Lenin Decriminalized Homosexuality? In *1922* ?!? Well Before The European "Democracies"!!!?????

[Smarmie Doofus]

So sez wikipedia:

>>>>The Soviet Union under Vladimir Lenin decriminalized homosexuality in 1922, long before many other European countries. The Soviet Communist Party effectively legalized no-fault divorce, abortion and homosexuality, when they abolished all the old Tsarist laws and the initial Soviet criminal code kept these liberal sexual policies in place.[42] Lenin's emancipation >>>>>
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homophobia

Is that why they ( and the USA ) tried to overthrow him?

Or PART of why?

Some knowledgeable souls could fill me in on this.

I never heard of it.

Bourgeois revisionism? Or commie propaganda?

[DetlefK]

1. Nobody tried to overthrow Lenin.

First there was WWI, then the Roaring 20s (which Russia remembers as years of civil-war, famine and strife, with millions of Russians dead), and in 1924 he already died and Stalin schemed and murdered his way to succession.

There was a Red Scare in Europe (which motivated Hitler to enter politics), but AFAIR no effort to attack/sabotage the Soviet Union.

[Smarmie Doofus]

2. So... none of the following happened?

>>>>The Western Allies also expressed their dismay at the Bolsheviks. They were worried about (1) a possible Russo-German alliance, (2) the prospect of the Bolsheviks making good their threats to assume no responsibility for, and so default on, Imperial Russia's massive foreign loans and (3) that the communist revolutionary ideas would spread (a concern shared by many Central Powers). Hence, many of these countries expressed their support for the Whites, including the provision of troops and supplies. Winston Churchill declared that Bolshevism must be "strangled in its cradle".[12] >>>>

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Civil_War

[DetlefK]

3. Ok. That was my bad. I didn't know that they meddled in the civil-war. But:

But I don't see any evidence that they CARED ABOUT THE RIGHTS OF HOMOSEXUALS either.

>> The Allies became concerned at the collapse of the Eastern front and the loss of their Tsarist autocracy ally to communism and there was also the question of the large amounts of supplies and equipment in Russian ports, which the Allies feared might be commandeered by the Germans or the Bolsheviks.

"Oh No, the Communists have toppled our russian ally in the midst of the biggest war Europe has ever seen! We must stop them before they give the homosexuals even more rights!"

[Smarmie Doofus]

4. Oh.... they "meddled" all right; big time.

We'd (USA) call it "war", "aggression", "expansionism" blah, blah, blah..... if we weren't the ones aggressing and expanding. As in this case.

But I'm more interested in the apparent anomaly of the Bolsheviks.... those evil demons of western history and imagination... being way out in front of the "West" where it comes to individual freedom.... or as we call them in this era: the "cultural issues". Three examples of which: right to divorce, right to abortion, right to exercise sexual preference.

>>>But I don't see any evidence that they CARED ABOUT THE RIGHTS OF HOMOSEXUALS either. >>>>

Well that's what I'm trying to get to the bottom of. I can't..... at the moment think of a single other reason to decriminalize homosexuality other than that that there must have been some recognition among at least some members of the ruling political class
( in this case, the Bolshies) that people had an inherent right to engage in the sexual activity of their choice.... unfettered and unencumbered by the state.


Is there any other way to see it?

[DetlefK]

8. What if it was purely reflexive?

The Bolsheviks killed everybody left and right who was connected to the old order. What if they decriminalized homosexuality simply out of spite BECAUSE it was a crime in tsarist Russia?

And if you say that nobody is that stupid, I say Robespierre and "freedom fries".

[Smarmie Doofus]

9. I'm not sure.

Did they legalize theft? Murder? Fraud? Rape?

People were not legally responsible to.... say... feed their children, pay their debts?

Hard to take that argument seriously.

[Zorra]

17. That was not the motivation behind decriminalization.

The initiative for revocation of antihomosexual legislation, following the Revolution of February 1917, had come, not from the Bolsheviks but from the Cadets (Constitutional democrats) and the anarchists (Karlinsky, 1989). Nevertheless, once the old criminal code had been repealed after the October Revolution, the antihomosexual article also ceased to be valid. The Russian Federation criminal codes for 1922 and 1926 did not mention homosexuality, although the corresponding laws remained in force in places where homosexuality was most prevalent - in the Islamic republics of Azerbaijan, Turkmenia, and Uzbekistan, as well as in Christian Georgia.

Soviet medical and legal experts were very proud of the progressive nature of their legislation, ln 1930, the medical expert Sereisky (1930) wrote in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia: "Soviet legislation does not recognize 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" P. 593).

The most important collection of documents and texts on Soviet homosexuality is Kozlovsky (1986).

As Engelstein (1995) justly mentions, the formal decriminalization of sodomy did not mean that such conduct was invulnerable to prosecution. The absence of formal statutes against anal intercourse or lesbianism did not stop the prosecution of homosexual behavior as a form of disorderly conduct. After the 1922 Penal Code was published there were in that same year at least two known trials for homosexual practices. The eminent psychiatrist Vladimir Bekhterev testified that "public demonstration of such impulses ... is socially harmful and cannot be permitted" (Engelstein, 1995, p. 167). The official stance of Soviet medicine and law in the 1920s, as reflected by Sereisky's encyclopedia article, was that homosexuality was a disease that was difficult, perhaps even impossible, to cure. So "while recognizing the incorrectness of homosexual development ... our society combines prophylactic and other therapeutic measures with all the necessary conditions for making the conflicts that afflict homosexuals as painless as possible and for resolving their typical estrangement from society within the collective" (Sereisky, 1930, p. 593).

http://www.gay.ru/english/history/kon/soviet.htm

Lenin on women's equality

No party or revolution in the world has ever dreamed of striking so deep at the roots of the oppression and inequality of women as the Soviet, Bolshevik revolution is doing. Over here, in Soviet Russia, no trace is left of any inequality between men and women under the law. The Soviet power has eliminated all there was of the especially disgusting, base and hypocritical inequality in the laws on marriage and the family and inequality in respect of children.

This is only the first step in the liberation of woman. But none of the bourgeois republics, including the most democratic, has dared to take oven this first step. The reason is awe of “sacrosanct private property.

The second and most important step is the abolition of the private ownership of land and the factories. This and this alone opens up the way towards a complete and actual emancipation of woman, her liberation from “household bondage” through transition from petty individual housekeeping to large-scale socialised domestic services.

This transition is a difficult one, because it involves the remoulding of the most deep-rooted, inveterate, hidebound and rigid “order” (indecency and barbarity would be nearer the truth). But the transition has been started, the thing has been set in motion, we have taken the new path.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1921/mar/04.htm

Lenin demonstrated the deep understanding (for the time) that women are completely equal to men, and deserved full equality under both natural and national law:

Comrades, the elections to the Moscow Soviet show that the Party of the Communists is gaining strength among the working class.

It is essential that women workers take a greater part in the elections. The Soviet government was the first and only government in the world to abolish completely all the old, bourgeois, infamous laws which placed women in an inferior position compared with men and which granted privileges to men, as, for instance, in the sphere of marriage laws or in the sphere of the legal attitude to children. The Soviet government was the first and only government in the world which, as a government of the toilers, abolished all the privileges connected with property, which men retained in the family laws of all bourgeois republics, even the most democratic.
snip---
We want women workers to achieve equality with men workers not only in law, but in life as well. For this, it is essential that women workers take an ever increasing part in the administration of public enterprises and in the administration of the state.
snip---
The proletariat cannot achieve complete freedom, unless it achieves complete freedom for women.

N. Lenin

February 21, 1920

https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/feb/21.htm

[MisterP]

5. recriminalized '33

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_history_in_Russia
the "propaganda law" is based on the notion that LGBT+s "recruit" from and otherwise "target" the young
and it's written by a social democrat

and I do know that the PRC stopped castrating gay men. in 1982, I think
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communism_and_homosexuality

[Smarmie Doofus]

6. Great link; thanks. Few modern leftists would consider Stalin any kind of "Bolshevik"...

.... or even much of a Leninist.

So basically there was a 10 yr sort of "glasnost" ( sending delegates to the conference in Germany is news to me and fascinating, frankly.) followed by Stalinist return to traditional sexual primitivism.

I'll need a day or two to work my way thru that entry. Let's hope it wasn't "edited" by KGB... or whatever their successor org. in modern Russia is called. ( It turned out this week that that NYPD is heavily involved in wiki-editing of police abuse entries on wiki. Esp those involving... you guessed it.... NYPD.)

[MisterP]

7. heh, the modern Communist Party doesn't like the ex-KGB types (United Russia)

and if you look at Mizulina's past she used to be in the Right Union (and thus has the *exact same* political path as Nemtsov): so to me the closest analogy to labyrinthine Russian politics, which we see as a muddled and impossible mess, might be France (Chirac's strongman party keeping Europe out of Iraq while the campus revolutionaries push for rabidly xenophobic laws)

half of what we hear about Russia is lies, but nobody knows which half!

also, if you go to a lot of the world it's not even really "gay vs. straight" but "top vs. bottom," and that perspective is behind both the terrifying slaughter of transsexuals in Honduras and Iran paying for sexual reassignment

[nomorenomore08]

12. "it's not even really "gay vs. straight" but "top vs. bottom...""

The gender binary in action. I guess they can't conceive of sexual intimacy without a "male" and "female" role.

[burrowowl]

10. Interesting! Very!

[Zorra]

11. The world would be a much better place today if Lenin had just lived another 10 years. nt

[nomorenomore08]

13. If he'd simply prevented Uncle Joe's rise to power, that would be enormous. n/t

[Smarmie Doofus]

15. I always say that about the DEMs dumping VP Henry Wallace in 1944....

... in favor of Truman.

HST added nothing to the ticket ( FDR would have carried whatever states he DID carry... including the south).

But, whoa ! Wallace would have taken us in another ( and *better* ) direction entirely.

[nomorenomore08]

14. A few European countries decriminalized "sodomy" earlier, or around the same time.

But for 1922 that is pretty progressive. Especially given the difficulties faced by even upper-class gay men like Tchaikovsky not too many years earlier.

[William769]

16. OMFG!