The Recriminalization of Homosexuality under Stalin: New Sources, New Answers

Irina Roldugina, The Russian Review 84(4), 2025, pp. 660–680

Abstract

Drawing on newly uncovered archival and printed sources, this article offers a fresh perspective on the recriminalization of homosexuality under Stalin by challenging key assumptions in existing historiography. It demonstrates that the OGPU did not actively advocate for new anti-sodomy legislation. Although Leningrad homosexuals had been under surveillance and selectively prosecuted by the secret service since the early 1930s, their consistent prosecution in the summer and autumn of 1933 was not only a result of growing and organized homophobia on the part of the Soviet state, but also connected to a little known campaign to establish a link between homosexuality and fascism. This article also argues that the recriminalization of homosexuality cannot be fully understood without extending the chronology and giving greater attention to the experiences of Soviet homosexuals themselves. Following the decriminalization of homosexuality in 1917 and its reaffirmation in the 1922 Criminal Code of the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic (the first Soviet penal code), the visibility of homosexuals increased—intensified by the growing self-acceptance among gay men—and eventually attracted the attention of the secret police.

In August 1933, the Fourth Secret-Political Department of the Unified State Political Administration (OGPU) launched a covert operation against homosexual men in Moscow and Leningrad. In Leningrad, the first arrests were made on August 4th and continued through September. A total of 198 men were arrested, including ballet artists and writers. However, the majority of those apprehended were white-collar workers, unskilled laborers, industrial workers, and individuals of peasant origin engaged in drudgery.[1] All of them were accused of being counterrevolutionaries under Article 58 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR), involving “counterrevolutionary activities,” with homosexuality cited as the main element of their anti-Soviet behavior. The criminal article penalizing male homosexuality had not yet been introduced, but it appears to be closely linked to this affair.

The 1933 Leningrad operation stands as the largest known campaign of repression against homosexual men in Soviet history. It would give rise to an infamous report that Genrikh Iagoda, then the acting head of the OGPU, sent to Stalin in September 1933, summarizing the interim results. Though brief, the excerpt from this report—published after the collapse of the Soviet Union—is the only known official reference to this secret operation.[2] To date, the full text of the report had been unknown. The existing historiography on the subject suggests that the OGPU report prompted Stalin to introduce a new criminal article penalizing sexual activity between men. In this interpretation, the Soviet leader agreed with the recommendation. On the first page of the report, Stalin issued an instruction to his fellow Politburo member Lazar Kaganovich: “To Comrade Kaganovich. These scoundrels must be subject to exemplary punishment, and a corresponding guiding decree must be introduced into our legislation.”[3] In 1934, twelve years after the decriminalization of homosexuality in 1922, articles against same-sex sexual activity between men (muzhelozhstvo) began to be introduced in the criminal codes of Soviet republics.[4] In Russia, the article was revoked only sixty years later in 1993 under Boris Yeltsin, making it one of the last Stalinist laws to be repealed.

So far, the recriminalization of homosexuality remains one of the least researched repressive reforms enacted under Stalin. Why was homosexuality recriminalized in 1933–1934 after a period of official leniency, supported by scholarly judgment, advocating for a non-criminal approach?[5] Who orchestrated this shift, and what factors influenced the authorities in making this decision? For decades historians have struggled with these questions. In answering them, they have emphasized the lack of respect for private life under Stalin, the struggle against “social anomalies” that was facilitated by the passportization campaign of the early 1930s, and the tension between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.[6] Indeed, beginning in the early 1930s, communists and National Socialists used accusations of homosexuality as a weapon in their ideological battle against each other.[7]

Trying to shed light on the recriminalization of homosexuality, scholars have highlighted two main difficulties. First, the recriminalization was not accompanied by a public campaign that could explain, or even formally justify, the rationale behind the authorities’ decision to introduce the law.[8] On the contrary, well-established psychiatrist Mark Sereiskii’s entry on homosexuality in the first edition of the Bol'shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia (Great Soviet Encyclopedia) reflected the official stance of the Soviet state at the time, treating homosexuality as a social issue, not a criminal offense.[9] The volume containing the entry on homosexuality was published in 1930, three years before its recriminalization in the Soviet Union. The psychiatrist called the laws against homosexuals “absurd in themselves” and, with passionate disapproval, referred to “the advanced capitalist countries, where the fight to repeal these hypocritical regulations is far from over.”[10] Second, scholars have consistently highlighted the gap between efforts to contextualize the recriminalization and the actual lack of primary sources that could substantiate their assumptions.[11] Everything related to the recriminalization of homosexuality was considered classified.

This article, drawing on fresh archival sources and hitherto unknown published materials, reexamines the history of the recriminalization of homosexuality and sheds new light on the previously hidden factors driving the enactment of this law. More specifically, the article characterizes it as a fragmented process driven largely by internal bureaucratic developments rather than a coordinated effort to prosecute Soviet homosexuals underpinned by a coherent rationale. Moreover, this article demonstrates that a public campaign did indeed contribute to the recriminalization of homosexuality. While it did not explicitly address homosexuality within the Soviet state, it established a context that was instrumental in shaping the conditions for the law’s enactment.

While Leningrad homosexuals had been under surveillance and selectively prosecuted by the secret service since the early 1930s, their consistent prosecution in the summer and autumn of 1933 was tightly connected to the Comintern campaign against the alleged Reichstag arsonist Marinus van der Lubbe. The campaign’s primary goal was to establish a link between homosexuality and fascism. It also played a crucial role in laying the groundwork for the recriminalization of homosexual relations in the USSR. The campaign was rather personalized. The alleged homosexuality of Marinus van der Lubbe (1909–1934), the Dutchman accused by Nazi Germany of setting the Reichstag fire, was highlighted and vilified in the Soviet press. According to the Nazis, van der Lubbe had a communist background. In contrast, for the Soviet Union, he was a homosexual whose “inclinations” naturally bound him to the Nazis. This article argues that the public campaign launched by the Soviet Union against Marinus van der Lubbe was seized upon by the acting head of the OGPU, Genrikh Iagoda, as a pretext to initiate repressions against homosexuals in Moscow and Leningrad from August to September 1933. Notably, Iagoda proceeded without seeking separate official sanctions to conduct these arrests. This maneuver served Iagoda’s personal ambitions, allowing him to demonstrate both his vigilance and the operational efficiency of the OGPU. Within this context, the anti–van der Lubbe campaign helped shape the ideological justification for the mass arrests of Soviet homosexual men in 1933. This article also challenges the claim that Iagoda himself initiated the recriminalization of homosexuality.[12] The full text of the 1933 report to Stalin about secret operations against homosexuals in Moscow and Leningrad, which I found in the archives, reveals that Iagoda did not propose the new law, skillfully utilizing the Article 58 of the Russian RSFSR Penal Code (“counterrevolutionary activity”) for their prosecution. On the 1933 report, Stalin’s handwritten instruction to Kaganovich, advising to develop a separate law, introduced a new approach to homosexuality in the USSR, targeting homosexual activity without any reference to political unreliability. Would homosexuality have been recriminalized under Stalin if Iagoda had not sent a report to Stalin? Would homosexual men, instead, have continued to be arrested as counterrevolutionaries under the “political” Article 58? And if so, would their prosecution have ended with Khrushchev’s denunciation of the victims of Stalinist terror? We cannot say for certain, but a full analysis of the 1933 report provides a more nuanced perspective on the recriminalization of homosexuality.

Finally, this article argues that the recriminalization of homosexuality cannot be fully understood without extending the chronology and giving greater attention to the experiences of Soviet homosexuals themselves.[13] After the decriminalization of homosexuality in 1922, the growing visibility—fueled by the increasing self-acceptance of gay men—eventually drew the attention of the secret police. In particular, the homosexual community in Leningrad, one of the largest and most organized in the country, became a focus of law enforcement scrutiny. As this article will demonstrate, some of the men were arbitrarily prosecuted by the OGPU and convicted in the early 1930s—even before the mass arrests of 1933.

THE MOST FAMOUS HOMOSEXUAL: MARINUS VAN DER LUBBE AND THE COMINTERN CAMPAIGN

On the evening of Monday, February 27, 1933, the Reichstag, the main governmental building of the Weimar Republic and a state symbol situated in the heart of Berlin, was engulfed in flames.[14] It is wellknown that the fire became a pretext for the Nazi seizure of power during that same year. The day after the fire, the country’s president, Paul von Hindenburg, issued “The Decree for the Protection of People and the Reich,” which is commonly known as “The Reichstag Fire Decree.” The new law granted Adolf Hitler as head of the government the authority to prosecute anyone deemed an opponent of the Nazis, with communists becoming his primary target. Marinus van der Lubbe, a twenty-four-yearold Dutchman caught at the scene, was identified as the prime suspect and immediately confessed. Although van der Lubbe maintained that he had acted alone, Nazi leaders portrayed him as part of a larger communist conspiracy aimed at sparking an insurrection.[15] Earlier, van der Lubbe had been a member of the Dutch Communist Party and, as a communist activist, was known to the local police.[16]

Although he had left the party in 1931, Nazi investigators readily linked him to the communists despite the lack of credible evidence.

In this article, I will not delve into the theories surrounding the arson—whether Van der Lubbe was framed by the Nazis, acted alone as an eccentric, or was influenced by his communist past. For my purposes, what is of crucial importance is that van der Lubbe’s alleged homosexuality became a key element in the communists’ strategy to confront the Nazis outside and within the USSR. The Soviet authorities presented van der Lubbe as the figure of a depraved and psychologically unstable individual to millions of its citizens, most of whom had never before encountered terms like “homosexual” and “pederast” in the central Soviet press on such a scale. Moreover, communists asserted that van der Lubbe’s homosexuality connected him to the Sturmabteilung (SA) and the Nazis, whose interests he had served by setting the Reichstag fire. Subsequently, this link between homosexuality and Nazism was exploited by the OGPU to prosecute Moscow and Leningrad homosexuals, inadvertently leading to the introduction of an article criminalizing male homosexuality in the USSR. The communists’ decision to center an anti-Nazi campaign on homosexuality was largely influenced by a series of scandals in 1931 and 1932 involving the SA leader Ernst Röhm, who made no secret of his homosexuality.[17] In the 1920s, Röhm had been a member of the German homosexual organization the League for Human Rights and a frequent patron of Berlin queer bars.[18] In 1931, when Röhm was already the SA chief of staff, his correspondence with Karl-Günther Heimsoth, a psychiatrist and gay rights advocate, was leaked by the leftist press.[19] In the letters, Röhm spoke about his homosexuality without expressing shame or self-deprecation: “I am absolutely not unhappy about my inclination, even though it has brought considerable difficulties from time to time; on the contrary, am even inwardly proud of it.”[20]

Although the unfolding scandal did not weaken Röhm’s position or significantly affect the Nazis’ popularity, it established a pattern in the left-wing press portraying Nazi leaders as morally corrupt. The emphasis on masculine militarized virility, which Röhm actively promoted and celebrated, was supposed to be underminedby accusations of homosexuality.[21]

In devising the case against van der Lubbe, the Soviet communists drew upon that earlier trend. A key text that presented van der Lubbe as a homosexual and claimed that a conspiratorial group of homosexual Nazis had set the fire was The Brown Book of the Reichstag Fire and Hitler Terror. The book provides an elaborate counter-propagandist narrative. Translated into twenty-four languages (including Russian), The Brown Book was the result of a campaign led by Wilhelm Münzenberg, the chief of German communist propaganda and closely connected to the Communist International, which was based in Moscow.[22]A Russian translation of the text was published in September 1933, coinciding with the start of the so-called Leipzig Process on September 21, 1933—a timing that was likely no accident. This legal proceeding implicated not only van der Lubbe but also communists Ernst Torgler, Blagoi Popov, Vasil Tanev, and Georgi Dimitrov—his alleged co-conspirators. Unlike van der Lubbe, however, all of them were actively supported and defended in the Soviet press. The Russian edition of The Brown Book was skillfully supplemented by a series of smaller publications— for example, a brochure containing selected chapters from the book, including the discussion of van der Lubbe’s homosexuality.[23] In addition, the prestigious Soviet journal Soviet Jurisprudence (Sovetskaia iustitsiia) published an anonymous article about van der Lubbe. The article promoted The Brown Book, emphasizing its main argument that van der Lubbe’s homosexuality made him a Nazi henchman: “He is a homosexual, and his alignment with the National Socialists has been driven by this factor.”[24] By way of these materials, Soviet citizens were introduced to a comprehensive portrayal of homosexuality, presented from a distinctly negative perspective.[25] One can argue that this had in fact occurred earlier: in the 1920s, some Soviet medical experts had cast homosexuality as a detrimental social and/or biological trait. However, medical professionals in the 1920s sought to ground their views in scholarly research and, for the most part, refrained from linking sexual orientation to political ideology. Furthermore, in these years, scholarly treatises on homosexuality were not popularized as extensively; instead, they constituted a niche literature that in fact offered a gamut of assessments of homosexuality. In contrast, the widely circulated Münzenberg’s pamphlet presented a different and rather manipulative view. As portrayed in The Brown Book, van der Lubbe is an archetype whose “petty-bourgeois” background and “primitive” religiosity, nurtured by his peasant mother, “predisposed” him to homosexuality, which “naturally” led him to embrace the Nazis.

We must emphasize van der Lubbe’s homosexuality, as it was upon this foundation that his association with the National Socialists was established during his trips to Germany. [...] According to Marinus van der Lubbe’s constitution, he is a homosexual. He exhibits a feminine temperament, and his attitude toward women, marked by timidity and fear, is attested to by numerous testimonies. Furthermore, his inclination toward seeking affection and tenderness from males is documented as well.[26]

The text explicitly states that van der Lubbe’s closeness to Röhm was a result of their shared “sexual inclination,” characterized as morally pathological. The psychological and medical viewpoints on homosexuality, as discussed by contemporary medical and legal experts, were completely disregarded. Surprisingly, this is inconsistent with other parts of the book, which include a highly sympathetic description of the work of Magnus Hirschfeld, the pioneer of the queer civil rights movement, as well as respectful mentions of Sigmund Freud and Havelock Ellis, scholars whose views on homosexuality were much more complex and evolving. The Russian edition of The Brown Book discusses in detail the demolition of the Institute for Sexual Research—a “world-famous scholarly institute and clinic” led by Hirschfield—by the Nazis: “Thanks to its unique and unparalleled collections, extensive research archives and library, the institute gained international renown and recognition. Numerous foreign scholars, doctors, and writers came to Berlin to work at the institute.”[27] This incongruity suggests that the creators of The Brown Book had no intention of engaging with scholarly theories on homosexuality and were not in conversation with the scientific community’s broader perspectives on the subject. At the same time, they did not explicitly critique scholarly approaches to homosexuality. Instead, they simply ignored them. The creators of The Brown Book were preoccupied with the denunciation of van der Lubbe and, broader, the National Socialists as their ideological contesters. They did not concern themselves with ensuring perfect coherence in the campaign. By equating homosexuality with moral corruption and attributing specific negative traits to homosexual individuals—such as stealth, softness, and a tendency to lie—they reinforced existing stereotypes surrounding homosexuality. Therefore, some elements of the campaign did not align seamlessly. For example, Ernst Röhm could hardly be described as having a “soft” character.

The Brown Book was not only published in the Soviet Union but also promoted in an article featured on the front page of Izvestiia, the official organ of the Soviet government, on September 10, 1933. The timing does not seem to have been accidental, as the Leipzig trial was scheduled to begin eleven days later. The article, “Marinus van der Lubbe,” signed with the pseudonym Iur, appeared on the front page of the newspaper.[28] In the piece, Iur explains why The Brown Book included details about van der Lubbe’s sexuality: “These inclinations could not have been the topic of public discussion. But since it offers an opportunity to explore the mystery of the Reichstag Fire, it has to be addressed.” The author asserts that van der Lubbe’s “pathological inclination” linked him “intimately to some members of the National Socialist movement.” Iur concludes the piece with a discussion of nineteenthcentury German history, noting that “the German nobility was profoundly eroded and demoralized.” According to Iur, homosexuality was one of the nobility’s main flaws. To strengthen his condemnation of homosexuality as a deplorable trait, the author referenced the sacred texts of communism—the correspondence between Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. The reader was presented with a quotation from a letter written by Engels to Marx on June 22, 1869. The full letter had previously been published in Russian in 1931 as part of a volume of their correspondence.[29]

The Urning you sent me is a very curious thing. These are extremely unnatural revelations. The pederasts are beginning to count themselves and discover that they are a power in the state. Only organization was lacking, but according to this source it apparently already exists in secret. And since they have such important men in all the old parties and even in the new ones, from Rösing to Schweitzer, they cannot fail to triumph ... It is a bit of luck that we personally are too old to need to fear that, when this party wins, we shall have to pay physical tribute to the victors. But the younger generation! Incidentally it is only in Germany that a fellow like this can possibly come forward, convert this smut into a theory... [30]

Iur then concludes: “This is what Engels wrote to Marx sixty-four years ago. This letter remains relevant.” [31] The Brown Book, its accompanying smaller brochure, and Iur’s piece were just the tip of the iceberg. When the Leipzig Trial began in September 1933, the Soviet press launched extensive coverage of the proceedings, directly addressing Marinus van der Lubbe and his alleged homosexuality.[32]

It portrayed van der Lubbe as a possible lover of Röhm and suggested that he had been instructed to set the fire.

Neither Iur’s article nor Engels’s letter has been examined or analyzed by scholars in the context of the recriminalization of homosexuality in the USSR. However, there is no doubt that millions of Soviet citizens encountered these materials. One of them was Nikolai Liubimov (1912–1992), a translator who worked for the publishing house Akademiia. He was arrested in October 1933 in Moscow as an “anti-Soviet element” suspected of plotting to kill Stalin. In Butyrskaia Prison, Liubimov encountered the first victims of the anti-homosexual purge in the capital, which had begun before the recriminalization of homosexuality. In his memoirs written in the 1970s, Liubimov recalled reading the Izvestiia article and later, while in prison, connecting the secret prosecution of homosexuals to the Reichstag fire:

Pederasts also fell victim to lawlessness. For the time being, they lived freely and cheerfully in Soviet Rus', nobody hurt them; they even arranged gatherings in private houses, which substituted for clubs. On September 10, 1933, an article titled “Marinus van der Lubbe” was published in Izvestiia. The author of this article, which was printed on the bottom of the first page, concealed himself under the pen name Iur. In the piece, relying on The Brown Book, he asserts that van der Lubbe, accused of the Reichstag arson, was a homosexual, and his “pathological inclinations intimately linked him to certain people from the National Socialist Movement.”[33]

The existence of Soviet homosexuals was never publicly acknowledged by the authorities during the campaign. Nevertheless, the campaign played a crucial role in laying the groundwork for the subsequent recriminalization of homosexuality in the USSR. The OGPU exploited the public momentum, resulting in the arrests of hundreds of homosexual men in Moscow and Leningrad—most of whom did not conceal their sexuality. Having witnessed the decriminalization of homosexuality in 1922, many still trusted in the Bolshevik state’s professed commitment to a scientific and progressive approach to the issue.