#lgbt ussr

[noonewilleverknowistealkneecaps]

Hey, I've been following your Soviet Holmes art for a few… months? I don't know. Anyway, just wanted to say that I absolutely love the way you do this. I love this show and your art is like a breath of fresh air about these old show. Thank you for lighting up this part of Tumblr with your art, this adaptation doesn't have that many followers and fans, but I'm absolutely happy we have you ❤️

And i’m afraid i didn’t answer for a few months as well - for that im sorry. but! Oh wow, i didn’t realise I’ve been sharing holmes art for so long, thats cool, and you’re cool for this interest methinks🫵.

Im boutta jump around my room, jolly manner, for many of you are sharing the same braincell with me. I’m 100% yes for bringing something new to old shows: new perspectives, theories, lgbt takes or whatnot (that it lacks tbh, especially soviet media). It so exciting!! i mean!! showing well known narratives and characters from other sides and bringing (hopefully warm) nostalgia to those who love them old movies as much as you do.

Not no mention that soviet Holmes movie is one of THE classics in ussr cinema, it is shown every new year on tv after all. And with all that, i’m furious that it doesn’t appear to have much fanart or fanfics (as a mainstream!!). And with this treatment, imagine all the “coded” russian literature and other shows, man they are so untouched. Looking at russian etc., artists meaningfully for not having a cult of soviet johnlock already bc IT’SRIGHT THERE PEOPLE, BREAK FREE FROM CENSORSHIP AT ONCE, BE FREE, BE PROUD, SHARE, EXPLORE, RECYCLE.

My point is, i really want soviet media and old movies in general to see the light of the sun again, be explored in such tasty, tasty ways. I want to savour them ravishing contexts. Let us fester on our nostalgia. I know, for now i share some pretty straightforward and rather shallow interpretations, for now its just “lol, gay dads, adorable” but theres so much more deeper things in my brain(it is there!! I promise!!!) id like to share sometime soon.

Iuhhhhhhh, sorry, back to the message im answering to! THANK YOU SO MUCH, FOR TEXTING THIS AND TRANSPORTING THESE KIND WORDS TO ME BRAIN, MEANS THE WORLD AND BOOSTS MY INSPIRATION A TON!!!! I actually wanted to have asks for so long, its great to finally communicate with fans of my fav stuff, bc comments dont seem to be in favour on this app.

Anyway, you made me too emotional and you know too much now, let me eat you at once, dear commenter

[mylimoji]

history understander has logged on

[zarya-zaryanitsa]

Stalinist attitudes towards homosexuality and the events surroudning criminalization of homosexuality in Soviet Union in 1934 - excerpts from professor Dan Healey’s book „Russian homophobia from Stalin to Sochi”

In the same chapter I analyze the Soviet return to a ban on “sodomy” in 1933-34. It was a Stalinist measure, proposed by the security police and backed with relish by Stalin and his Politburo. Stalin personally edited the new penal article. This was the moment when the Soviet state adopted a modern anti-homosexual politics, the birth of modern Russian political homophobia. (…)

On September 15, 1933, deputy chief of the OGPU (secret police) Genrikh Yagoda proposed to Stalin that a law against “pederasty” was needed urgently. Stalin and Yagoda used the crude term pederastiia to discuss male homosexuality; but government lawyers revived the tsarist term muzhelozhstvo (sodomy) for the published law that was eventually adopted in March 1934. Yagoda reported that in August-September 1933, OGPU raids had been conducted on circles of “pederasts” in Moscow and Leningrad, and other cities of the Soviet Union. Yagoda wrote that these men were guilty of spying; they had also “politically demoralized various social layers of young men, including young workers, and even attempted to penetrate the army and navy.” From a recent collection of FSB archive documents of political cases against young Communists, it is clear that during the early 1930s, the secret police were obsessed with detecting counterrevolutionary moods among young people. Stalin forwarded Yagoda’s letter to Politburo member Lazar Kaganovich, noting that “these scoundrels must receive exemplary punishment” and directing a law against “pederasty” should be adopted. In the months that followed, Yagoda the secret policeman steered its passage through the various legislative drafts. (…)

When in mid-September 1933 Yagoda wrote to Stalin, recommending the adoption of a formal law against sodomy, he apparently cited a figure of 130 arrests of “pederasts” for the operations in “Moscow and Leningrad.” According to Ivanov, the archives of the St. Petersburg FSB reveal that during August-September 1933, 175 men were arrested on grounds of homosexual relations in Leningrad alone. The raids on “pederasts” continued and probably expanded to the principal “regime” cities, including Kharkov and Kiev. It appears that somewhere inside the central secret police machinery, an order originated in late July or early August 1933 to begin arrests of “pederasts” known to the authorities on their card-indexes either as “anti-social” or “declassed” elements, or as a security threat with international dimensions. (…)

In the 1993 release of correspondence between Yagoda and Stalin leading to the sodomy ban, one other significant document was published from the same file in the Presidential Archive. It is a sixteen-page letter to Stalin, from a homosexual British Communist, Harry O. Whyte (1907-60), an ex­ patriate journalist living in Moscow who loved a man who was a Soviet citizen. His Soviet lover was arrested sometime during late 1933 or early 1934. The release of the Whyte letter said little about its provenance and the author. It was typical of the 1993 publication that this document also appeared without commentary, but was labeled “Humor from the Special Collections” by archivists or editors who failed to show any historical empathy or intellectual curiosity.

Whyte, who worked for the English-language Moscow Daily News, wrote to Stalin, in May 1934, asking him to justify the new law. The journalist boldly explained why it violated the principles of both Marxism and the Soviet revolution. He argued that persecution of the law-abiding homosexual was typical of capitalist regimes and fascist ones: Nazi Germany’s “racial purity” drive was just the most extreme example of the push in both systems for “labor reserves and cannon fodder.” “Constitutional homosexuals, as an insignificant portion of the population . . . cannot present a threat to the birth rate in a socialist state.” Their position was analogous to that of other unjustly persecuted groups: “women, colored races, national minorities” and the best traditions of socialism showed tolerance of the relatively insignificant number of naturally occurring homosexuals in the population. He asked Stalin, “Can a homosexual be considered a person fit to become a member of the Communist Party?” In a revealing reaction, Stalin scrawled across the letter, “An idiot and a degenerate. To the archives.” Whyte got a blunt answer to his question: he was expelled from the Communist Party; he hastily left the Soviet Union for England in 1935. (…)

The dictator turned to his cultural spokesman Maxim Gorky, to explain the law’s rationale for Soviet and European readers. Gorky wrote an article that appeared in Izvestiia and Pravda on May 23, 1934, and later in a German-language socialist newspaper in Switzerland, in which he compared healthy Soviet youth to the degenerate youth of Nazi Germany. “Destroy the homosexuals - and fascism will disappear” he concluded, propounding the genocide of a social group on the grounds of sexuality. Later in 1936, People’s Commissar of Justice Nikolai V. Krylenko gave a speech to the central Soviet legislature in which he explained that the law was necessary because homosexuals were not healthy workers but “a declassed rabble, or the scum of society, or remnants of the exploiting classes.”

[socialismforall]

"Lavender & Red (Parts 10-12)" (2004) by Leslie Feinberg. LGBTQ+ History Meets Socialist History.

[detectiveangel]

it's an easy moment to miss in goncharov (1973)'s rowdy russian cafe-bar sequence, but these two women dancing with each other are definitely girlfriends. mr. scorsese, the lgbtq community thanks you,

[qqueenofhades]

Y'all ever just see a post that is shaped like a hornet's nest with a giant sign reading KICK ME, and oh god, you want to kick it SO BAD but you know it would be a bad idea? But you still want to?

Since that is me right now. Oy.

[wallisninety-six]

[TRANSCRIPTION / ID]:

“Birth control information is available at any medical consultation center, and abortions have been legalized since 1955... Abortions are permitted to prevent their taking place outside of hospitals, and because it is felt that the question is one for individuals and families to decide on their own.”

- A Visit to the Soviet Union, Part I: Women of Russia (1962)

Where the hell did the US go wrong that now American women & people who menstruate in the 2020s, now have less bodily autonomy/freedom than a Russian woman in the 1960s?

[alphabet-is-a-sheep]

Under communism, pride will be year-round and secret police will send straight people to gulags, call that the KGBTQ+ /j

[delicehm]

In soviet history there was a period it was believed that the big part of fascism is homosexuality and you can't beat fascism without getting rid of gays. The only reason why being gay was legal at first is because it's forbidence was there before and made by Empire they wanted to abolish and Lenin being, apparently, a much nicer(still not exactly n i c e) guy than Stalin *Le sigh* why am I not surprised by it?

PS, I'm not westerner, I'm from post-soviet country, I take interest in history(mostly pre-annexation-by-RI, but after it too), I don't support capitalism. I don't try to put shade on USSR, it did it pretty well itself

[txttletale]

I hope you don’t mind me asking, but how could someone like you, who otherwise has such based opinions, be a fan of Stalin? How do you reckon with his crimes? Especially when Trotskyism is right there for you to follow instead?

i'm not a 'fan' of stalin--i don't consider myself a 'fan' of any historical person. i would not even consider myself a 'fan' of people whom i admire, who have seriously influenced my thinking with their theory (e.g. lenin). and for much the same reason i am not a 'fan' of stalin i feel no need to reckon with 'his' crimes--he was just one person. stalin neither 'perpertrated the purges' nor 'starved ukraine' nor 'industrialized the USSR' nor 'defeated nazism'. he would have had to be a very busy man to execute all those folks and eat all that grain and mine all that coal and kill all those fascists on his own!

i think inasmuch as stalin personally influenced policy in the USSR, he mostly did so for the worse (e.g., encouraging a lot of the social reaction of the 30s in regards to LGBT and women's rights and national minorities, standing by lysenko long after it became clear that his theories were bullshit) -- where he did so for the better, it was usually because he recognised the value of adopting the positions of someone who was a better and more capable theorist. so i don't care for the lionization of the man that goes on in some circles.

however, i'm not interested in condemning him as some cartoonish supervillain either. if you have gotten the impression that i am a 'fan' of stalin, it is likely because i refuse to repeat anticommunist propaganda about how he killed One Gazillion People, because i sharply shut down anybody i see trying to propagate the fascist double genocide myth, because i think that the positive achievements of the USSR in the 1930s and 1940s--improving the lives of millions, performing one of the fastest industrializations in history, defeating German fascism--are impressive and laudable and refusing to learn from them because of a fear of 'stalinism' (something which i don't think meaningfully exists or ever did) is misguided and counterproductive, and because i think that the failures of that period are better understood as the results of the legacy of russian chauvinism and of the strain on soviet political systems caused by the civil war and wwii rather than the liberal conception of history where stalin, god-emperor of russia, unilaterally decided to Be Evil because he was a Sicko

as for why i'm not a trotskyist, i've covered that here. i simply don't think that any of trotsky's critiques were useful to anybody except the US empire, i think most of trotsky's theoretical positions are wrong, and i've had nothing but deeply deeply negative interactions with trotskyist organizations in the real world.

[workingclasshistory]

On this day, 11 April 1945, as US forces approached, the inmate resistance seized control of Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany. However, when the Allies took control of the concentration camps, some of those interned for homosexuality were not freed but were required to serve out the full term of the sentences they had received under the homophobic Nazi penal code. Thousands of LGBT+ people were interned in concentration camps, most made to wear a pink triangle. Many of them were subjected to medical experiments, castrated, or murdered. After “liberation,” US army regulations established that, while most Holocaust survivors should be released from concentration camps, “criminals with a prison sentence still to serve will be transferred to civil prisons.” Gay and bisexual men, and trans women had been convicted under paragraph 175 of the criminal code, which had been strengthened by the Nazis, and were therefore considered common criminals. Homosexuality was also against the law at that time in Allied countries, including the US, the UK, and the USSR. One prisoner, Hermann R, who was detained at Landsberg Fortress, southwest of Dachau, joined liberation celebrations. But two weeks later, A US military commissioner told him: “Homosexual – that’s a crime. You’re staying here!” US occupation authorities kept the Nazified paragraph 175 on the books, and in the first four years after the end of the war, around 1,500 men per year were arrested under it. Later, West Germany kept it as well and convicted over 50,000 men before it was finally revoked in 1969. East Germany on the other hand reverted to the pre-Nazi paragraph 175, and convicted some four thousand men before revoking it in 1968. LGBT+ people were not recognised as victims of the Holocaust and had their pensions deducted for the time they spent interned in concentration camps, with most never receiving any compensation. More: https://stories.workingclasshistory.com/article/11244/liberation-of-buchenwald https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=607046051468614&set=a.602588028581083&type=3

[hussyknee]

it’s rare to find a sinhalese person (online atleast) who is supportive of tamil self-determination. genuine question: among leftist circles in sri lanka, how common is such a stance?

I don't know whether I'm a reliable source to answer this question because I'm very jaded about this in general. A couple of days ago, someone on the Sri Lanka Reddit started up discourse about Maitreyi Ramakrishnan's choice to reject identifying with the country that tried to genocide her people, which I'm still chewing wire about. I'm a very isolated person with a very small social circle of like-minded leftist friends. They're mostly not SinBud and anti SinBud nonsense, but none of them are Tamil and I'm the one who really convinced them about Eelam I think. The people I learned from, who are out there doing the work of building inter-ethnic dialogue and overturning Sinhalese propaganda, might have a more hopeful view.

Thing is, there's no one "leftist" faction here because "left" doesn't mean the same thing as it does in the West. The Rajapaksas' party SLPP is socialist, a legacy of their ancestor the SLFP who was the party aligned with the USSR. They and their voters and their saffron terror acolytes (Buddhist priesthood) are all for public infrastructure they can rob blind and central government they can use to crush minorities, and build on the nationalist fervour of genocidal Sinhalese Buddhism that's served both major parties independence. There's quasi-communists, descendants of the ethnonationalist Marxist JVP that rose in opposition to the class corruption of ethnonationalist USSR-aligned socialist SLFP and enthonationalist US-aligned neoliberal UNP. They've since distanced themselves from their ethnic myopia, possibly due to suffering much of the same state terrorism as minorities via militarisation and policies like the draconian Prevention of Terrorism Act. They're the most vocal about the abolition of the executive presidency, the defunding of military and police, and restructuring and executing the long-mismanaged socialist infrastructure. These are usually the working class and university students, but their base has been growing in other demographics too, since we "held our noses and voted" for the Yahapalana government in 2015 and it ended up fucking us over. But despite their sympathy with the suffering of Tamils and Muslims and favouring the devolution of power, most still cling to the idea that Sinhalese majoritarianism is a fair result of democracy.

The kind of pro-LGBT, anti-racist, feminist liberals that would pass muster with the western left otoh, are a minority of urban, English-speaking professionals. Their panacea for enthofascism is voting for the neoliberal party, whose idea of reducing corruption and increasing efficiency is privatizing everything, are against racism because it's bad for tourism, and coasts on the promise of never actively feeding ethnosupremacy, even if they won't do anything about it either. Both these groups hate each other but are equally deeply uncomfortable with if not entirely resistant to the idea that the North and East are Tamil lands colonized by the Sinhalese. Both groups are aware of the corruption and complicity of the Buddhist priesthood and are prepared to do exactly nothing about it.

What I'm trying to say is that Sinhalese Buddhist ethnosupremacy is baked in to the Sri Lankan political fabric. "Left" means jack shit when it comes to whether Tamils have rights, in much the same way that the western left agrees on everything except Palestine. It's a political no man's land everyone tries not to look at.

The fundamental problem is that Sinhalese people who know enough about 1958, 1983, or the full scope of genocide perpetrated against Tamils during the last push of the war, let alone all 26 years of it, are very much in the minority. It takes a particular education to understand that "Sri Lanka" is a post-colonial invention that took over from "Ceylon", which was nothing but a construct for the ease of British administration. As far as I know, this education is confined to activist organizations and whoever followed my sociology program. So my kind of anarchist leftism that calls the war a Tamil genocide with their whole chest and the priesthood saffron terrorists and recognises Eelam is, afaik, vanishingly small.

To be honest, I never really questioned the propaganda and narrative we've been spoon fed myself until I went to Canada when I was 23 to complete my anthro degree (became disabled and dropped out after). One thing that struck me was how racist the Sinhalese diaspora was. I was raised SinBud, my school didn't admit any non-Sinhalese, half my uncles were in the military, but these people that had left the country decades ago still hated Tamils and Muslims in a way that nobody else I knew did. I wondered whether this was what it had been like when it had all started; whether this hatred that seemed to have been preserved in amber was a true taste of what had ignited Black July. Suddenly the attitude of the Tamil diaspora towards the Sri Lankan government and Sinhalese people didn't seem so unreasonable.

Then, later in the same uni term, I went to an art exhibition of a white artist who travelled the world collecting information about their genocides and made art about them, and found a painting depicting Sri Lankan Tamils in 2008. Promptly had a meltdown. Went to the lady and told her tearfully that it was all propaganda, we didn't really hate Tamils, not even my uncles in the army hated Tamils, it was a war, the LTTE had terrorized us for my whole lifetime. Bless the woman, she didn't fight me, just let me cry at her and patted my hand and pretended to take me seriously. This made it easier for me to really think about what I knew once I'd stopped wailing and stamping. It prompted a years-long self-interrogation and fact finding that made me unearth how much brainwashing had been done to us by everyone, from our families to our school textbooks to news media. It's like the air we breathed was propaganda. And I still didn't know a fraction of what life had been like for Tamils (or Muslims) and the scope of atrocities perpetrated by the Sinhalese until I began my Society and Culture degree at the Open University when I was 30. The first year textbooks were only broadstrokes facts, but at last I found out about Gnananth Obeysekera, Prageeth Jeganathan, Stanley Thambaiya, Malithi DeAlwis. Their work on nation-making, ethnicity, historical revisionism, genocide and ethnic conflict and state terrorism...everything I should have been taught as a child. The chapters on the rapes and murders and shelling and war crimes and IDP camps were..indescribable. That was what properly radicalised me about Tamil self-sovereignty, because there's clearly no possible way the Tamil people will ever be safe and safeguarded under a Sinhalese majoritarian government.

I had to drop out of that programme too because of my health. But during the mass protests against the government in 2022, I learned even more about Tamil indigeneity, the extent of JR Jayawardena's crimes, and the persecution of Marxists and victims of the '71 and '89 insurrections. So much of the protests and their encampments were directed and galvanized by social media, that organised online and in-person lectures, teach-outs, and live discussions that anyone and everyone could attend right alongside the protests. I've never seen that kind of truly democratized, free, egalitarian civic education and discourse before. That was the very first time I saw academics, survivors, refugees and human rights activists being given a respectful platform, the masses hearing firsthand accounts from people of the North and East and witnesses of Black July. April to July 2022 was a truly golden bubble of time where I saw people finally start listening, believing, and challenging all their convictions. It was the closest we ever came to realising the hope that things could be different; that we could, as a society, understand how Sinhalese ethnosupremacy had been the black rot killing this country from the first, stop being racist Sinhala-first cunts and actually hold any of these murderers accountable.

Teach us to hope, I guess.

But I suppose it's no small thing that I learned about the Tamil resistance and struggle and taught all my friends about it. I'm sure they're informing their own circles in small ways too. These tendrils are hard to see, but they exist and grow. Especially with the fall of the Rajapaksas and their Bhaiyya contingent, more people can see ethnosupremacy for the grift that it is, and the younger generations are less defensive, more willing to listen and eager for justice and change. So I guess the answer is: not very common, but less uncommon than it used to be.

[icarusxxrising]

// long ramble TLDR just me discussing how I found my politics at the beginning

When I was a baby leftist the final push for me into anarchism wasn't when I learned what anarchy actually was, it was 1 event leading to a culmination of recognizing one of the biggest problems in social and economic systems was people having power over each other.

When I first got into leftism there was nothing on Anarchism when I tried to lookup "beginner leftist books". It was The Communist Manifesto, State and Revolution, The ABCs of Socialism, etc. Nothing about Anarchism though.

I tried to connect to Communism through reading and content creators but it couldn't stick for me. Not to say I'm not a communist now but my communism is different, and more inherent to my Anarchism. A lot of communist creators I watched talk were very intelligent on the system and helped me realize some positives, but they never could talk about the negatives of past communist ideologies.

When people addressed genuinely negative things that communist regimes did, like their treatment of disabled people or the genocide campaigns, they responded with facts about literacy rates going up. Obviously something like literacy rates going up IS a positive that should be addressed, but they could never just say "Yeah that was fucked up, we don't condone that bullshit, here's how we are going to stop that from happening". (Hell a ton of communists idolize and have pfps of some of the dudes that did horrible shit).

Even if I disagree I'll respect a communist who will say "These regimes did xyz fucked up shit, We can do better and learn from this fucked up shit tho", and I have met some that do that, but I couldn't click into the communism being fed to me because it once again felt like blind worship and just redoing the past rather than striving for something that would fit our modern society.

Ironically the first time I thought "Power corrupts people always" was when I found out TST founders were gross and Fascistic. I was getting into Satanism and was excited by the idea of TST fighting for religious freedoms within the system (lib moment), and how they were gay friendly and had posts about respecting lgbt ppl unlike COS who just said summarized "who cares what you feel about them as long as no one tells you you can't do that :)".

But when I found out about Queer Satanic and actually dove into the history of TST it was kinda this Camel Straw moment. I was angry I had supported a shitty organization and I was angry that something that could be good was controlled by shitty people who could just do fuck all bc they had power. It made me realize that as long as there was a person in power over others that there would be problems. It made me think of my childhood and how when parents have complete authority over their children it causes harm more often than not just by the nature of Exploitation that comes with holding power.

I didn't know what Anarchism was yet or that it was a real leftist ideology, I just thought it meant Chaos and Warmonger, but I took the steps into it without knowing just from the realization I had.

When I did find out about Anarchism it clicked for me. A style of communism and workers unions that won't hold power over individuals. And then I just began to learn more and it makes sense for me. It doesn't matter how many times other people told me it was unrealistic, my brain can conceive Anarchism better than systems that call for few people to hold power over entire populations.

Too be fair, I've always had anarchistic tendencies growing up, but once I found it the pieces just fell into place.

* This isn't for debating if you come into my comments with some USSR bullshit I'll just tell you to walk somewhere dangerous and block you *

[zarya-zaryanitsa]

„If USSR was around today it would be progressive with LGBT rights”, my dear, USSR is literally the source of contemporary Russian approach to LGBT issues.

[dangermousie]

We interrupt fandom content to inform you that today, Russia’s Supreme Court, in accordance with the case brought by the Russian Ministry of Justice, declared “LGBT Movement” an extremist organization. It’s now banned and you face criminal penalties for any relationship to it or use of its “symbols.” We all know how this is going to go.

They held it as a closed session, did not allow representatives of defendant in, and the representatives of Ministry of Justice arrived in masks.

In you think this is insane and don’t believe me, if you can read Russian or use Google translate, here is one of the mentions about it: https://twitter.com/mediazzzona/status/1730185749109047638

That’s all I got.

FYI, the Soviet Criminal Code gave you serious jail time for gay sex. Clearly they are indeed going back to the USSR in every possible way.

[the-ind1gen0us-jude4n]

American democracy is horrible, we all know that. But it always makes me laugh when Americans praise foreign brutal totalitarian regimes. Not only are they technically supporting genocide, but their opinions would change very quickly if they lived in that country, or found out what is really involved in those horrific regimes.

Tankies and the western left need to realise how good they have it here in the west for freedom of expression or any other kind of freedom. If you were to fight for "Social Justice" anywhere else, your head would be on the chopping block. You're "communist" ideas have also been tried before, and no, they don't work.

It's also worth mentioning how intolerant the USSR and the eastern block was for the LGBT community and other minorities (Including Jews). Being gay was punishable for 5 years hard labour under Stalin.

The west is far from perfect, but I'd rather live here than literally anywhere else.