Red Closet: The Hidden History of Gay Oppression in the USSR

Having published an academic study of gay people in the Soviet Union, Alexander now shares his findings with a broader audience. His collection of true stories of gay life in the Soviet Union opens with a chapter about a young Scottish man who came to Moscow in 1932, attracted by both communist ideas and the lack of legal constraints on gay behavior. When gay sex among consenting males was criminalized the following year, he was so astonished that he wrote a letter to the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin asking for clarification of this sudden change of policy. He never got a response, but at least he was able to safely leave the Soviet Union. Other chapters recount the stories of victims of anti-gay legislation, from Vadim Kozin, one of the most popular Soviet singers of the 1930s, who spent years in the gulag, to unremarkable men and even one KGB officer jailed for their “sexual perversion.” During the looser decades that followed Stalin’s death, in 1953, a few legal experts dared to argue for the decriminalization of homosexuality. But it remained a criminal offense until 1993, two years after the collapse of the Soviet Union.