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Masculine Purity and “Gentlemen's Mischief”: Sexual Exchange and Prostitution between Russian Men, 1861-1941

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Dan Healey
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Abstract

Sexual exchanges between men in modernizing Russia can be a window on the comparatively unexplored problem of Russian masculinities. Traditional forms of mutual male intimacy occurred within the patriarchal structures of gentry and merchant households, workshops and bathhouses. Arteli of peasant bathhouse attendants engaged in “sodomy” with clients, observing customary work practices (zemliachestvo, krugovaia poruka). By the 1890s an urban sexual marketplace characterized Russia's male homosexual subculture. Sexually knowing youths and men systematically offered sex for cash to “pederasts”, or tetki, who were perceived as predominantly attracted to men. After 1917, Bolsheviks evaluated same-sex love not through a single prism but by class and national contexts. Russia's male homosexual subculture was mistrusted in part because it was a clandestine sexual market, creating suspicious dependency relationships and threatening the “purity” of “innocent” young men.

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Slavic Review , Volume 60 , Issue 2 , Summer 2001 , pp. 233 - 265
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Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2001

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References

I am grateful to Lynne Viola, who encouraged me to examine this question, and to the graduate students of the Department of History, University of Delaware, who invited me to present this research at the February 1999 Hagley Fellows conference “Private Space, Private Time, Private Parts.” Mark von Hagen and David Higgs generously criticized earlier versions of this work. Richard Taylor and Slavic Review's two anonymous referees gave entertaining, intelligent comments that sharpened the final product; any remaining faults are mine alone. The research for this article was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (Canada), the Stalin Era Research and Archives Project, University of Toronto, and the Wellcome Trust (grant no. 488182).

1. Perhaps the best historical discussion of male prostitution is Jeffrey Weeks, “Inverts, Perverts, and Mary-Annes: Male Prostitution and the Regulation of Homosexuality in England in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,” in Martin B. Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey, eds., Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past (New York, 1989); note also Peniston, W. A., “Love and Death in Gay Paris: Homosexuality and Criminality in the 1870s,” in Merrick, Jeffrey and Ragan, Bryant T. Jr., eds., Homosexuality in Modern France (Oxford, 1996).Google Scholar There is a large sociological literature on male prostitution in Anglo-American cultures, and an emerging one on men's sex work in developing nations. See, for example, West, Donald J. and Villiers, Buz de, Male Prostitution (London, 1993)Google Scholar; Jackson, Peter A., Dear Uncle Go: Male Homosexuality in Thailand (Bangkok, 1995).Google Scholar

2. A significant exception is Laura Engelstein, who has explored the regulation of sexualities in late imperial Russia in her The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-Sièck Russia (Ithaca, 1992). The pioneering cultural studies of Simon Karlinsky excavated a heritage of famous “gays” and laid out an essentialist and conservative interpretation of Russia's “gay” history. Simon Karlinsky, “Russia's Gay Literature and Culture: The Impact of the October Revolution,” in Duberman, Vicinus, Chauncey, eds., Hidden from History. In his bestselling Drugoi Peterburg (St. Petersburg, 1998), the pseudonymous Konstantin K. Rotikov uses an essentialist “homosexuality,” conflating widely diverging patterns of sex between men in St. Petersburg from 1703 to the twentieth century. Rotikov deploys a vast range of memoir gossip and legend (without attribution) to argue that homosexuality was an immutable feature of the capital's private life. For evaluations of this text from the perspective of western histories of sexualities, see Bershtein, Evgenii, “Goluboi Peterburg,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 1999, no. 1:403-6Google Scholar; and Baer, Brian James, “The Other Russia: Re-Presenting the Gay Experience,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 1, no. 1 (2000): 183-94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For some recent studies of sex in Russian society, ideology, or policy that do not explore same-sex relations (apparently because of a lack of sources) see Goldman, Wendy Z., Women, the State, and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917-1936 (Cambridge, Eng., 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lebina, N. B. and Shkarovskii, M. V., Prostitutsiia v Peterburge (Moscow, 1994)Google Scholar; Naiman, Eric, Sex in Public: The Incarnation of Early Soviet Ideology (Princeton, 1997).Google Scholar

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6. For the tsarist era, see Bernstein, Sonia's Daughters, 47-48, 52-55 (on clandestine prostitutes), 99-100, 251 (on lone prostitutes); on St. Petersburg-Petrograd-Leningrad, see Lebina and Shkarovskii, Prostitutsiia v Peterburge, 30, 42-43, 46-56, 77.

7. Lebina and Shkarovskii, Prostitutsiia v Peterburge, 90-93; note also Engel, “St. Petersburg Prostitutes,” 22. For a summary of sociological studies of the 1920s, see Golosenko, I. A. and Golod, S. I., Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniia prostitutsii v Rossii (Istoriia i sovremennoe sostoianie voprosa) (St. Petersburg, 1998), 58–88.Google Scholar On public policy and prostitution in the early Bolshevik imagination, see Waters, Elizabeth, “Victim or Villain: Prostitution in Post-Revolutionary Russia,” in Edmondson, Linda, ed., Women and Society in Russia and the Soviet Union (Cambridge, Eng., 1992)Google Scholar; Wood, Elizabeth, “Prostitution Unbound: Representations of Sexual and Political Anxieties in Postrevolutionary Russia,” in Costlow, Jane T., Sandler, Stephanie, Vowles, Judith, eds., Sexuality and the Body in Russian Culture (Stanford, 1993)Google Scholar; Frances Bernstein, “What Everyone Should Know about Sex: Gender, Sexual Enlightenment, and the Politics of Health in Revolutionary Russia, 1918-1931” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1998); Cassiday, Julie A. and Rouhi, Leyla, “From Nevskii Prospekt to Zoia's Apartment: Trials of the Russian Procuress,” Russian Review 58, no. 3 (July 1999): 413-31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8. On compensation in England, see Weeks, “Inverts,” 204; for Canada, Maynard, Steven, “'Horrible Temptations': Sex, Men and Working-Class Male Youth in Urban Ontario, 1890-1935,” Canadian Historical Review 78, no. 2 (1997): 191-235.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9. On “treating,” see Peiss, Kathy, “'Charity Girls’ and City Pleasures: Historical Notes on Working-Class Sexuality, 1880-1920,” in Snitow, Ann, Stansell, Christine, and Thompson, Sharon, eds., Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality (New York, 1983).Google Scholar

10. See, however, Healey, Dan, Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia: The Regulation of Sexual and Gender Dissent (Chicago, 2001).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11. See, for example, Poznansky, Alexander, Tchaikovsky: The Quest for the Inner Man (New York, 1991)Google Scholar; Poznansky, , Tchaikovsky's Last Days: A Documentary Study (Oxford, 1996)Google Scholar; Malmstad, John E. and Bogomolov, Nikolay, Mikhail Kuzmin: A Life in Art (Cambridge, Mass., 1999).Google Scholar For an example of a lesbian life in which relationships nourished creativity, Burgin, Diana Lewis, Sophia Parnok: The Life and Work of Russia's Sappho (New York, 1994).Google Scholar

12. Rowse's “extravaganza” (in Weeks's phrase) of contributionist pleading displeased a younger generation of scholars of sexualities with its gossip, insinuation, and absence of conceptual thinking about same-sex relations, typical of historical talk about homosexuality until the 1970s: Rowse, Alfred Leslie, Homosexuals in History: A Study of Ambivalence in Society, Literature, and the Arts (New York, 1977)Google Scholar; Weeks, Jeffrey, “Discourse, Desire and Sexual Deviance: Some Problems in a History of Homosexuality,” in Plummer, Kenneth, ed., The Making of the Modern Homosexual (London, 1981).Google Scholar For some, the appeal of Rotikov's Drugoi Peterburg lies in its contributionist bricolage, a Rowse for Russians; see Kushlina, Ol'ga, “Zelenyi krai za parom golubym …,” Novoe literaturnoe ohozrenie, 1999, no. 1:400–402.Google Scholar

13. On the emergence of the subculture in one Russian city, see Healey, Dan, “Moscow,” in Higgs, David, ed., Queer Sites: Gay Urban Histories since 1600 (London, 1999)Google Scholar; for a fuller discussion, Healey, Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia.

14. Weeks, “Inverts,” 209-10. Working-class boys in early twentieth-century Ontario accepted money and favors for sex with men but did not always view themselves as “prostitutes“: Maynard, “'Horrible Temptations,'” 212-13. Whether Britain's male homosexual subculture was indeed an exclusively upper-class phenomenon remains to be demonstrated. In late tsarist Russia, homosexual self-consciousness cut across class lines. For an example of bourgeois self-awareness, see Ushakovskii, P. V. [pseud.], Liudi srednego pola (St. Petersburg, 1908)Google Scholar; for a peasant migrant's understanding of himself as “a stepson of nature,” see Belousov, V. A., “Sluchai gomoseksuala-muzhskoi prostitutki,” Prestupnik i prestupnost': Sbornik II (1927): 309-17Google Scholar; and for the aristocracy, extracts from the diary of Grand Duke Konstantin Romanov, in Andrei Maylunas and Sergei Mironenko, A Lifelong Passion: Nicholas and Alexandra: Their Own Story (London, 1997).

15. On the reception of Wilde in Russia, see Pavlova, T. V., “Oskar Uail'd v russkoi literature,” in Levin, Iu. D., ed., Na rubezhe XIX i XX vekov: Iz istorii mezhdunarodnykh sviazei russkoi literatury (Leningrad, 1991).Google Scholar

16. Constructionist historians of sexualities do not view Anglo-American concepts of homosexuality and heterosexuality as eternal and universal, but as historically contingent and culture-bound, the product of interaction between persons who experienced samesex desire and medico-legal systems of regulation. Homosexual subcultures and identities were made possible by capitalism and urbanization that transformed social relation exships. Individuals in other contexts did not necessarily think of themselves as “homosexual” in essence. See Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. Hurley, Robert (London, 1978)Google Scholar; Weeks, Jeffrey, Sexuality and Its Discontents: Meanings, Myths and Modern Sexualities (London, 1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Stein, Edward, ed., Forms of Desire: Sexual Orientation and the Social Constructionist Controversy (New York, 1990).Google Scholar

17. Traditional mutual male intimacy in Russia resembled premodern European patterns of sexual contact between males documented in Bray, Alan, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (London, 1982)Google Scholar; Rocke, Michael, Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence (Oxford, 1996).Google Scholar

18. Jeffrey Burds, trans, and ed., “Dnevnik moskovskogo kuptsa Pavla Vasil'evicha Medvedeva, 1854-1864 gg.” (in progress). I am grateful to Burds for providing me with a transcript of the diary; references here use his transcript's pagination. The diary is held in Tsentral'nyi istoricheskii arkhiv g. Moskvy (TsIAM), f. 2330, op. 1, dd. 984, 986. For an introduction, see Kupriianov, A. I., ‘“Pagubnaia strast” moskovskogo kuptsa,” in Bessmertnyi, Iu. L. and Boitsov, M. A., eds., Kazus 1996 (Moscow, 1997).Google Scholar

19. The merchant blamed his sexual excesses on his unhappy marriage. Kupriianov proposes a “hierarchy of sexual deviation” in Medvedev's diary, with the greatest disapproval expressed for heterosexual adultery (preliubodeianie), followed in order of declining seriousness by sex with female prostitutes, mutual masturbation with males, solitary masturbation, and coitus (with women) during religious fasts. Kupriianov, “Pagubnaia strast',” 101. Kupriianov's ranking ignores anal intercourse between men, although Medvedev describes three such episodes.

20. Burds, “Dnevnik moskovskogo kuptsa,” 152.

21. For example, Golenko, V. F., “Pederastiia na sude,” Arkhiv psikhiatrii, neirologii i sudebnoi psikhopatologii 9, no. 3 (1887): 42–56 Google Scholar; Tarnovskii, V. M., Izvrashchenie polovogo chuvstva: Sudebno-psikhiatricheskii ocherk (St. Petersburg, 1885), 69–71 Google Scholar; Tarnovskii wrote about one patient: “A third ['pederast,’ as Tarnovskii labels him] particularly exploits young coachmen, travels with them, converses with them, strikes up acquaintances with them, visits coachmen's courtyards, and never had even an unpleasant confrontation. They consented to, or laughed at, his propositions, but always in the kindest fashion.” Ibid., 70.

22. So, for example, Medvedev and a male friend had a drunken sexual encounter in a secluded corner of Sokol'niki Park on the outskirts of Moscow on a July evening in 1861. Burds, “Dnevnik moskovskogo kuptsa,” 132. On outdoor sex in Moscow in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see Healey, “Moscow.“

23. N. A. Obolonskii, “Izvrashchenie polovogo chuvstva,” Russkii arkhiv patologii, klinicheskoi meditsiny i bakteriologii (1898): 1-20, esp. 15; V. M. Bekhterev, “O polovykh izvrashcheniiakh, kak patologicheskikh sochetatel'nykh refleksakh,” Obozrenie psikhiatrii, 1915, no. 7-9:1-26, esp. 9-13; Belousov, “Sluchai gomoseksuala-muzhskoi prostitutki.“

24. Burds, “Dnevnik moskovskogo kuptsa,” 144.

25. Apprentice boys risked their livelihoods if they resisted. Chelnokov, a Moscow baker, was investigated by a children's charity and its doctors in 1891, when one of his 15-year-old apprentices, complaining of a spinal condition, revealed that the baker masturbated with him. In all, six apprentices, mostly peasants, masturbated regularly with the baker. He was charged under article 993 of the criminal code (prohibiting nonpenetrative sexual abuse by persons in authority over their charges) and sentenced to two months’ confinement. TsIAM, f. 142, op. 1, d. 172 (“Delo po obvineniiu moskovskogo meshchanina Chelnokova M. A. v rastlenii podrostkov“). Documents on this case collected by jurist A. F. Koni were mislabeled as “sodomy,” see Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (GARF), f. 564, op. 1, d. 260,11. 92-100 (“Dokumental'nye materialy, sobrannye A. F. Koni; dela po obvineniiu raznykh lits v polovykh izvrashcheniiakh. Ne polnye. Kopii. 1884-1896 gg.“).

26. For the case of a “rather highly placed individual” of 65 years tried in St. Petersburg in the 1860s for luring newly hired teenaged boys into bed, with the collusion of his retinue, see V. Merzheevskii, Sudebnaia ginekologiia: Rukovodstvo dlia vrachei i iuristov (St. Petersburg, 1878), 241-45.

27. Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv (RGIA), f. 1412, op. 221, d. 54, 11. 29-37. I am grateful to Gaby Donicht for sharing this data with me.

28. Golenko, “Pederastiia na sude.“

29. Merzheevskii, Sudebnaia ginekologiia, 207-9; Tarnovskii, Izvrashchenie polovogo chuvstva, 69-73.

30. Biriukov, A. A., Eta volshebnitsa bania (Moscow, 1991), 17 Google Scholar; Rubinov, Anatolii, Sanduny: Kniga o moskovskikh baniakh (Moscow, 1990), 19.Google Scholar

31. Eve Levin concludes from ecclesiastical sources that Russian baths were desexualized space, Sex and Society in the World of the Orthodox Slavs, 900-1700 (Ithaca, 1989), 195-97. For a provocative reading of the modern bathhouse as universally feminine, see Nancy Condee, “The Second Fantasy Mother, or All Baths Are Women's Baths,” in Helena Goscilo and Beth Holmgren, eds., Russia—Women—Culture (Bloomington, 1996). Even discounting their western, and masculine, viewpoint, foreigners’ accounts contradict decorous readings of the bania, suggesting that in the village and in disreputable establishments in towns, the sexes mixed freely: Claude de Grève, Le Voyage en Russie: Anthologie des voyageurs français aux XVIIIe et XIXe siècles (Paris, 1990), 948-54; Sir N. Wraxall, A Tour through Some of the Northern Parts of Europe (n.p., 1776), 248, cited in Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex (Philadelphia, 1926), 1:31. In 1845 officials compelled by commercial pressure restated the prohibition of mixed-sex baths. RGIA, f. 1287, op. 37, ed. khr. 61, 11. 222-25, cited in I. A. Bogdanov, Tri veka peterburgskoi bani (St. Petersburg, 2000), 242-43.

32. This miniature is reproduced in Akademiia nauk SSSR, Istoriia Moskvy, 8 vols. (Moscow, 1952-59), 1:515.

33. Elite Russian men generally adopted shaving under Peter the Great; Muscovites who took up the practice before the eighteenth century were condemned for making themselves resemble women, and thus departing from the image of God. Levin, Sex and Society, 202. Archpriest Avvakum refused a request from Vasilii Sheremet'ev, governor of Kazan', that the priest bless his son, “Matvei bradobrits” (Matthew who shaves), citing his “shameful appearance” (bludonosnyi obraz). See Tikonravov, N. S., ed., Zhitie Protopopa Avvakuma (St. Petersburg, 1861), 16.Google Scholar Another variant of this passage gives bludoliubnyi obraz, and its editor argues that shaving arrived in the 1500s and stimulated condemnatory sermons based on the erotic suggestion smooth faces conveyed. See N. K. Gudzii, ed., Zhitie Protopopa Avvakuma (St. Petersburg, 1997), 76, 385. See also V Kozlovskii, Argo russkoi gomoseksualnoi subkul'tury: Materialy k izucheniiu (Benson, Vt., 1986), 21; I. S. Kon, Lunnyi svet na zare: Liki i maski odnopoloi liubvi (Moscow, 1998), 284.

34. For discussion of this incident in the context of labor migration, see Akademiia nauk SSSR, Istoriia Moskvy, 2:553.

35. An aged Moscow-region peasant told a journalist in the early 1930s: “Banshchiki [bathhouse attendants] came from three guberniias, but only from two or three districts in each, and not next door to each other, but in nests…. From time immemorial the districts that have supplied Moscow with banshchiki were Zaraiskii-Riazanskii, Tul'skii-Kashirskii, and Venerskii. Generation after generation of men and women went to Moscow for this. See, I was taken as a 10-year-old boy, just as they sent my grandfather, and father, and now our children.” Vladimir A. Giliarovskii, “Moskva i moskvichi,” in V. A. Giliarovskii, Izbrannoe v trekh tomakh (Moscow, 1960), 3:308.

36. Burds, “Dnevnik moskovskogo kuptsa,” 157. Kulizm was derived from the French cul (ass). The word culiste, meaning someone who enjoys anal intercourse, was first published in French in 1677 and was in use in bawdy verse and speech during the Enlightenment. See entry for coniste, in Claude Courouve, Vocabulaire de l'homosexualité masculine (Paris, 1985), 84-86. These words probably arrived in Russia during the eighteenth century as elite sexual culture borrowed from France. Kon, Igor’, “Istoricheskie sud'by russkogo Erosa,” in Toporkov, A. L., ed., Seks i erotika v russkoi traditsionnoi kul'ture (Moscow, 1996), 13.Google Scholar

37. Merzheevskii, Sudebnaia ginekolegiia, 239. Thirty years later, attendants in a Petersburg bathhouse were said to charge 3 to 5 rubles for similar attentions, see V M. Bekhterev, “Lechenie vnusheniem prevratnykh polovykh vlechenii i onanizma,” Obozrenie psikhiatrii 1898, no. 8:1-11. As with female prostitution, price differentials apparently indicated perceptions of value associated with the luxury or modesty of the setting, the age of the male providing sex, and the acts performed. See Bernstein, Sonia'sDaughters, 86-93.

38. Tarnovskii, Izvrashchenie polovogo chuvstva, 89.

39. Ibid., 69.

40. Thanks to his role in the medical policing of the female prostitution regime, Tarnovskii was “perhaps the most closely identified with state authority” of his colleagues. Engelstein, Keys to Happiness, 162. In the 1880s, he called for tax exemptions for brothels, proposed that soldiers should pay mandatory visits to them free of charge, and claimed brothels kept crime and immorality off the streets. His opinions shifted by the late 1890s, when he argued that clients of licensed brothels needed to be inspected for disease. See Bernstein, Sonia's Daughters, 145, 176.

41. Tarnovskii, Izvrashchenie polovogo chuvstva, 70.

42. For discussion of extortionists’ ruses, Merzheevskii, Sudebnaia ginekologiia, 252, and Koni, A. F., Na zhiznennom puti: Iz zapisok sudebnogo deiatelia. Zhiteiskie vstrechi (St. Petersburg, 1912), 1:152-56Google Scholar. Banshchiki-apprentices worked their way up a ladder of occupational divisions to become fully trained attendants at age 18 or 19; they were reportedly more content than boys in bakeries or workshops (and so perhaps disinclined to blackmail clients). Giliarovskii, “Moskva i moskvichi,” 308-12.

43. Tarnovskii, Izvrashchenie polovogo chuvstva, 70.

44. Wings first appeared in 1906 in the journal Vesy, then was issued separately in St. Petersburg in 1907 and repeatedly reissued until 1923. See Karlinsky, Simon, “Death and Resurrection of Mikhail Kuzmin,” Slavic Review 38, no. 1 (March 1979): 92-96 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; on critics of the novel and their rejection of the baths as “the bright kingdom of freedom,” see Engelstein, Keys to Happiness, 390-91. For foreign praise, Magnus Hirschfeld, Die Homosexualität des Mannes und des Weibes (Berlin, 1914), 590-91; Xavier Mayne [Edward I. Prime-Stevenson], The Intersexes: A History of Similsexualism as a Problem in Social Life ([Naples], 1908; reprint, New York, 1975), 431; for a lurid condemnation, Bernhard Stern, Geschichte der Öffentlichen Sittlichkeit in Russland (Vienna, n.d. [1907]), 2:570.

45. On American gay baths, see Chauncey, George, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (New York, 1994), 209 Google Scholar, and Les Wright, “San Francisco,” in D. Higgs, ed., Queer Sites, 170. In Paris, commercial baths with a clientele of men seeking sex together also proliferated. See Michael Sibalis, “Paris,” in D. Higgs, ed., Queer Sites, 25.

46. An anonymous denunciation of the capital's “pederasts” ca. 1890 described a procurer, Grigorii Depari/Ivanov, who brought young impecunious men together with a wealthier class of gentlemen for sexual purposes. “From 8 to 10 in the evening [in Depari's flat] you will find boys whom he uses himself or for whom he pimps. On Saturdays there are soldiers; Depari appears everywhere but acts discreetly.” V V Bersen'ev and A. R. Markov, “Politsiia i gei: Epizod iz epokhi Aleksandra III,” Risk, 1998, no. 3:112.

47. Tetki (singular, tetka) had both foreign and local resonance for the homosexual subculture. In France, tante was in use from the mid-nineteenth century to describe male prostitutes and by the end of the century to denote the homosexual man more generally. (Germans likewise used this word in this way.) Russians began to employ tetka with these specialized meanings almost simultaneously. Meanwhile, the demotic use of tetka to refer pejoratively to any middle-aged or older woman (especially in peasant contexts) added a nuance of gendered irony and ruralizing deprecation in Russia's urban homosexual milieu. For clarity in this article I use tetka to refer to men who were seen to have a predominant sexual taste for their own sex, and in this context especially to the clients of those men and boys who sold sex. For more examples of uses of tetka, see Merzheevskii, Sudebnaia ginekologiia, 93 (to denote male prostitutes in Russian cities); P. I. Chaikovskii, Dnevniki 1873-1891 (Moscow-Petrograd, 1923; reprint, St. Petersburg, 1993), 203 (referring in 1888 to tetki as “repulsive“).

48. Russians, like the French, usually used “pederasty” (pederastiia) to refer to anal intercourse between males regardless of age; a “pederast” could similarly be of any age or generation. A general term of abuse in twentieth-century popular Russian, “pederast” is often found as a synonym for “homosexual” in police and Communist Party documents. When the Politburo in December 1933 discussed recriminalizing sodomy, “pederasty” was the subject on the agenda; government jurists labeled their files on this measure “sodomy” (muzhelozhstvo), a much less coarse term, with religious and juridical resonance. Nikita Khrushchev used the term pederasts to abuse abstract artists at a 1962 exhibition in Moscow. The word (and its many harsh variants—pidar, pedik—that evolved in the gulag and prisons) now means something close to the Anglo-American “queer” or “faggot.“

49. The denunciation can be found in RGIA, f. 1683, op. 1, d. 199,11. 1-13. This document was first described in Konstantin Rotikov, “Epizod iz zhizni ‘golubogo’ Peterburga,” Nevskii arkhiv, 1997, no. 3:449-66. Rotikov presented a detailed analysis of the denunciation, withholding however its most explicit aspects. The full text was published by RGIA researcher V. V. Bersen'ev and A. R. Markov of the St. Petersburg State Academy of Culture, in “Politsiia i gei,” quotation, 109. Bersen'ev and Markov contest Rotikov's 1889 dating of the document, arguing for composition between 1890 and 1894. All further citations of the denunciation are from “Politsiia i gei.” On the significant glance, see also Tarnovskii, Izvrashchenie polovogo chuvstva, 62.

50. V P. Ruadze, K sudu! … Gomoseksual'nyi Peterburg (St. Petersburg, 1908), 105- 6, 108.

51. A sailor arrested in 1921 at a “pederastic party” in Petrograd, when asked if he realized the sexual proclivities of the other guests, replied “I don't engage in pederasty myself, but the fact that many of the guests at these parties engaged in pederasty—I knew because I saw it in their glances, conversations, and smiles.” V. M. Bekhterev, “O polovom izvrashchenii, kak osoboi ustanovke polovykh refleksov,” in I. S. Simonov, ed., Polovoi vopros v shkok i v zhizni (Leningrad, 1927), 170; see also Belousov, “Sluchai gomoseksualamuzhskoi prostitutki.“

52. Sources for Moscow point to the Boulevard Ring as the earliest and most infamous territory for male and female prostitution alike, as well as for same-sex contacts free of commercial intent. See especially Belousov, “Sluchai gomoseksuala-muzhskoi prosdtutki“; L. M. Vasilevskii and L. A. Vasilevskaia, Prostitutsiia i novaia Rossiia (Tver', 1923).

53. On 6 January 1869, a 56-year-old Dane met a young man while buying eau de cologne in this gallery. After having sex with the Dane in his flat, the young man tried to blackmail him. Merzheevskii, Sudebnaia ginekologiia, 254. Parisian galleries facilitated similar encounters, see Sibalis, “Paris,” 19.

54. Koni, Na zhiznennom puti, 154-55; Tarnovskii, Izvrashchenie polovogo chuvstva, 72.

55. Bersen'ev and Markov, “Politsiia i gei,” 109.

56. This despite official efforts to transform “traditional public spaces” like winter festivals by moving them off Nevskii Prospekt and into more easily policed locations, part of the efforts by the Directorship for the People's Temperance to cope with the surging Petersburg population. See McReynolds, Louise and Popkin, Cathy, “The Objective Eye and the Common Good,” in Kelly, Catriona and Shepherd, David, eds., Constructing Russian Culture in the Age of Revolution, 1881-1940 (Oxford, 1998), 60, 62.Google Scholar

57. Restaurant-based “clubs” or “dens” of “pederasts” were uncovered periodically, but information on these locations remains elusive. The young Chaikovskii escaped scandal when the Chautemps Restaurant was exposed in the press. Poznansky, Tchaikovsky's Last Days, 10. Another scandal forced the closure of a restaurant in approximately 1893. Ushakovskii, Liudi srednego pola, 6.

58. See Rotikov, “Epizod iz zhizni ‘golubogo’ Peterburga,” 454-55, cf. Bersen'ev and Markov, “Politsiia i gei,” 112n4. On Meshcherskii, see W. E. Mosse, “Imperial Favorite: V. P. Meshchersky and the Grazhdanin,” Slavonic and East European Review 59 (1981): 529-47.

59. Bersen'ev and Markov, “Politsiia i gei,” 109.

60. Ruadze, Ksudu!… Gomoseksual'nyi Peterburg, 55-56, 102-3.

61. Ibid., 102-3. McReynolds and Popkin single out wresding matches at the Cinizelli Circus as edifying spectacles of “masculine strength” for an elite worried about an ideal manliness crumbling under the influence of “flourishing consumer culture.” McReynolds and Popkin, “The Objective Eye and the Common Good,” 77. Marginal space in the immediate vicinity was ironically being exploited simultaneously by a consumer subculture devoted to a clandestine alternative masculinity. On temporal compartmentalization in the geographies of sexual subcultures, see Angie Hart, “(Re)Constructing a Spanish Red-Light District: Prostitution, Space and Power,” in David Bell and Gill Valentine, eds., Mapping Desire: Geographies of Sexualities (London, 1995).

62. Bersen'ev and Markov, “Politsiia i gei,” 109. The nearby Narodnyi Dom (opened 1901, later the Velikan Cinema) became another site for same-sex military-civilian liaisons, see Ruadze, Ksudu!… Gomoseksual'nyi Peterburg, 108.

63. On the proximity of these baths, Rotikov, “Epizod iz zhizni ‘golubogo’ Peterburga,” 453-54.

64. Magnus Hirschfeld, Berlins drittes Geschkcht: Schwule und Lesben um 1900 (Berlin, 1904; reprint, Berlin, 1991), 97; Mayne, Intersexes, 431.

65. Belousov, “Sluchai gomoseksuala-muzhskoi prostitutki,” 314; Bekhterev, “O polovom izvrashchenii,” 168-70; V. P. Protopopov, “Sovremennoe sostoianie voprosa o sushchnosti i proiskhozhdenii gomoseksualizma,” Nauchnaia meditsina, 1922, no. 10: 49-62.

66. Example of “homosexual” verse in praise of sailors, see Dan Healey, “Evgeniia/ Evgenii: Queer Case Histories in the First Years of Soviet Power,” Gender & History, no. 1 (1997): 92. On the reproduction of prostitution patterns in successive cohorts of English Guardsmen, see Weeks, “Inverts,” 207, 209-10. Male prostitution in the Russian army has resurfaced perhaps as a result of continued low pay. See Michel Peyrard, “Moscou: Pour manger, les soldats se prostituent,” Paris Match, no. 2573 (17 September 1998): 48-51. I am grateful to Paul Sabourin for this reference. The role of desire in these transactions cannot be discounted. A study of opinion among all ranks in the Moscow military district notes that while 70 percent of these men expressed a “negative attitude” toward homosexuality, 4 percent admitted attraction to both sexes, and 7 percent admitted the sight of a beautiful man aroused them to some degree; Evgenii A. Kashchenko, Institutsionalizatsiia seksual'noi kultury voennosluzhashchikh v Rossiiskoi armii: Avtoreferat dissertatsii na soiskanie uchenoi stepeni doktora sotsiologicheskikh nauk (Moscow, 1997), 24.

67. By 1900 bathhouse employees had ceased to perform their conventional duties in artel’ formations. Bogdanov, Tri veka peterburgskoi bani, 86.

68. Ruadze, Ksudu!… Gomoseksual'nyi Peterburg, 17-18.

69. A description of a “pornographic club” offered a composite portrait of the homosexual subculture, cataloguing male prostitution, strip shows, lectures on unnatural love, and poetry from a figure suggestive of Mikhail Kuzmin: A. I. Matiushenskii, Polovoi rynok i polovye otnosheniia (St. Petersburg, 1908), 124-28, citing an article reportedly published in Stolichnoe utro, 1907, no. 45. See also Bershtein, Evgenii, ‘“Psychopathia sexualis’ v Rossii nachala veka: Politika i zhanr,” in Levitt, M. and A., Toporkov, eds., Eros i pornografiia v russkoi kul'ture/Eros and Pornography in Russian Culture (Moscow, 1999).Google Scholar

70. Entries for 15 and 21 May 1904, in Maylunas and Mironenko, A Lifelong Passion, 231.

71. Bersen'ev and Markov, “Politsiia i gei,” 109.

72. For example, one Obrezkov, a 60-year-old civil servant in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, was described as “a lady, loves to be used by persons with large members“; Bersen'ev and Markov, “Politsiia i gei,” 114.

73. Ruadze, Ksudu!… Gomoseksual'nyi Peterburg, 55-56, 90, 105, 108,109; for further examples of the effeminized male “pervert,” see Bershtein, “'Psychopathia sexualis’ v Rossii nachala veka.“

74. On the legal debates, see Engelstein, Keys to Happiness, 57-71. On policing of the sodomy ban during this period, Healey, Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia.

75. N. S. Tagantsev and P. N. Iakobi, eds., Ugolovnoe ulozhenie 22 marta 1903 g. (Riga, 1922), 1064-65. In one proposal the intermediary category also included boys of 12 and 13.

76. LSR criminal statute: GARF, f. A353, op. 2, d. 164,11.115-16 (“Proekt svoda zakonov Russkoi revoliutsii, ch. Ill, Uchrezhdenie sudebnykh ustanovlenii, i ch. V, Ugolovnoe ulozhenie, 1918 g.“).

77. GARF, f. A353, op. 4, d. 301,1. Hob. (“Polozhenie … i proekt osobennoi chasti ugolovnogo kodeksa RSFSR, 1920 g.“).

78. On the process of codification and the modernization of the language of sex crimes, see Healey, Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia.

79. Semashko visited Hirschfeld's Berlin Institute for Sexual Research in 1923 and praised Soviet Russia's decriminalization of sodomy; his statement was not publicized in Russia. See Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen, no. 23 (1923): 211-12. Soviet psychiatrists who explored hormonal etiologies for sexual anomaly included V. P. Protopopov, E. K. Krasnushkin, and M. Ia. Sereiskii. On the appeal of Hirschfeld's hormonal theories, Chandak Sengoopta, “Glandular Politics: Experimental Biology, Clinical Medicine, and Homosexual Emancipation in Fin-de-Siècle Central Europe,“ Isis, no. 89 (1998): 445-73.

80. Psychiatrists unconvinced by Hirschfeld's model included V M. Bekhterev, N. I. Skliar, A. O. Edel'shtein, and E. A. Popov.

81. Lebina and Shkarovskii, Prostitutsiia v Peterburge; Waters, ‘Victim or Villain“; Frances L. Bernstein, “Envisioning Health in Revolutionary Russia: The Politics of Gender in Sexual-Enlightenment Posters of the 1920s,” Russian Review 57, no. 2 (April 1998): 191-217.

82. On Bolsheviks’ attitudes toward sexual pleasure and its links in their imagination with the NEP bourgeoisie, see Naiman, Sex in Public; on links between alcohol consumption, the market economy, and illicit sexuality, see Bernstein, “Envisioning Health in Revolutionary Russia.“

83. The mechanisms of these controls remain obscure. In 1925, article 171 of the RSFSR Criminal Code (forbidding “dens of vice“) was used to close Moscow's Ermitazh Restaurant and a bar also harboring female prostitutes; a 1924 survey of men with sexually transmitted infections thought to be from prostitutes suggested that the use of commodified space (hotels, “dives,” and bathhouses) for commercial sex had declined and that communal space (railway stations, streets) was increasingly used. Haustein, Hans, “Zur sexuellen Hygiene in Sowjet-Russland,” Abhandlungen aus dem Gebiete der Sexualforschung, no. 1 (1926): 20, 28.Google Scholar On the leasing of Leningrad bathhouses during NEP, see Awakumovetal, S. I., eds., Ocherki istorii Leningrada (Moscow-Leningrad, 1964), 4:493.Google Scholar

84. B. R. Gurvich, “Prostitutsiia, kak sotsial'no-psikhopatologicheskoe iavlenie (Predvaritel'noe soobshchenie),” in A. I. Miskinov, L. M. Rozenshtein, and L. A. Prozorov, eds., Sovetskaia meditsina v bor'be za zdorovye nervy: Sbornik statei i materialov (Ul'ianovsk, 1926), 66.

85. Ledeneva, Alena V., Russia's Economy of Favours: Blat, Networking and Informal Exchange (Cambridge, Eng., 1998).Google Scholar

86. Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv literatury i iskusstva, f. 232, op. 1, d. 62, 1. 460 (Diary of M. A. Kuzmin, 28 October 1924).

87. Ibid., 1. 462 (29 October 1924).

88. Belousov, “Sluchai gomoseksuala-muzhskoi prostitutki,” 313.

89. Ibid., 314.

90. Ozeretskii, N. I., “Polovye pravonamsheniia nesovershennoletnikh,” in Krasnushkin, E. K., ed., Pravonamsheniia v oblasti seksual'nykh otnoshenii (Moscow, 1927), 149-50.Google Scholar

91. Ball, Alan, And Now My Soul Is Hardened: Abandoned Children in Soviet Russia, 1918-1930 (Berkeley, 1994), 57.Google Scholar

92. One critic found that bathhouses outside Russia were “the center of homosexuality,” citing these institutions in “the civilized nations of Europe and America.” L. M. Vasilevskii, Polovye izvrashcheniia (Moscow, 1924), 38.

93. Ozeretskii, “Polovye pravonarusheniia nesovershennoletnikh,” 147.

94. It is unclear whether this was a voluntary or a paid sexual relationship. Belousov, “Sluchai gomoseksuala-muzhskoi prostitutki,” 312, 314.

95. Tsentral'nyi munitsipal'nyi arkhiv Moskvy (TsMAM), f. 819, op. 2, d. 51, 11. 57, 106ob.

96. For a mordant view of bathhouse expansion, see Bogdanov, Tri veka peterburgskoi bani, 150-75. Leningrad had 50 baths in 1928 and 64 (more spacious as a result of new investment) by 1940. Awakumov et al., eds., Ocherki istorii Leningrada, 4:502-3. In 1924, Moscow had 38 baths (three run by the city). Vsia Moskva v karmane (Moscow, 1924), 253- 55. A guide for 1940 lists 54 municipal bathhouses. Moskva: Kratkaia adresno-spravochnaia kniga (Moscow, 1940), 180-81.

97. Belousov, “Sluchai gomoseksuala-muzhskoi prostitutki,” 312, 314. These had been sites of public facilities in the tsarist era.

98. A penal psychiatrist discussing male prostitutes did not explicitly admit they used toilets in this fashion, although he implied it in referring to these public places. Ozeretskii, “Polovye pravonarusheniia nesovershennoletnikh,” 150.

99. Belousov, “Sluchai gomoseksuala-muzhskoi prostitutki,” 314. See also the February 1929 discussion by top Soviet psychiatrists and biologists of “transvestites,” “changes of sex” (peremeny pola), and the “intermediate sex” (srednii pol) as medical and social issues, in the Expert Medical Council of the Health Commissariat. GARF, f. A482, op. 25, d. 478, 11. 80-80ob., 85-87 (“Uchenyi meditsinskii sovet. Protokol 177(7) zasedaniia 8/II-1929 g.; ‘O transvestistakh,’ stenogramma prilozhennaia k protokolu“).

100. See, for example, GARF, f. A353, op. 3, d. 745 (“Dokumenty o kontrrevoliutsionnoi agitatsii monakhov Novoierusalimskogo monastyria i po obvineniiu episkopa Palladiia v rastlenii mal'chika, 1919 g.“); N. P., “Monakhi pred sudom v roli razvratitelei maloletnikh i nesovershennoletnikh,” Ezhenedel'nik sovetskoi iustitsii, 1922, no. 42:13-15; N. P., “Sviatoi otets: K predstoiashchemu protsessu ieromonakha Vissariona,” Bezbozhnik, 6 February 1927, 6; K. Petrova, “Protsess d'iakona Tkachenko. (Gor. Vladikavkaz),” Bezbozhnik, 16 October 1927, 5; M. Sheinman, Religioznost’ i prestupnost’ (Moscow, 1927), 55-56; F. U-v, “Ikh ‘kul'tura,'” Bezbozhnik, 20 December 1930, 8.

101. For early republican sodomy penalties, see M. S. Khalafov etal., eds.,Istoriia gosudarstva i prava Azerbaidzhanskoi SSR (1920-1934gg.) (Baku, 1973), 373; D. S. Karev, Ugolovnoe zakonodatel'stvo SSSR i soiuznykh respublik: Sbornik (Moscow, 1957) ,215, 433. For analysis of local forms of “sodomy,” see Durmanov, N. D., Ugolovnoe pravo. Osobennaia chast': Prestupleniia, sostavliaiushchie perezhitki rodogo byta (Moscow, 1938), 68.Google Scholar In Soviet Central Asia, Bolsheviks combined antisodomy statutes with measures drawn from the struggle against female prostitution to eradicate the keeping of bachi (dancing boy entertainers and prostitutes). For the most comprehensive scholarly view of the bachi, see Baldauf, I., Die Knabenliebe in Mittelasien: Bačabozlik (Berlin, 1988).Google Scholar

102. See, for example, GARF, f. A353, op. 3, d. 745, 1. 45 (protocol of the trial of Bishop Palladii, 22 October 1919), in which prosecutor Petr A. Krasikov argued that “to all who know physical laws it is obvious that for a monk, boys serve as women” and the “dark masses” had to be shown that the “depraved” religious environment was a menace to young men. Cf. a Vologda prosecutor's claims in a similar case that “among the mass of peasants and workers this illness [homosexuality] is not widespread, but is rather completely alien and incomprehensible to them” and that teenaged boys seduced by clerics were “crippled morally and spiritually for life.” The same prosecutor noted with satisfaction that one “victimized” youth had later started a sexual relationship with a widow. N. P., “Monakhi pred sudom,” 14.

103. GARF, f. A482, op. 25, d. 478, 1. 86. Male femininity could be broached as a consequence of Central Asian boy-prostitution. Thus the “unfortunate bachi of Turkestan,” biologically unquestionably male, “were dressed in feminine clothes and spoiled forever” by class enemies. By contrast, these experts spoke indulgently about Russian women of the “masculinized type” (maskulizirovannyi tip). See Healey, Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia.

104. On measures to deal with “social anomalies” in the first Five-Year Plan, see G. A. Bordiugov, “Sotsial'nyi parazitizm ili sotsial'nye anomalii? (Iz istorii bor'by s alkogolizmom, nishchestvom,prostitutsiei i brodiazhestvom v 20-30e gody),“Istoriia SSSR, 1989,no. 1:60-73. Evidence from Leningrad archives for the experience of female prostitutes under these measures is presented in Lebina and Shkarovskii, Prostitutsiia v Peterburge, 152-58. For urban social cleansing as a factor in Stalinist terror, see Shearer, David, “Crime and Social Disorder in Stalin's Russia: A Reassessment of the Great Retreat and the Origins of Mass Repression,” Cahiers du Monde russe et soviétique 39, no. 1-2 (1998): 119-49Google Scholar; Hagenloh, Paul, “'Socially Harmful Elements’ and the Great Terror,” in Fitzpatrick, Sheila, ed., Stalinism: New Directions (London, 2000).Google Scholar

105. See “Iz istorii Ugolovnogo kodeksa: ‘Primerno NAKAZAT’ etikh Merzavtsev,'” Istochnik, 1993, no. 5-6:164-65, citing ArkhivPrezidenta Rossiiskoi Federatsii, f. 3, op. 57, d. 37,11. 25-26.

106. GARF, f. 1235, op. 141, d. 1591, cf. 11. 1, and 5-6 (“Proekt postanovleniia VTsIK i SNK RSFSR. ‘Ob ugolovnoi otvetsrvennosti za muzhelozhstvo’ 19.I.1934-20.II.1934“). I am grateful to David Shearer for this reference. As late as 28 February 1934, the Iagoda draft mentioning prostitution and public sex was approved by the Central Soviet Executive Committee and the Council of People's Commissars of the Russian Republic; on this date it was sent to the Russian Republic Commissariat of Justice and the USSR and Russian Supreme Courts. One of these bodies probably suggested dropping these descriptive elements. Soviet sex crime law had two variants: a minimalist, forensic medical language used in the codes of the European republics of the USSR, and a descriptive, ethnographic language for “crimes constituting survivals of primitive custom” applied in the southern and eastern Soviet republics. Jurists probably argued that male prostitution and public homosexual acts could be punished without resort to descriptive language; they would have criticized the inconsistency of outlawing male but not female prostitution.

107. For a discussion of the domestic and international context of the Stalin antisodomy law, see Healey, Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia.

108. Sodomy case records (in most cases, consisting of sentencing documents summarizing the proceedings) of the Moscow city court for 1935-1941 are held in TsMAM. The names of all the defendants have been altered to preserve their anonymity. I am indebted to Julie Hessler whose suggestions assisted me in finding these records. Sexual barter was also present in casual heterosexual relations of the time; see, for example, Lebina and Shkarovskii, Prostitutsiia v Peterburge, 77-85.

109. TsMAM, f. 819, op. 2, d. 11,11. 238-45.

110. Ibid, 1.242.

111. The city court gave Anisimov a (comparatively lenient) three-year prison term; Brodskii got five years, the maximum for consensual sodomy. (No charges of extortion were laid.) On appeal to the Russian Supreme Court, Brodskii's sentence was reduced to three years, accepting his defense advocate's claim that the younger man “had been drawn into crime by” Anisimov and did not deserve a longer sentence. Here perhaps was a scrap of sympathy for the “prostitute” as less responsible for his actions. TsMAM, f. 819, op. 2, d. 10,11. 297-99.

112. Cf. TsMAM, f. 819, op. 2, d. 11, 11. 238-45 (1935); d. 10, 11. 283-85 (1935); d. 30,11. 41-47 (1938); d. 51,11. 1-132 (1941).

113. That is, bytovoe razlozhenie, the classic Bolshevik euphemism for personal conduct incommensurate with party membership. In this context “bytovoe” meant “personal life,” indicating that side of existence regarded as insignificant, except when it produced excesses such as Siniakov's. The euphemism often concealed alcoholism or disorderly heterosexual relations.

114. TsMAM, f. 819, op. 2, d. 25, 11. 128-29. The sailors’ surnames have been replaced with letters to preserve their anonymity.

115. In 1934, he met an artist in the stables of the Moscow Circus and lured him into posing nude for photographs and into bed. In 1936, in an encounter not without rich ironies, at the House of Unions (Dom soiuzov, the former House of the Nobility and the scene that year of the show trial of Grigorii Zinov'ev and Lev Kamenev), Siniakov made the acquaintance of “Soso, a participant in a festival of Georgian Art” and took him home to bed. Also in the same year he met a sea cadet at Mosfil'm Studios, with the same result.

116. TsMAM, f. 819, op. 2, d. 25,1. 130. Unfortunately, the diary and album are not in the archive.

117. Ibid., 11. 128,130.

118. Visionary planners imagined workers spending their free time becoming just like intellectuals: “in the library, the museum, studying, in the gymnasium or sports field, at mass festival promenades, at the popular music theater, art gallery or movies.” Few of these activities were private or solitary. See Clark, Katerina, Petersburg: Crucible of Cultural Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), 253.Google Scholar

119. Legal medicine in Russia made a weak effort to domesticate European techniques for detecting traces of “passive pederasty” on the anus of the sodomite. Merzheevskii and Tarnovskii long remained the national authorities in this arcane science. In the 1960s to furnish evidence for police, forensic medics developed “sphincterometry” (sfinkterometriia) to detect “homosexual” muscle control, and chemical analysis of the penis of the so-called “active partner.” I. G. Bliumin and L. S. Gel'fenbein, “Ob odnom diagnosticheskom priznake pri ekspertize polovykh sostoianii muzhchin,” in Voprosy travmatologii, toksikologii, skoropostizhnoi smerti i deontologii v ekspertnoi praktike. Vypusk 3 (Moscow, 1966); 1. G. Bliumin, “O nekotorykh funktsional'nykh priznakakh gomoseksualizma,” in D. D. Fedotov, ed., Voprosy seksopatologii (Moscow, 1969).

120. Ruadze, K sudu!… Gomoseksual'nyi Peterburg, 3-5, 113-17.