Police raid Moscow gay bars after a Supreme Court ruling labeled LGBTQ+ movement 'extremist'
Police raid Moscow gay bars after a Supreme Court ruling labeled LGBTQ+ movement 'extremist'
Russian security forces have raided gay clubs and bars across Moscow less than 48 hours after the country’s top court banned what it called the “global LGBTQ+ movement” as an extremist organization.
Sigh.
You're viewing a single thread.
So does Russia have a big stinky history of queerphobia or is this relatively recent?
Stalin did re-criminalize homosexuality after the Civil War due to extreme loss of population at the time.
Today, LGBT+ movement is seen as foreign/Western propaganda weaponized to destroy the national culture of their country. We see some of this too in China where boomers really think LGBT+ movement is a Western imperialist tool to divide the Chinese population (a lot of them did have support from Western NGOs, not going to lie about it), so I don’t think this is a strictly religious thing.
Russia also faces significant demographic issues where they’re going to fall off the cliff if the situation is not reversed by 2030. The brainwormed boomers really bought into the idea that being gay is a result of being exposed to propaganda and you can somehow reverse that if you mitigate this exposure lol.
due to extreme loss of population
Lol, fuckin Lmao, even
So is there much to the idea that queer people not being criminalised is western propaganda?
I think most of the younger people don’t care. It’s mostly the boomers in charge who are determining the policies.
As ever...
Stalin did re-criminalize homosexuality after the Civil War due to extreme loss of population at the time.
Stalin did have some black marks during his leadership. This, and the anti-semitic climate when Zhdanov was the Minister of Culture which called for the “strengthening” of Russian culture to resist “rootless cosmopolitanism” (which is code for the Jews).
To be clear, there is no indication that Stalin was anti-semitic himself, but the general notion (at least from what history books tell me) is that he sort of let it happen under him for reasons we can only speculate.
Also the the USSR literally recognized Israel under his leadership
that one is complicated honestly, and I know how that sounds. Socialist countries at the time saw the UK as the primary global Satan, and viewed Israel as a loss of a colonial asset. They also assumed Israel would be socialist, and this sounds silly, but they weren't too misguided in believing that. A lot of early Israeli politicians had ideologically socialist leanings, but none of that mattered once it became clear Israel was going to be an apartheid settler state. The USSR made a declaration of support for the Arab struggle against Israel as early as 1955
after 1967 the USSR cut off all diplomacy with Israel and only talked occasionally through the Dutch embassy in Moscow
Stalin did re-criminalize homosexuality after the Civil War due to extreme loss of population at the time.
I have seen no documents that support that claim. One can try and make the claim that in the lead-up and during the Great Patriotic War the Stalin administration recognized the great desperate state they were going to be in / were in, and understood there was a need to marshal all levels of Soviet society leading to the decision to end the prosecution of all religions to the point of encouraging state collaboration in order to further motivate the proletariat to fight against the fascist genocidal invaders, and one can cite the Imams of the many Stan countries who called the War against nazi Germany a jihad or the Orthodox patriarch who wrote
"We want to be Orthodox and at the same time recognize the Soviet Union as our civil motherland, whose joys and successes are our joys and successes and whose failures are our failures. Any blow directed at the Union, be it a war, a boycott, some kind of social disaster, or just a murder from around the corner, like the Warsaw one, is recognized by us as a blow directed at us."
While there are no documents as far as I'm aware declare the softening towards religion and implementation of policies favored by the social conservatives that make up the religious factions as a means of strengthening the Soviet Union to fight harder during the Great Patriotic War exists, I would say that this period of history is one where you could draw correlations to causations as the most likely reason it occured.
I did read and post a translation of the bill and it's comments on the homosexuality criminalization, I don't feel like searching for it but the big thing is they thought homosexuality was lowering birth rates when that was the topic of the day postwar, and it was even implied to be temporary along with other measures. Cuba is taking the correct approach now, if you want LGBT people to have kids, you need to support non traditional families.
I chalk it up to traditionalist and non scientific brain worms, they ended up walking back most of those changes once they actually measured them. The demographic crisis after ww2 can't be understated though, I recall reading a worst case scenario projection for it and they expected the Soviet Unions population to half
Thank you for your work as always, Tina! I'll have to go over it when I'm having breakfast tomorrow.
Cuba is taking the correct approach now, if you want LGBT people to have kids, you need to support non traditional families.
Cuba gang stay winning
Yeah the Soviets eventually worked in some really groundbreaking stuff encouraging people to be single moms with state assistance. Needed to keep that energy for everyone
Reading about childcare in the Soviet Union sometimes seems like a dream, I'd give an arm and a leg to be able to have kids in an environment like what they were able to build.
I agree and I stand corrected if that’s the case. I’m mostly regurgitating stuff I read from analyses from Russian communist telegrams but I don’t know their sources and how historically accurate those are.
There's a stupendous amount of archival data to still go through, not mentioning its all in Russian, it always stands possible that a communist over there could've stumbled on it ahead of us and all the other professional Soviet scholars thus far.
It just seems very unlikely as it's a case of, as comrade Fidel would put it, toxic machismo cultural brainworms that just weren't ready to get pulled out at that time
Stalin did re-criminalize homosexuality after the Civil War due to extreme loss of population at the time.
I imagine this was the motivation behind the dumb abortion ban as well yeah?
No and the above is also probably false. It was criminalised because it was not seen favourably by the majority orthodox population. Stalin alone didn't pass laws.
https://hexbear.net/comment/4331437
Also yes I should just say “the soviets in Stalin’s time” or something like that.
This was the official reason given by the June 27, 1936 resolution issued by the Central Executive Committee and the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR on the prohibition of abortion.
However, they found that banning abortion did not lead to increase of birth rate, but instead it drove up illegal abortions and increased mortality of pregnant women.
The October Socialist Revolution, which marked the beginning of the destruction of all class exploitation, the destruction of the classes themselves, simultaneously marked the beginning of the complete and final emancipation of women.
In no other country in the world does a woman enjoy such complete equality in all areas of political, social life and family life as in the USSR.
In no country in the world does a woman, as a mother and citizen, who bears the great and responsible responsibility of giving birth and raising citizens, enjoy such respect and protection of the law as in the USSR.
However, the economic devastation in the country that occurred in the first years after the civil war and armed intervention and the insufficient cultural level of women inherited from the pre-revolutionary era did not allow them to immediately fully use the rights granted by law and, without fear for the future, fulfill their duties as citizens and mothers responsible for childbirth. and the initial education of their children. In this regard, on November 18, 1920, the Soviet government allowed abortions (artificial termination of pregnancy) for women while, as the People's Commissariat of Health and the People's Commissariat of Justice wrote, "the moral remnants of the past and the difficult economic conditions of the present still force some women to decide on this operation" (S.U. 1920 No. 90, Art. 471).
Lenin wrote back in 1913 that class-conscious workers are “the unconditional enemies of neo-Malthusianism, this trend for the petty-bourgeois couple, calloused and selfish, who mutter in fear: God willing, they themselves could hold out somehow, but it would be better if they don’t need children.”
But rebelling against abortion as a social evil, Lenin considered only laws prohibiting abortion to be clearly insufficient to combat it. Moreover, he pointed out that under the conditions of capitalism, these laws only reflect the “hypocrisy of the ruling classes,” since they “do not heal the ills of capitalism, but turn them into especially malignant ones, especially difficult for the oppressed masses” (vol. XVI, p. 498 -499).
Only under socialist conditions, where there is no exploitation of man by man and where a woman is a full member of society, and the progressive increase in the material well-being of workers is the law of social development, can the fight against abortion be seriously launched, including through prohibition laws.
The destruction of capitalist exploitation in the USSR, the growth of material well-being and the gigantic increase in the political and cultural level of the working people make it possible to raise the question of revising the resolution of the People's Commissariat of Health and the People's Commissariat of Justice of November 18, 1920.
Necessary material support for women and their children, state assistance to large families, maximum development of a network of maternity hospitals, nurseries, kindergartens, legislative establishment of the minimum amounts to be paid by the father of the child for his maintenance during the separation of the spouses, on the one hand, and the prohibition of abortions - on the one hand. another, together with strengthening the punishment for malicious non-payment of funds awarded by the court for the maintenance of children and introducing some changes to the legislation on divorce, in order to combat a frivolous attitude towards the family and family responsibilities - these are the paths that need to be taken to resolve this big issue that affects everyone population of the issue. In this regard, the Soviet government is meeting the numerous statements of working women.
Wow thanks kapyla!
From what I've heard, US conservative groups like Focus on the Famiy were doing a lot of fucking around in the area leading up to dissolution and into the '90s. Any truth to that?
in russia it has historically been very similar to the rest of europe. heavy suppression of homosexual activity (criminalization of sodomy, especially in the army) in the imperial era but with a queer underground that existed in traditionally masculine spaces and brothels. the tsarist code of law was abolished after the revolution, and with it the anti-sodomy law, but unfortunately the medical/psychiatric structure of the RSFSR and the USSR as a whole was plagued by conservative views that pathologized queerness. this queerphobia in the psychiatric system lead to it being abused for finding extralegal means to repress homosexual behaviors in the 20s. this kind of changed with the first five year plan and trans people were given a little more legal leeway but in kind of a strange spot. trans people were often allowed to exist and transition legally, and in one case a trans woman was permitted by a local people's court in kazan to obtain a female name and documents stating she was a female. though it was seen more with the lens of "there's something psychologically wrong with these people, but letting them change their gender will treat some of that psychological pain". if you're interested in more about this, homosexual desire in revolutionary russia has a lot of historical information thats been translated from original documents, just be wary of the looming liberal ideology that the author sprinkles in there. just stick to the historical information in there and make your own conclusions.
Thank you for this book recommendation
Permanently Deleted
Since the fall of the Soviet Union Russia has only grown more reactionary with time
That's weird, I wonder what was keeping all the reactionaries out of power