In , further laws were enacted criminalising certain sexual acts between two males, but an LGBT subculture developed in Russia during that century, with many significant Russians being openly homosexual or bisexual. In , the Russian Revolution saw the overthrow of the Tsarist government and the subsequent foundation of the Russian SFSR , the world's first socialist state , followed by the founding of the Soviet Union after the end of the civil war in The Bolsheviks rewrote the constitution and "produced two Criminal Codes - in and - and an article prohibiting gay sex was left off both.

Under Vladimir Lenin 's leadership, openly homosexual people were allowed to serve in government. In , the Soviet government under the leadership of Joseph Stalin recriminalised homosexual activity with punishments of up to five years' hard labour [ citation needed ]. A article in the new Criminal Code outlawed 'homosexuality'. Nonetheless, homosexual culture became increasingly visible, particularly following the brashly liberal glasnost policy of Mikhail Gorbachev 's government in the late s.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the foundation of the Russian Federation in , the Council of Europe pressured the new administration to legalize homosexuality, leading President Boris Yeltsin to do so in However, there are several restrictions on activities related to homosexuality. According to several reports about ancient Russia, many Western visitors from Europe were shocked or surprised how open and naturally the Russian people dealt with homosexuality. The Austrian royal councilor Sigismund von Herberstein described in his report Rerum Moscoviticarum Commentarii Notes on Muscovite Affairs his observations during his travels in Moscow in and He noted that homosexuality was prevalent among all social classes.

Prior to Tsarist policy, homosexuality and cross-dressing were punished by religious authorities or militias. Ivan the Terrible was accused of being gay in an attempt to discredit him. When Tsar False Dmitry I was overthrown, his broken body was dragged through the streets by his genitals alongside his reputed male lover. In , Tsar Peter the Great enacted a ban on male homosexuality in the armed forces. The prohibition on sodomy was part of a larger reform movement designed to modernize Russia and efforts to extend a similar ban to the civilian population were rejected until In , [14] Tsar Nicholas I added Article which outlawed muzhelozhstvo.

While this could have created a ban on all forms of private adult voluntary homosexual behavior, the courts tended to limit its interpretation to anal sex between men, thus making private acts of oral sex between consenting men legal. The law did not explicitly address female homosexuality or cross-dressing, although both behaviors were considered to be equally immoral and may have been punished under other laws similar to how the Church would punish girls for being "tomboys" as lesbians were previously punished by law in the 17th century and prior.

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It is unknown how many Russians were sentenced under this law, although there were a number of openly gay and bisexual Russians during this era and homoerotic rites were popular among some religious dissidents in the far north of Russia. Author and critic Konstantin Leontiev was bisexual and one of the most famous couples in the late 19th century Russian literary world were the lesbians Anna Yevreinova a lawyer and Maria Feodorova an author.

Mikhail Kuzmin 's novel Wings became one of the first "coming out" stories to have a happy ending and his private journals provide a detailed view of a gay subculture, involving men of all classes. While there was a degree of government tolerance extended to certain gay or bisexual artists and intellectuals, especially if they were on friendly terms with the Imperial family, the pervasive public opinion, greatly influenced by the Eastern Orthodox Church , was that homosexuality was a sign of corruption, decadence and immorality. Leo Tolstoy 's Resurrection introduces a Russian artist, convicted for having sex with his students, but given a lenient sentence; and a Russian activist for gay rights as examples of the widespread corruption and immorality in Tsarist Russia.

These depictions of gay men and women in literature suggest that the government's selective tolerance of homosexuality was not widely expressed among the Russian people and that it was also divorced from any endorsement of LGBT rights. While other nations, most notable Germany, had an active gay rights movement during this era, the most visible example of Russian homosexuality aside from literature was prostitution. Russian urbanization had helped to ensure that Saint Petersburg and Moscow both had gay brothels, along with many public places where men would buy and sell sexual services for or from other men.

His homosexual relationships were widely famous in Moscow.

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Anarchist Alexander Berkman softened his prejudice against homosexuality through his relationship with Emma Goldman and his time spent in jail, where he learned that working class men could be gay, thus debunking the idea that homosexuality was a sign of upper middle class or wealthy exploitation or decadence. One of the founders of the Kadets, Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov , had written a research paper on the legal status of homosexuality in Russia, published by early gay rights advocate Dr.

Magnus Hirschfeld in Berlin. In addition to the legal research, the paper argued that the anti-gay criminal law should be repealed, making him the first Russian politician to public express support for gay rights. Through the abolishment of the Tsarist legal code in , the Russian Communist Party effectively legalised homosexuality. The initial Russian Soviet criminal code contained no criminalisation of homosexuality as the subject was omitted.

Yet the abrogation of the Tsarist law was part of an overall rejection of the laws of the Russian Empire and the Soviets never undertook any campaign to reduce prejudice against homosexuality.

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Homosexuality or sodomy remained a crime in Azerbaijan officially criminalised in as well as in the Transcaucasian and Central Asian Soviet Republics throughout the s. Despite decriminalising homosexuality in wider Soviet social policy on the matter of wider homosexual rights and the treatment of homosexual people in the s was often mixed.

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Official Soviet policy in both the RSFSR and the wider USSR in the s on homosexuality fluctuated between toleration and support, attempts at legal equality and social rights for homosexual people, to open examples of state hostility against homosexuals and state attempts to classify homosexuality as "a mental disorder to be cured". In the early s, Commissar of Health Nikolai Semashko for example was sympathetic [26] to homosexual emancipation "as part of the [sexual] revolution" and attempted such reforms for homosexual rights in the area of civil and medical areas. The Bolsheviks also rescinded Tzarist legal bans on homosexual civil and political rights, especially in the area of state employment.

In the early s, the Soviet government and scientific community took a great deal of interest in sexual research, sexual emancipation and homosexual emancipation. In January , the Soviet Union sent delegates from the Commissariat of Health led by Commissar of Health Semashko [29] to the German Institute for Sexual Research as well as to some international conferences on human sexuality between and , where they expressed support for the legalisation of adult, private and consensual homosexual relations and the improvement of homosexual rights in all nations. Grigorii Batkis , director of the Institute for Social Hygiene in Moscow, published a report, The Sexual Revolution in Russia , which stated that homosexuality was "perfectly natural" and should be legally and socially respected.

Batkis prior to However, in the late s and early s Soviet policy and attitudes on homosexuality and homosexual rights changed, alongside wider social backlashes against homosexual rights in general in the USSR. Along with increased repression of political dissidents and non-Russian nationalities [ citation needed ] under Stalin, LGBT themes and issues faced increasing official government censorship and a uniformly harsher policy across the entire Soviet Union. Homosexuality was officially labelled a disease and a mental disorder in the late s specifically over a period from Batkis and other sexual researchers repudiated in their own earlier scientific reports of homosexuality as a natural human sexuality.

Earlier examples of this type of hardening Soviet attitude towards homosexuality include the report from the People's Commissariat for Health entitled The Sexual Life of Contemporary Youth , authored by Izrail Gel'man , which stated: The world of a female or male homosexual is perverted, it is alien to the normal sexual attraction that exists in a normal person".

Soviet legislation does not recognise so-called crimes against morality. Our laws proceed from the principle of protection of society and therefore countenance punishment only in those instances when juveniles and minors are the objects of homosexual interest. In , the Soviet government under Stalin recriminalised sex between men. On 7 March , Article was added to the criminal code for the entire Soviet Union that expressly prohibited only male homosexuality, with up to five years of hard labour in prison.

There were no criminal statutes regarding sex between women. During the Soviet regime, Western observers believed that between and 1, men were imprisoned each year under Article Some historians have noted that it was during this time that Soviet propaganda began to depict homosexuality as a sign of fascism [36] and that Article may have a simple political tool to use against dissidents, irrespective of their true sexual orientation and to solidify Russian opposition to Nazi Germany, who had broken its treaty with Russia. More recently, a third possible reason for the anti-gay law has emerged from declassified Soviet documents and transcripts.

Beyond expressed fears of a vast "counterrevolutionary" or fascist homosexual conspiracy, there were several high-profile arrests of Russian men accused of being pederasts. Since no records of men having sex with boys at that time are available, it is possible this term was used broadly and crudely to label homosexuality". The Soviet government itself said very little publicly about the change in the law and few people seemed to be aware that it existed.

In , the British communist Harry Whyte wrote a long letter to Stalin condemning the law and its prejudicial motivations. He laid out a Marxist position against the oppression of homosexuals as a social minority and compared homophobia to racism, xenophobia and sexism. A few years later in , Justice Commissar Nikolai Krylenko publicly stated that the anti-gay criminal law was correctly aimed at the decadent and effete old ruling classes, thus further linking homosexuality to a right-wing conspiracy, i.

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Tsarist aristocracy and German fascists. When Stalin came to power, homosexuality became a topic unfit for public depiction, defense or discussion. Homosexual or bisexual Soviets who wanted a position within the Communist Party were expected to marry a person of the opposite sex, regardless of their actual sexual orientation. A notable example was the Russian film director Sergei Eisenstein , who despite his homosexuality managed to survive by leading a double life, having affairs with men while married to a woman, producing films that were politically pleasing to Stalin.

After Stalin died in , he was replaced by Nikita Khrushchev , who proceeded to liberalize the Stalin era laws regarding marriage, divorce and abortion, but the anti-gay criminal law remained. The Khrushchev government believed that absent of a criminal law against homosexuality, the sex between men that occurred in the prison environment would spread into the general population as they released many Stalin-era prisoners.

Whereas the Stalin government conflated homosexuality with pedophilia , the Khrushchev government conflated homosexuality with the situational, sometimes forced, sex acts between male prisoners. Although the topic of homosexuality was practically unmentionable, some references to homosexuality could be found in Soviet sex education manuals for young people and their parents.

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These manuals were published from the early s to the early s in the hope of restricting the sexual activity of Soviet people and to raise their awareness of venereal diseases. These manuals mentioned homosexuality to prevent Soviet children and youth from engaging in it. The first Khrushchev-era sex education manual to mention homosexuality was The Youth Becomes a Man and described homosexuals as child molesters: Homosexuals go all out to gain the affection of the youngsters' society; they buy sweets and cigarettes for youngsters, tickets to the cinema, give them money, help to do home assignments and generally pretend that they unselfishly love youngsters.

However, after such preparation, they sooner or later proceed to act. Do not let them touch you! Do not be shy about reporting them to your parents or educators, do not hesitate to report such attempts aimed at you or other young men! Both parents and educators will willingly help: In , the Interior Ministry sent a secret memo to law enforcement ordering them to step up enforcement of the anti-gay criminal law.

Yet during the late s and early s, Aline Mosby, a foreign reporter in Russia at the time, attributed to the more liberal attitude of the Khrushchev government to the fact that she did see some gay couples in public and that it was not uncommon to see men waiting outside of certain theaters looking for dates with male performers. In the late s some Soviet jurists attempted to decriminalise consensual sodomy.

Two members of the committee proposed to eliminate the law penalising consensual sodomy, yet their proposal was not supported by other members of the committee. Discussions between Soviet legal scholars on the value of the anti-sodomy law continued under Brezhnev. Those legal scholars, who believed that consensual homosexuality should not be a crime, argued that it was a disease, which had to be dealt with by medical knowledge. They also contended that homosexuality was a congenital condition and therefore gay people were not guilty of being different from others. It's like the state says 'gay people are shit and you're outlaws, we will not protect you anymore," Dmitry remembered.

Dmitry saw the impact of the law reflected in the media and pop culture as well.

It was a really popular one, and the host starting talking about gay people so badly, it made me so angry. The man he is referring to is Dmitry Kiselev, whose on-camera hate speech enraged human rights activists worldwide.

He proclaimed to a cheering audience that the law wasn't enough. Direct to camera, Kiselev touted: Dmitry decided he'd work another year to save money while figuring out how to apply for asylum. That was until his boss found out he was gay. He said,'You should quit.

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You shouldn't shame us. To make ends meet while he figured out how to get out of the country, he worked remotely and did odd jobs. The community group based in New York has been around since , and is somewhat of a one-stop-shop for those both seeking sanctuary out of places they weren't safe, and those who had made it the U.

Whether it's helping people as they apply, connecting them with free lawyers, or if needed, temporary housing and affordable medical services once they arrive, they do what they can. The organization is also completely volunteer-based with no paid staff positions. Alexy Lyosha, Co-President and a former asylum seeker himself, says that it's partially due to HIV programs closing there, but also that services that do exist are corrupt because of the intolerant culture.

Sometimes they just assume it's because you are gay. Some doctors say, 'You are a faggot, and you are going to die, I am not going to save you. Or who won't get treated at all because they don't want to deal with the humiliation," Lyosha said. Russia surpassed over a million documented HIV cases last year , with the estimated total of infections being higher to include those who don't get tested.

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