The GLQ Forum HOMOSEXUAL EXISTENCE AND EXISTING SOCIALISM New Light on the Repression of Male Homosexuality in Stalin’s Russia Dan Healey Q ueer historians and activists have a peculiar relationship with the history of the Soviet Union. It is a relationship that has been shaped by Cold War politics and the rise, initially in the Anglo-American world, of the gay liberation move- ment. For activists on the left, the knowledge that the world’s first socialist state proclaimed a radical sexual politics has served as a talisman and guide. The decriminalization of male homosexuality, in the form of sodomy, in early revolu- tionary Russia was one of the sweeping changes to criminal, family, and property law that marked the coming of the Bolsheviks to power. The comprehensive clear- ing away of the tsarist regime’s religious and reactionary regulation of sexuality has been presented as the benchmark of an enlightened sexual politics. The same viewpoint interprets the Soviet government’s recriminalization of sodomy during 1933–34 as one feature of the “reactionary trend” accompanying Joseph Stalin’s rule, a degeneration from Vladimir Lenin’s (or Leon Trotsky’s) presumed legitimate socialism. 1 Our narratives also present the Soviet reversal on male homosexuality during the troubled 1930s through the prism of international relations. This per- spective draws heavily on the work of the Freudian and Marxist sex reformer Wil- helm Reich, who in 1936 published an indictment of the repression of Soviet homosexuals. 2 The antihomosexual drive was in this view a response to the sup- posed discovery of espionage networks run by Nazi Germans infiltrating homosex- ual circles in Moscow, Leningrad, and other Soviet cities. The handful of Soviet GLQ 8:3 pp. 349 – 378 Copyright © 2002 by Duke University Press GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies Published by Duke University Press