilities are not available to everyone, hence new inequalities are produced; second, private arrangements of one’s welfare through market mechanisms reinforces common inequalities and covers actually existing ones from civic communities and state officials.

Activism is still informed by dangers that it involves, a situation which leads to demands for ‘private activism’ such as the ‘development of gay culture, gay community’ (male, 1973, therapist), closeted social clubs for lesbians and gay men. Certainly, ‘there are people who can bite’ (male, 1947, professor of maths), but many of the interviewees expressed a preference for changing the environment around them rather than addressing the whole world:

I changed my sister’s attitude towards it. Before she knew that there was a gay person in our family, she had, not negative, but this: fie, gays, what is it! […] Then she started to reflect. Changing society around us, changing ourselves…there is no need to go out with these posters: it’s okay to be gay. (male, 1978, engineer)

Every person has her own responsibility for this, so there are people, friends, relatives, well, colleagues, if their attitude is changed to positive, then it’s already a small step […] If we take it in scale of a thousand people, or millions, then we should add proportionally the number of adequate people. (male, 1988, chemist)

This private, small scale kind of activist citizenship seems preferable to the interviewed Russian lesbians and gay men as they feel immense oppression, and even being open to members of their families is already an activist stand for them. Yet, just like kitchen talks that occurred in every Soviet house and concerned the government’s mistakes, this private activism subverts the monolithic and monopolistic heteronormative regime of citizenship in contemporary Russia.

Conclusion

Both Soviet and Russian citizenship regimes were based on the rhetoric of equality from the very beginning: one presupposed a society without class division to achieve equality, and the other offered human rights and legality instead. Nonetheless, political and social arrangements produced different conscious and unconscious effects. Monopolisation of power to control the public sphere is a crucial characteristic of both historical periods in Russia. This phenomenon gives rise to a vision of the regimes as monolithic and authoritarian because dissident opinions from public debates are merged with equally straightforward pressure while the government’s position is introduced as the only possibility. This situation produces alternative spaces for dissent within the sanctioned private–public domains as well as outside of them. This state monopoly does not entirely frustrate expressions of active citizenship, but it is relegated to specific forms of almost invisible private activism.

Sexual citizenship is informed by heteronormativity. Although the first periods of Soviet citizenship promoted equal treatment of Soviet people to ensure mobilisation of the work force, it then was reconfigured to guarantee loyalty and commitment to promoted ideologies, which rested on predominant heterosexual values. The same disposition of sexuality is tracked through the whole ‘democratic’ period of Russia. In the 1990s, the heteronormative understanding of sexuality was displayed through legal norms and reformations that could not embrace principles of equality in relation to homosexuality. Mass media introduced sexual diversity to the public sphere but was also influenced by assumptions about heterosexuality as the sole possible basis of ‘normal’ sexuality. In the 2000s, a conservative government has secured this position by the purification of mass media discourse through monopolisation of public discourse and through censorship. Individual narratives are also informed by heteronormativity, though there is room for alternatives grounded in universal arguments for dignity and individuality.

The Soviet ideal citizen was loyal to the authorities. In terms of sexuality, this situation included loyalty to ‘traditional family values’: heterosexual marriage and procreation. The Soviet government guaranteed the opposition of homosexuality to family by its criminalisation together with other ‘incompatible’ phenomena: abortion, sexual freedom and divorce. The democratic government explicitly presented homosexuality as opposed to family values in the law, court decisions and political argumentation produced by heteronormative reasoning.

In the USSR, citizens’ loyalty and the monopolisation of the public sphere was achieved by silencing undesirable phenomena, including homosexuality. Russia is making steps towards the same situation by the legal ban of homosexual propaganda, which rests on the arguments of protection of children and the public from moral harm. The fight for the public (and, consequently, the reinforcement of the public/private divide) is rooted in the drive to establish a monolithic ideological framework that would ensure expression of support for the government’s politics from its citizens. In a sense, it was a successful Soviet strategy for the production of loyal citizens when the private space was not available physically. Nonetheless, the emergence of the private ensured housing for dissent and oppositional opinions and the development of alternative ways of life. Homosexuality (as a criminal offence in the USSR) occupied this private space. Homosexuality was also visible in specific private–public spaces in the Soviet epoch: those urban spaces where alternative conduct was normalised.

In contemporary Russia, the private is left to the market: through market mechanisms one organises her/his own private space and explores her/his homosexual identity by limited market means (gay and lesbian clubs, journals and leisure). However, the configuration of relations between the public and the private (reproduction of their rigid, though imagined, boundaries) produces the effects of ‘social schizophrenia’: double life and mimicry that Russian homosexuals reported in interviews as a means to hide their homosexuality from those general public audiences who presumably consider it unsuitable or act directly against expressions of homosexuality. The market contributes to this situation by offering the fragile shelter of the private and reinforcing inequalities at the same time.

Those are the effects of a heteronormative citizenship regime, which reproduces a conservative public/private divide and rests on family values. This regime has nothing to do with equality and civil rights as it systematically denies these ideals. However, it produces resistance that is channelled through the discourse of human rights. This resistance is articulated in demands for the right to marry by homosexuals, who see same-sex cohabitation as one of the most important deprivations. This demand is simultaneously suppressed and produced by the discourse of heteronormative citizenship: homosexuality is excluded from it, and the only way by which inclusion is claimed is demands for same-sex marriage, based on its heteronormative model.

Legal Documents

Criminal Code of Russian Socialistic Federative Soviet Republic, 1926.

Criminal Code of Russian Federation, 1996.

Federal Law, N 135-FZ, 2013.

Konstitutsya (osnovnoy zakon) Soyuza Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik [Constitution (The Basic Law) of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics] 1924.

Konstitutsya Rossiyskoy Federatsii [The Constitution of the Russian Federation], adopted by popular vote, 1993.

Law of Saint Petersburg N 108-18 ‘About modifications to the Law of Saint Petersburg “About administrative offences in Saint Petersburg”’, 2012.

Order of the Minister of Health of the Russian Federation No 311, 1999.

European Court for Human Rights, Alekseyev v Russia, 2010.

Constitutional Court of Russia, Decision N 151-O, 2010.

Supreme Court of Russia, Decision N 1-APG12-11, 2012.

Supreme Court of Russia, Decision N 87-APG12-2, 2012.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author thanks his partner Evgeny Shtorn for his immense contribution to this work and also appreciates Prof. Hilary Sommerlad for her valuable comments on the draft, and Kristen Hendrickson, for volunteering in proofreading the manuscript. He also thanks Anastasia Golovneva and Daniil Grachev, students from St Petersburg State University, who conducted interviews and collected data under his supervision.

Notes

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