Grigory Abramovich Batkis

The son of a physician, he graduated from the medical faculty of Kiev University in 1919, joined the Communist Party that year and helped build the health service in Ukraine during the Civil War. From 1923 to 1930 he worked in the social hygiene departments of the Second and First Moscow Universities and directed the Institute for Social Hygiene in Moscow. His four-page pamphlet The Sexual Revolution in Russia (1923) explained that after 1917 Soviet law regarded all matters of sex as private, treated sex between people of the same sex as part of normal human sexual behaviour and did not punish it. In the 1925 version he again wrote that homosexuality was “perfectly natural” and should be respected by law and society. In the early 1920s he and Health Commissar Semashko were in close contact with German colleagues, Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science among them, and declared that Soviet Russia’s repeal of the sodomy law had been a deliberate measure. As the official view of homosexuality as an illness hardened in the late 1920s, Semashko reduced his support, and in 1928 Batkis and other sex researchers repudiated their earlier reports describing homosexuality as natural. He turned to social hygiene and health statistics, chairing social hygiene and health organisation at the Second Moscow Medical Institute from 1931. He was deputy chairman of the health ministry’s central sanitary-statistical commission in 1944–1950 and its chairman from 1958, became a corresponding member of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 1945 and co-edited the second edition of the Great Medical Encyclopedia.