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Whatsapp Members of a gay rights group at a protest in St Petersburg, Russia in 2008.

In modern Russia, legislation is pending that would allow authorities to take children away from gay parents. Already, promoting a homosexual lifestyle is illegal. But Russia hasn't always been so behind the times, with the state formally recognising transgender identity as far back as the Soviet period, as Annabelle Quince writes.

Homosexuality was decriminalised in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union, but gay and lesbian citizens say they are being subjected to a 'classic hate campaign', backed up by hardline legal reforms. Earlier this year, the Russian parliament passed legislation making it illegal to promote a homosexual lifestyle to minors. A new law has now been drafted that would allow Russian authorities to take children away from homosexual parents.

With the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi looming, Russia is facing international scrutiny. Experts say the country has a troubled history when it comes to its treatment of homosexuality in society.

Dan Healey is Professor of Modern Russian History at the University of Oxford and the author of Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia. He explained that while the Tsarist regime criminalised male homosexuality in 1835, a blind eye was turned to ‘ordinary homosexual behaviour’.

For the last year and a half the Kremlin has been running a concerted campaign of hatred on television... The patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church has stated that the international trend toward legalising same-sex marriage is a sign of the coming apocalypse.

‘We know of instances where there were members of the Romanov royal family who were gay, and also of course famous individuals like Tchaikovsky,’ said Professor Healey.

‘These people were able to function in their social and political roles and their cultural roles, despite the fact that they were also living pretty exuberant male homosexual lives.’

In 1917, Tsarist Russia was swept aside by the Bolshevik revolution. Sodomy was effectively decriminalised when the new criminal code of the Bolsheviks, enacted in 1922, came into force.

However, author and journalist Masha Gessen said this was not an indication of a more liberal attitude to homosexuality.

‘They had the idea that the social institutions of Tsarist Russia needed to be destroyed, and the family went down and all the laws went out, including the laws criminalising homosexuality. In some Western literature that has been misinterpreted as a legalisation of homosexuality,’ she said.

‘The society began getting more conservative and sort of solidifying its institutions and retrenching almost immediately. By the early 1930s that retrenchment was in full force. So in 1934 when the Soviet Union re-criminalised homosexuality, that was a perfectly logical step.’

Joseph Stalin came to power in the late 1920s, and in 1933 he accepted a proposed law that allowed the arrest and conviction of homosexuals. This law was in effect from 1934 to 1993.

Anywhere from a few hundred to thousands of men were arrested under the law each year, according to Laurie Essig, an Associate Professor of Sociology and Women's and Gender Studies at Middlebury College and the author of Queer in Russia: A Story of Sex, Self, and the Other.

‘They would go to the camps, they would be the lowest of the low in the camp hierarchy, it was quite dangerous for them,’ she said.

‘I have to say there were a lot more men having sex with men than the few hundred or few thousand who went to prison every year under it, and so it worked more as a form of terror.’

‘You never knew when it would be used, you never knew if it could be used, and certainly it was used all the time to blackmail people, to get them to be informants, to get them to cooperate with the internal security forces or the police.’

At the same time, Professor Essig said, women were increasingly caught up in the psychiatric system, and women who desired other women were diagnosed with a form of schizophrenia—the same diagnosis the authorities would use for political dissidents.

‘Interestingly enough, if they couldn't cure a woman of her desire for other women they would actually just change the gender assignment on her papers, so they would allow her, allow him to now have a transgender identity,’ said Professor Essig.

‘It allowed you to go get a job and get a man's pay scale, you could wear men's uniforms to work, you could marry your girlfriend, you could also go to a couple of hospitals later on in the regime from the 1970s and 1980s forward... that would even perform certain surgical procedures to help your body look more like a man's.’

Despite changes in leadership, the situation in Soviet Russia remained unchanged until the late 1980s, the period of Mikhail Gorbachev and Glasnost, his policy of openness and transparency.

‘The process of democratisation and Glasnost openness that Mikhail Gorbachev initiates when he comes to power in 1985 that leads to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, that begins to allow the problem of homosexuality to be discussed publicly,’ said Professor Healey.

‘So before Boris Yeltsin eventually decriminalises male homosexuality in 1993 there is already a head of steam building up among experts and possibly members of the public as well. There is also emerging at this time the beginnings of a lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender movement, LGBT movement, from about 1989, 1990 onwards.’

In 1993 the law criminalising male homosexual behaviour was repealed, but not in a public way, explained Masha Gessen.

‘The amendment repealing the law was stuck into a larger bill that mostly concerned arms reduction,’ said Ms Gessen.

‘So I think somebody within the presidential administration which was drafting those bills basically took the initiative of sneaking something in that was right that would have taken a long time to go through the normal procedures of amending the penal and the criminal code.’

‘At the same time what was happening in the '90s was there was a bit of community building, gay clubs started showing up, little bit of gay literature, in Moscow and St Petersburg there were gay bookshops and a couple of gay publications, couple of gay and lesbian websites.’

‘I spent the '90s being pretty much the only publicly out person in the country, and by the 2000s it started getting a little bit better, and by the late 2000s there would be several openly gay people more or less anyplace I worked or went to. So it was a slow process but it was moving in the right direction.’

Professor Healey said this was a sign that the state was no longer interested in what went on in the bedrooms of the nation. Once the Russian media became freer and more privatised, he said sexuality in general became a very hot topic.

‘It was something obviously that sold newspapers and magazines at the lower and the middle range of the market, but it was also that talking about sexuality was radical, it was political, it was something that actually made your text anti-Soviet or post-Soviet and made it modern, made it contemporary, made it fresh,’ said Professor Healey.

However, democratic reforms began to stall in 1999 when Vladimir Putin emerged as the new powerbroker in the Russia Federation.

Legislation on so-called homosexual propaganda started showing up in 2006 in the small town of Ryazan.

‘Ryazan passed this ban on homosexual propaganda, it was challenged in court, it went all the way to the Constitutional Court, which is the highest court in the land,’ Ms Gessen said.

‘The challenge was that there is no definition of homosexual propaganda, so it's very difficult to ban something that you can't define. So the Constitutional Court responded by defining homosexual propaganda, and that is when I think we got into real trouble.’

‘The Constitutional Court defined homosexual propaganda as the uncontrolled and goal directed distribution of information that can cause harm to the physical or spiritual development of minors, including forming in them the erroneous impression of social equality of traditional and non-traditional marital relations.’

‘So this was the first law in Russia that actually enshrined second-class citizenship.’

From Russia with love? Listen to Annabelle Quince's full report on the history of homosexual relationships in Russia, from the Tsarist regime to Putin's government.

Bills with the Constitutional Court’s definition started spreading around the country, first in small towns, then in larger cities. After reaching St Petersburg in March 2012, the law was floated on the national level. That's when the television campaign began.

‘For the last year and a half the Kremlin has been running a concerted campaign of hatred on television, the Kremlin and the Russian Orthodox Church in concert. It's a very classic hate campaign,’ said Ms Gessen.

‘The patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church has stated that the international trend toward legalising same-sex marriage is a sign of the coming apocalypse, so that establishes gays and lesbians as a sort of larger-than-life threat.’

‘At the same time the number two person in the state-held broadcasting system has gone on television to say that the laws against homosexual propaganda are not enough to protect our children, that we need to ban sperm and blood donations by gay people. And if they should die in a car accident, then their hearts need to be buried underground or burned lest they be implanted in a human body.’

Russia’s ruling party has recently filed a bill that will create a mechanism for removing children from parents who are known or suspected to be homosexual. The bill will go to the floor in parliament in February, and according to Ms Gessen, it will ‘definitely’ pass.

‘People may not have been fully publicly out, but for people with kids most of the time their paediatrician knows that they have two mothers or two fathers, a lot of the time the school teachers know, the neighbours know, and people have no place to hide,’ she said.

‘And so there's a clear sense, at least among gay and lesbian people with children, that we have to leave the country.’

Find out more at Rear Vision, a program that puts contemporary events in their historical context and answers the question—'How did it come to this?'

