Despite its emancipatory promises, including in the field of sexuality, the Soviet Union was a deeply conservative society, which meant that homosexuality was expunged from the “polite society”. When it was addressed, it was treated as a crime or a disease, says Rasa Navickaitė, a scholar researching homosexuality in Soviet Lithuania.
Laws criminalising sexual relations between men – though not women – also came to Lithuania with the Soviet penal code, she notes. Among other things, it was a method of control – the KGB could blackmail people with evidence of their “sexual deviance”.
Even when the law was repealed, in 1993, deep-seated anti-LGBT attitudes in Lithuania persisted. “The pathologisation of homosexuality has continued from the Soviet period right up to the present day, and there are constant battles in institutions, in society, about how we can speak differently, interpret things differently,” says the scholar of Vienna University.
Your current research looks at homosexuality in the Soviet era. Tell us more about it what you are researching.
My research is about the history of sexual minorities in Lithuania during the Soviet era and the post-socialist transformation. [...] I’m interested in the history of homophobia, its institutionalisation in various publications and discourses, and I’m interested in how it has changed, how it medicalised and pathologised homosexuality and various sexualities and identities that transgress heteronormative norms.
I am interested in the stories of people who lived during the Soviet and immediate post-Soviet periods, people who felt that they were outside that norm. Of course, they had relationships, they lived in couples, they lived in families.
In Lithuania, there is now a huge debate, a huge polarisation about LGBT issues, a lot of haters as well as people who are trying very hard to achieve equality. This debate is at its peak and it seems to me that it is rooted in the Soviet era.
Unfortunately, there isn’t quite enough research on this topic in Lithuania, and Lithuanian historical research is still quite conservative, with little attention to the history of everyday life, or to women’s history, or to the history of sexuality. Only recently have there appeared researchers who are interested in these topics [...].
How was homosexuality perceived and what did it mean to be part of the LGBT community in Soviet Lithuania?
There was no such thing as the LGBT community in the Soviet era, but people still managed to understand themselves somehow, even though it must have been very difficult because there were no conceptual tools to approach it. But they were able to have relationships with other people of the same sex, they were even able to create social spaces – cafés, bathhouses – where they could meet.
Homosexual men in particular were able to create social spaces in the bigger cities of Lithuania and the Soviet Union.
It is very important to say that there were homosexual people in Soviet times, but they faced extraordinary difficulties. [...] First of all, because there was no discourse, no language to talk about it, no vocabulary, no positive descriptions or explanations of what it was.
There were literally no words to describe sexuality in a positive way. For example, the word ‘gay’ (gėjus) only came to Lithuania after independence (1990), and the words used until then were very medicalized and pathologising.
People who felt they were ‘different’ had to go through a difficult process. People had this feeling, but it was as if they didn’t have the words to talk about it, which was extremely difficult. But it wasn’t that no one talked about it at all.
It was not talked about in a ‘polite society’, it was an uncomfortable subject, but it was talked about by specialists, ‘experts’ – in textbooks, in manuals, for example, for criminologists or medics, psychiatrists. They gave definitions of homosexuality or transsexuality, but they were very pathologising, defining it as a mental disorder.
They’d sometimes list 10 different causes of homosexuality, from congenital, biological, psychological causes to abuse at an early age, masturbation, mother’s smoking and drinking during pregnancy.
It was unequivocally defined as abnormal, a disorder that is very harmful. Interestingly, homosexuality was both medicalised and criminalised at the same time – seen as both a disease and a crime. You could say it was seen as a crime against Soviet morality.
Homosexual relations between men were criminalised, but not between women. What were the penalties for this?
Soviet law was only interested in homosexual relations between men. This is not unique, many countries in history have only criminalised sexual relations between men.
In Latvia in the 1960s, for example, there were moves to include women’s homosexuality in the new Penal Code. It was even proposed to introduce penalties for oral and anal sex for all people, homosexual and heterosexual alike. However, the wording was not changed and only sex between men remained a crime.
Why were only male homosexual relations criminalised?
I think male sexuality is generally more visible, women are always seen as less sexual, their sexuality is less important. Sexuality in a patriarchal society is controlled in order to ensure the continuity of the male lineage and inheritance, so male sexuality is, as it were, more important.
Male sexuality is also more public, more visible than female, and this is historically linked to gender inequality, as women have been more relegated to the domestic sphere, while men have been given the public sphere.
There is a myth that communists were sexually liberal. [...] There was a brief period in the history of the Soviet Union after the revolution when the elites actually experimented with the idea that maybe there could be some sexual freedom in a communist system. It was very short-lived and Lithuania was not involved in it.
When Stalin came to power, the Soviet Union radically changed direction, became a very traditionalist state, and started controlling sexuality very strongly. Homosexuality was criminalised in 1934.
In Lithuania, the criminalisation came with the Soviet law. Before World War Two, consensual sexual relations between men were not penalised in Lithuania. However, there was inequality – a man who raped a boy or another man who could not give consent was punished much more severely than a man who raped a girl or a woman.
Consensual relations were not penalised, however. When Soviet Russia occupied Lithuania, we took over the Soviet Penal Code, under which sexual relations between men were punishable by between three and five years in prison. In Lithuania, the punishment was a little lighter – up to three years in prison.
Unfortunately, we still do not have historical research to tell us whether men were actually persecuted and punished under this article.
Aren’t there any surviving documents about how many men could have been punished for homosexuality?
Unfortunately, I cannot really say anything for sure, we do not know. What we do know is that [evidence of homosexual relations] was probably used by the KGB as a blackmail tool.
We already have studies done in Soviet Russia – many men were convicted and imprisoned under that very article. [...]
And how would law enforcement discover about a person’s homosexuality? Did neighbours inform on them?
Sometimes the wives would tell. If someone wanted to take revenge on a man, it was possible to report him. It is important to say that alongside prison sentences, there was also psychiatric treatment.
Even in prison, it was possible for prisoners to “choose” treatment, supposedly voluntarily. But, of course, the choice between prison and Soviet treatment is not a choice. Soviet psychiatrists followed outdated methods and had devised ways to “convert” homosexual men.
Psychiatry in the Soviet Union committed many crimes, tortured many people, and homosexual people were one of those tortured groups. One of the proposed ways of converting homosexual men to heterosexuality was aversion therapy.
The idea was simple – people were given drugs that caused nausea and sickness and then shown pictures of naked men or erotic homosexual scenes. People would get sick because of the drugs. They were then given stimulant drugs and shown photographs of women.
But not all psychiatrists in the Soviet era were monsters – there were people who tried to help homosexual people in their own way, and there were more humane ways, such as psychotherapy. [...] We have difficulty in establishing how homosexuality was or was not “treated” in Lithuania, because to this day, due to privacy reasons, we cannot access patient files, and we have to rely on the testimonies of psychiatrists.
Everybody says that none of that was happening in Lithuania, that Lithuanian psychiatrists tried to protect homosexual people. We cannot confirm or deny this. Of course, today we know that homosexuality cannot be “cured”, that trying to change a person’s sexual orientation with “conversion” or “aversion” therapies can make people depressed, suicidal, and is generally harmful.
How did this medicalisation and criminalisation of homosexuality in the Soviet Union compare to the situation in other countries, in the West?
When it came to sexuality, the Soviet Union was very conservative, with a conservative ethic that saw love and desire as a Platonic extension of Soviet friendship. Sexuality was not a subject that could be talked about, or it could be very carefully, subtly mentioned. It is hard to say why.
Basically, the Soviet Union forged a communist society out of a deeply peasant and religious culture – a lot of traditional and religious beliefs, the rural culture, survived, and this formed an ethical base which was deeply conservative. It was a very traditionalist peasant society. [...]
However, in some other socialist countries, such as Czechoslovakia and Poland, the decriminalisation of homosexuality came earlier than even in some Western countries. But what happened in the West that could not happen in the socialist countries were social movements where LGBT people came together to fight for their rights. [...]
Lithuania remains a much less LGBT-friendly country than Western Europe. Do these attitudes come from the Soviet era?
I am of the opinion that the Soviet era still does affect our society. To say that the Soviet era has no effect is to say that history has no effect on our society –it is part of our history. I think that we can see continuity of all phenomena that existed in the Soviet era into the post-Soviet period.
The pathologisation of homosexuality has continued from the Soviet period right up to the present day, and there are constant battles in institutions, in society, about how we can speak differently, interpret things differently. During the Soviet period, there was very little talk about sexuality, but in the 1980s, there appeared more so-called sexual education publications.
Soviet authorities began to try to educate the society and to fashion a Soviet family, a Soviet intimacy. Then Soviet sex education publications appear. In Lithuania, we translated most of them from other countries – from Poland, Russia, East Germany – but we also have a regional book written by a Latvian oncologist [Jānis Zālītis] who also considered himself a sexologist and a psychotherapist. In 1981, he published a book in Latvia called In the Name of Love.
That book was a great success in Latvia, it had a run of 99,000 copies. In Lithuania, it was translated and published in 100,000 copies, with a second run a year later.
The book pushed the boundaries of how to talk about sexuality in the Soviet Union; it offered a communist discourse about sex, sexuality, the sexual act itself, which was unheard of at the time, and the main concern was how to preserve harmony within the family.
Most people saw this book as revolutionary, but it reiterated and further reinforced many extremely problematic things. The late Soviet period was symptomatic of a conservative gender system that saw men as sexually active and aggressive and women as passive. [...]
It reinforced the ideology of gender complementarity – a 19 century idea that the sexes are vastly different, but complementary. This is still the ideology of the Catholic Church and was also a common notion in the late Soviet era.
This book pathologises homosexuality enormously, sees it as a perversion. Such books reflected and shaped the conservative understanding of sexuality in the Soviet era. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Lithuanian society clang to this Soviet traditionalist understanding of sexuality – it wasn’t some exclusively national, Catholic approach, it was Soviet conservatism, and it is still felt today.
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