Abstract
As someone who researches and teaches gender and sexuality in the post-Soviet Central Asian state of Kyrgyzstan, I found the recently published volume Soviet and Post-Soviet Sexualities edited by Richard C.M. Mole extremely timely, useful and full of insight. The volume unites under the same cover ten chapters by authors working on various aspects, periods and regions (although roughly half of the contributions are based primarily on data from Russia) of the Soviet and post-Soviet experience, using a broad range of methodological tools. In the opening chapter, the editor explains the book’s constructionist approach to the matter of sexuality: ‘While sexual desire can be understood as being biologically driven, sexual categories and the meanings assigned to them are constructed’ (p. 1).
The contributors to the volume focus on non-normative (in this case meaning ‘homosexual’) sexualities. Throughout the book, the authors examine the history of Soviet and post-Soviet homosexual (gay and lesbian) subjectivities, making an important contribution not only to gender and queer studies of the region but also to the literature on Soviet and post-Soviet subjectivities.
Working with archival documents, historian Irina Roldugina (Chapter 2) writes about the early Soviet period of sexual emancipation and self-advocacy, whereby queer working-class subjects engaged in direct communication and debates with experts and invented themselves as both authentically Soviet people and homosexuals (gays and lesbians), pushing against the ‘counter-revolutionary pederast’ myth (p. 17). Arthur Clech’s chapter on tema as a ‘communal subjectivity shaped through common forms such as language, irony and solidarity’ (p. 33) turns our attention to the late Soviet period and the shared subculture which still exists everywhere that people speak Russian (Mamedov, 2019). Non-heterosexual and gender non-conforming people in the former Soviet space still refer to themselves and their communities as tema, the term that ‘designates all persons with whom a given individual may feel they share forms common to homosexual subjectivities’ (p. 36). Being more a way to describe a mode of sociality than individual sexual desire, practices or identities, tema is an ‘affinity transcending gender, nationality and social status affiliations’ (ibid.). Clech argues that such subjectivities were based on Soviet values (p. 33), and thus creatively reappropriated the identity of a Soviet citizen (p. 34).
Further pushing our understanding beyond the usual narratives of suppression of sexuality in general and oppression of sexual dissidents in the Soviet Union in particular is the chapter by Rustam Alexander (Chapter 4), which describes the debates that took place between 1960 and 1975 within the socialist block and in the USSR itself regarding the ‘decriminalisation of consensual sodomy’. The author adds depth and nuance to our understanding of Soviet history of homosexuality and the discussions that were taking place within and across the state institutions (the Ministry of the Interior [MVD] and academic legal scholars).
Today’s debates regarding the origins of homosexuality (‘nature versus nurture’ or ‘born this way’ versus social constructionism) echo those between the MVD and ‘civilian’ scholars in USSR. The ‘new sexual Cold War’ described by Laurie Essig and Alexander Kondakov in Chapter 5 also paints a picture of the world where the supposedly progressive West advocates for LGBTQ rights based on the belief that one is ‘born this way’, while the authoritarian East seeks to protect itself from the contagion of ‘gay propaganda’ (based on an underlying constructivist belief that sexuality is an acquired/learned behaviour). Essig and Kondakov criticise such depictions of the state of affairs as too simplistic and overlooking the poor record many Western ‘progressive’ states have with regard to the rights of their own queer citizens, while the authors suggest ‘a third path, a troublesome and queer way of thinking about sex and nation’ (p. 81). Essig and Kondakov tell a more complex story of a global exchange of ideologies between the US and Russia, whereby ‘national stances are usually contradictory and always already globalised’ (p. 90).
In fact, the rest of the chapters demonstrate once again that both the essentialist and the constructivist logics can be used to ‘other’ and discriminate against LGBTQ people, depending on what value is attributed to homosexuality by the actors involved. See, for instance, Philip Bullock’s chapter on the uses of queer biography of Chaikovsky in post-Soviet Russia (Chapter 6); Richard C.M. Mole’s exploration of queer migration and diaspora in Berlin (Chapter 7); Sevan Beukian’s examination of the links between national identity, trauma, war, genocide memory and homosexuality in Armenia (Chapter 8); and Joanna Pares Hoare’s (Chapter 9) and Galina Miazevich’s (Chapter 10) insights into the processes of non-heterosexual identities negotiations in Kyrgyzstan (Hoare), Belarus and Lithuania (Miazevich). Both discursive strategies—essentialist and constructivist—are used by both sides of the debates to self-advocate or to demonise. After all, during the original Cold War, queerness was strongly linked to communist politics in the United States (Fiks, 2014). So much for the myth of the queer West and straight East.