Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History

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Dan Healey's latest book offers a new take on the traditional academic monograph format while still delivering the meticulous scholarship and crisp argumentation readers have come to expect from his work. The main innovation is found in the book's structure, which features nine thematic and loosely chronological essays. Throughout each case study, Healey argues that modern Russian homophobia began in the Stalinist 1930s but did not proceed from there directly to Vladimir Putin's now infamous 2013 law, much as Western allies might want to believe. The introduction quickly establishes Healey's imperative for writing: the "memoryless accusations of homophobia" (5) unleashed by Western commenters in 2012–13, certain that Russian homophobia is both unique and timeless. The book's second innovation thus comes from the author's remarkable ambition (achieved, I would say) to reach both academic and general audiences, particularly Western LGBT activists who might mean well in wishing to help protest homophobia in contemporary Russia, but who are hampered by misunderstandings of Russia's historical peculiarities.

The book is divided into three main sections each with three essays: the first features case studies of Soviet queer history from the 1930s through the postwar era, including the Gulag, rural Leningrad Province, and the life of the persecuted queer singer Vadim Kozin. "Taken together," Healey writes, "these essays argue that the Stalinist anti-sodomy law of 1933–34 launched the modernization of the Soviet homosexual, stigmatizing queer men as political outcasts" (22). The second section moves forward in time to the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s to chart the surprising amount of activism and even some freedoms that characterized Soviet and post-Soviet Russian queer life before 2002. This section convincingly historicizes the post-2002 turn toward overt political homophobia by situating it as a backlash to the queer organizing of the 1990s, and in particular to gay men's attempts to publicly and visibly define their own spaces and identities in the wake of the 1993 decriminalization of sodomy. The final section is devoted to a welcome foray into sources and methodologies for Russian queer history, including discussions of the violence inflicted on the queer past by both archival silences and the potentially careless researcher. "Our questions need updating," Healey states, "our methods need queering, our frames of reference need greater sophistication." In part, doing so would "begin the project of destabilizing and undermining fixed notions of a 'traditional' heterosexuality—an invented tradition, now utterly politicized—in Russian history and culture" (194). This section in particular should be read by all graduate students training in queer [End Page 455] history—and ideally Soviet history students more broadly—as Healey draws on his deep experience with Stalin-era archives as well as with sources like Kozin's diary to confront the challenges, and indeed the political stakes, of queering the Russian past.

Russian Homophobia from Stalin to Sochi is a stunning accomplishment, filled with original research on topics as diverse as institutionalized sex and power dynamics in the Gulag camps, diary writing for a queer Soviet subject, and early 21st-century legislative debates. Throughout, Healey shows why he is the leading historian of Soviet sexuality writing today by demonstrating how fully understanding Soviet history—including the revolution, Stalinism, the war, urban and rural spaces, everyday life, art and culture, dissent and belief—means studying it through a queer lens. After reading chapter 1, for example, no Soviet historian should be able to write or teach about the Gulag without centering it as a site of both sexual violence and remarkable queer visibility (22). Historians of the Soviet century broadly construed, historians of sexuality in other geographical fields, and general-interest readers looking for a well-researched history of the current discrimination in Russia should all find Healey's book a must-read.

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Claire McCallum's first book is also a welcome addition to postwar history and Soviet masculinity studies. She investigates a wide variety of postwar art, focusing on how male bodies and the shifting "New Soviet Man" motif were represented and reproduced for the gaze of ordinary citizens. Created in the 1930s as an aspirational archetype of the early Stalinist gender regime, the New Soviet Man was "highly militarized, based on values of self-sacrifice and loyalty, where dedication to work and the well-being of the collective overrode any personal or private considerations, and demanded physical health and moral fortitude" (8). This definition was not static, of course, and McCallum uses a variety of visual mediums including painting, posters, and photography to demonstrate the complex shifts that this idealized identity underwent over the 20 years after the end of the war. In particular, she eschews the traditional political periodizations of the postwar era and finds the biggest changes to visual masculinity coming only in 1965, with the onset of official war commemorations under Leonid Brezhnev. Ultimately, McCallum argues for the primacy of the war—rather than de-Stalinization or the Thaw—as the experience that shaped masculine imagery in art until the mid-1960s.⁶ [End Page 456]

The first three chapters examine the effects of the war on three pervasive themes in visual culture: comradeship, war wounds, and death in battle. The final two chapters move to a parallel issue for postwar masculinity—fatherhood—and investigate visual motifs through the end of the Stalin era and the changes in those representations during de-Stalinization. The standout chapter is the second one, as it delves into disability history, a drastically under researched field in Russian and Soviet history.⁷ McCallum's argument here is also at its strongest, as she proposes that visual culture is a unique lens through which to view disability and ableism in the postwar era. As opposed to more honest portrayals in literature and film, representations of war wounds in painting demonstrate that even across the divide of 1953, "the fact that so many men returned home from the War physically disabled was studiously ignored" (19). McCallum posits that while novels, plays, and films could construct a plot arc to explain the protagonist's disability and potential rehabilitation, the visual arts made an immediate impact on the viewer. Disability required official explanation, it seems, and paintings and photographs did not have that luxury.⁸

Also very welcome is McCallum's focus on fatherhood in the second half of the book, a gendered category that has so far received little attention in Soviet history. She makes excellent use of photography as a visual art in this section, discussing how photographs of ordinary men spending leisure time with their children regularly ran in the pages of magazines such as Ogonek and Rabotnitsa, especially after 1953. These images visually challenged Stalin's paternalistic personality cult while implicitly dismissing the trauma of widespread fatherlessness in the postwar generation.

Much of the argumentation is chapter-specific, with each thematic site featuring its own timeline and points of change. For this reason, it should be easy to assign individual chapters to students. The book as a whole, however, could have sustained a stronger binding argument, particularly with such robust visual evidence and McCallum's talent for closely reading the pieces. That said, the complexity of the timeline cannot be overlooked as a strength [End Page 457] as well; postwar art has much to offer historians in disrupting our comfortable understandings of this era.

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Both books ask us to reflect on what masculinized subjectivity means in the Soviet context. How might we queer the viewer's gaze on the male forms in McCallum's art pieces, for example? Healey discusses gay male pornography in the 1990s as an empowering site for both producers and consumers. For McCallum, visual depictions of men's service in postwar proletarian art motifs might have placed the viewer as both subject and object, the body of a soldier built for heroism but also desire.

Moreover, historians of gender and sexuality must still further explore the links between masculinity, homophobia, and antifeminism. We need more work on the role of women's imagery as a perceived counterpoint for masculine virility and heroism in Soviet culture, and even more so, we need more work on lesbianism and women's sexuality. Healey devotes considerable attention to women who loved women where possible, in particular drawing on Francesca Stella's work on this topic.⁹ Ultimately, however, Soviet sexualities were most visible where they came into contact with the state—overwhelmingly the burden for gay men.

Together, both authors share an interest in McCallum's titular "fate of the new man." McCallum finds this early Soviet archetype alive and well but much changed by the experience of war. Soviet institutions, even in the art world, consistently protected the ideal of a particular militarized male form—defined by his service, his able-bodiedness, and, of course, by sex with women (implied by the emphasis on fatherhood). Beneath those visual cues, however, lived a plurality of masculinities and sexualities that Healey finds were just as active in Soviet (and post-Soviet) spaces, sometimes even with the government's tacit consent. Both books enrich our knowledge of gendered subjectivities under Stalinism and after, pose new questions, and encourage young scholars to continue pursuing new research in this field. [End Page 458]