Dmitri Levitsky, Portrait of E. N. Khruschova and Princess E. N. Khovanskaya. 1773. Oil on canvas. The Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia.
during the twentieth century, lesbian women and their sexuality and behavior came to the attention of Russian male legal minds, as well. However, the historiography of Russian attitudes to female same-sex sexuality is overwhelmingly the work of pious churchmen and “dirty medicos” as the philosopher and theorizer of “lunar love,” Vasily Rozanov, called the latter in his People of the Lunar Light (1911). (Rozanov’s idiosyncratic and provocative ideas about female homosexuality will be explored in detail in Chapter Four). Few, if any, of the Russian authors of lesbian women had an original or specifically Russian approach to the women they named variously “girlfriends,” “perverts,” “sodomites,” “selenites” (lunar women), “tribades,” and “female homosexuals.” The Russian clerics reiterated official Byzantine ecclesiastical views on female same-sex “sins” and the medical doctors and later, psychiatrists, drew heavily on the works of western European sexologists, especially nineteenth-century German ones.Because the various Russian writers on lesbian sexuality are largely dependent on foreign sources, and because the discipline or sub-specialty of sexology is, for Russian scientists, a wholly imported field of inquiry, one must be very skeptical about the importance to Russians, Russian women, or even Russian lesbian women of anything the Russian churchmen or doctors who wrote about or “studied” lesbian sexual practices in Russia had to say. Western scholars who have recently discovered, or re-discovered, the sources in Orthodox canon law and penitentials, Russian medical and legal literature on which this chapter is based, may themselves overestimate the value of what these sources can really tell us about female same-sex sexuality in Russia even during periods, such as the 1920’s, for which a relatively respectable amount of such scientific source material has been diligently brought to light. To paraphrase the famous British economist’s dismal view of human life, applying it to male-authored writings on female same-sex sexuality in Russian, they tend to be ‘nasty, sexist and short.’ They are also, in the main, of dubious applicability to real-life lesbian experience at any time. With these caveats, however, let us begin.
The Russian Orthodox Church was an extremely powerful institution in determining and sometimes regulating Russian cultural, social and personal life from the late-fourteenth-century beginning of the Muscovite Empire until the emergence of a secular state under Peter I at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The apogee of the Church’s patriarchal control over and regulation of the lives of Russian women was reached in the sixteenth century when every aspect of a woman’s life was at least theoretically prescribed by the Domostroi (Household Management), a manual of household management, which was informed by Russian custom and Orthodox teachings about women. Those teachings fundamentally viewed women as the source of evil, disorder, sedition and immorality in life and society if they were not controlled. As the Russian women’s historian, Pushkareva, concludes: “The requirements of Christian piety and virtue could easily become so constraining that they were oppressive” (Pushkareva, 104-05).
Officially, the Orthodox church viewed all sex, but especially sex involving women (whether with men or other women) as at best a necessary evil justified only for the production of children and for the most part, as a sin. For both men and women the Russian religious ideal was celibacy. More than one Russian holy man preached self-castration for the purpose of avoiding the temptations of the flesh. Perhaps the spiritual ideal of celibacy helps to explain why the two original non-medical Russian theoreticians of same-sex love, Vasily Rozanov and Marina Tsvetaeva (see chapter four) both stressed, in their respective justifications of same-sex (or ideal) love, the intense spiritual and chaste qualities of the majority (in their opinion) of same-sex intimacies.
So dangerous a force was female sexuality deemed to be that Russian clerics appeared tacitly, at least in the eyes of foreign observers, to condone or cast a blind eye on male homosexual acts, viewing such behavior as preferable to sexual intercourse with women outside of marriage. The Russian language has no native words for eroticism or sexuality, and Russian popular belief suggests that a righteous Orthodox man “would be more interested in food and drinks than in women” (Moyle, 221).
Russian Orthodox churchmen, like their western Catholic counterparts, did not on the whole consider female same-sex sexual activity a serious violation of canon law. Sex between adult women was viewed by the Russian Church as similar to masturbation. Nevertheless, ecclesiastical writings did deal with the issue, possibly because of the connection the Church made – also similarly to the West – between female same-sex sexuality, heresy and pagan rites. Although there is no evidence that Russian women were more oriented to paganism than Russian men, it does appear that women who might be considered “lesbian” today were, in medieval Russian ecclesiastical writings, occasionally referred to as “impious women” and accused of praying to female pagan divinities (e.g. the vily). Such a connection between “impious lecheries with women” and “praying to the vily” is made in one fifteenth-century penitential (trebnik)[2]The trebniki (plural form), or penitentials, were books for priests that contained the order of service of all ceremonies and rites except the Eucharist and the ordination of priests.: “If you have done any impious lecheries with women, prayed to vily, for that you are to observe a fast for one year” (Almazov, 161). The word translated here as “lechery” (blud) had two meanings in Old Russian: “debauchery” and “delusion” or “false belief.” Therefore, the injunction in this penitential can have in view both sexual debauchery and religious error, i.e. the worship of pagan divinities.
An early example of official Russian Church thinking on female same-sex sexual behavior occurs in a fourteenth-century penitential which raises putatively typical questions to be asked of women confesses by the priest confessor concerning masturbation and “amorous” relations between women. We can assume that these questions came from Byzantine penitential writings since in the fourteenth century there was as yet no Russian patriarchate and the order of service and all rituals were determined in Byzantium. (It is interesting that in the penitentials the noun used to name “female sexual partners of females” is podruga (woman-friend), a calque of the Greek hetaira, meaning “female friend” or “companion.” In Old Russian the word podruga had three meanings: a female friend, a spouse or wife, and a concubine – the last meaning occurs mainly in translations of the Bible). Among the numerous “questions for women” in the fourteenth-century penitential, the two that concern us here are listed after all possible issues of heterosexual relations have been treated. They read as follows:
The repetition of a general prohibition (in this case, against “unnatural” sexual acts) in different specific variants within a single penitential gives one indication of how widespread in the community of believers the sin being prohibited was. Therefore, the fourfold repetition of specific female same-sex or masturbatory behaviors in the following sixteenth-century penitential suggests that female same-sex sexual activity was not uncommon in medieval Muscovy:
In the above-cited and similar sexual prohibitions in the Russian Orthodox penitentials, there is a special emphasis on the sinfulness of orgasm (outflow, or expulsion of lust) as the desired outcome of solitary or mutual masturbation whether performed by same- or opposite-sex partners.
The prohibitions and penances for female same-sex sexual acts in Orthodox penitentials dating from the entire Muscovite period (14th-17th centuries) reveal that some ecclesiastics were aware of female same-sex sexual behavior and practices among the population of Orthodox women who confessed to them. From the relatively variegated and specific female same-sex sexual activities described in the penitentials, we can conclude that these behaviors were widespread and were viewed by the Church as a sin or vice similar in gravity to heterosexual “debauchery” on one hand and to religious delusion on the other. The association between allegedly covert all-female group worship of the vily and female same-sex “debauchery,” while speculative, still raises interesting questions about what if any sexual activity between women might have been part of religious rituals performed by women who continued as a community of worshippers to worship pagan goddesses.
The Russian Orthodox penitentials seem to make no distinction (in terms of seriousness of offense) between women who mount their female partners and women who are mounted. In other words, there is no delineation of so-called active and passive sexual roles for female same-sex partners. Medieval Russian clerics appear to view the woman who mounts and the mounted woman as equally debauched. This is illustrated in the phrasing of a late-fifteenth-century penitential: “Have you either mounted your female friend or allowed her to mount you?” (Almazov, 163). This penitential establishes a forty-day fast as penance for the woman who mounts her friend, the woman who allows herself to be mounted, and the woman who masturbates herself (“uses her finger in her own vulva”). Similarly, the same penance is given both to a woman who “mounts a married woman” and to a woman who indulged in the debauchery of anal intercourse (“debauchery through the rear passage”) with her husband. Still, there was little consistency in the Church’s punishments for female same-sex sexual acts. The light penances cited above are quite at odds with Article 59 of Law Code for the Laity (that is, the Russian translation of Emperor Constantine’s Law Code) which mandated flogging for any woman who was proved to have “sat astride” another woman, thereby assuming the male sexual role.
In trying to assess what the penitentials can tell us about how, and how much, women may have had sex with each other in medieval Russia, we have to keep in mind that confession did not play at all the same role in Russian Orthodoxy that it did in Roman Catholicism. The majority of Orthodox believers had a cynical attitude toward confession and did not trust the sanctity of the confessional. They were convinced that anything they said at confession would be reported to the authorities and therefore, they tended to hide their worst sins. In any case, confession was supposed to be voluntary, so the question format of the penitentials was more academic than practical. Confessors resorted to questions only when parishioners could no longer speak for themselves, for example on their deathbeds. Therefore, the penitential “questions for confession” concerning sexual sins of any kind may rarely have been asked of penitents, and if asked, may not have elicited answers. They reflect merely the official attitudes of a small number of Orthodox Church authorities, first in Byzantium, then in Moscow.
The questions in the penitentials do suggest, however, that throughout the medieval period, the Russian Orthodox Church sought to make its village priests at least theoretically aware of the existence of homosexual activity among Russian women of all classes and of the fact that such activity was to be encountered among both married and unmarried women. In seventeenth-century Muscovy, relatively open female same-sex “play” or “games” between unmarried women were common and viewed by the Church as sinful, no doubt, but also a passing phase and even a prelude to marriage. The penitential literature characterizes such behavior as maidens “playing in a sinful or illicit manner with their girlfriends ‘as if they were men’,” but they consider such sin equivalent to “a maiden kissing young men lustfully” (Almazov, 169). Clearly in medieval Russia as far as the church was concerned, sex itself was the sin, not the sex of the sinners.
Other than the penitential literature from the 14th-17th centuries that I have reviewed and brief segments of canon law, there appear to be no written sources concerning female same-sex erotic play or sexuality in Russian (outside of a handful of nineteenth-century literary works, such as Dostoevsky’s Netochka Nezvanova and Leskov’s Night Owls, to cite the most glaring examples) until the late nineteenth century. The fact that this “forbidden” subject found its way into print and public discourse at that time, mainly in the writings of legal and medical authorities, is due in part to the emergence of law and medicine as professions in Russia only in the aftermath of Alexander the Second’s reforms of the 1860’s. Interestingly, and again in marked contrast to Western Europe, the Russian women’s liberation movement of the last third of the nineteenth century had no visible lesbian contingent. Russian feminism joined forces with radical populism and nihilism and as Simon Karlinsky has noted, homosexuality was anathema to all Russian radical and revolutionary movements. So it fell to Russia’s professional men, lawyers and doctors, to formulate and debate what might be called the Russian woman-plus-woman question. This meant that lesbianism found its way into public discourse in Russia largely as a corollary to issues such as female criminality, prostitution and disease.
Despite the efforts of Russian jurists and physicians to keep up professionally with western sexology, the fin-de-siècle medical preoccupation with female homosexuality seems to have been a Western concern more than a Russian one. Only one Russian study of lesbianism (or tribadism, to use the term preferred by the author of the study) is extant: Perversion of Sexual Feeling in Women (1895) by Dr. Ippolit Tarnovsky, a gynecologist. As the historian Laura Engelstein notes, Tarnovsky’s work is sui generis, “a Russian example of a clinical genre pioneered by physicians in the West” (Engelstein, 813).
Engelstein argues that the Russian neglect of female homosexuality may have been even more extreme than Europe’s. While she advances a number of interesting social, cultural and political theories for the unwillingness of nineteenth-century Russian physicians “to stigmatize sexual perversion as socially and organically pathological –at least in regard to women,” I believe there may be another explanation for the Russian doctors’ restraint in dealing with female same-sex sexuality. Their apparent disinterest in lesbianism strikes me as similar to what Judith Brown has shown to be a general neglect of lesbian sexuality in the law, theology and literature of medieval and early modern Europe. Brown argues that such neglect “suggests an almost active willingness to disbelieve” (Brown, 69).
Dr. Tarnovsky’s interest in “tribades” and their sexuality makes him unique among his Russian medical colleagues, but it does not distinguish him in any way from his Western European peers and forerunners. For example, Tarnovsky begins his investigations and physical examinations of “organic tribades” (i.e. women whose sexual object choice of women appears to him inborn), working on the assumption that these women’s sexuality must be explained by some physiological abnormality, specifically, their possession of an organ resembling a penis. Here, Tarnovsky is approaching the “problem” of lesbian sexuality in the tradition of the eighteenth-century Italian cleric, Lodovico Maria Sinistrari, who, working with the definition of sodomy as “carnal intercourse in the wrong vessel,” and attempting to solve the problem of “’how one woman can lie with another in such a way that their rubbing against each other can be called Sodomy,’” concluded on the basis of the latest [early 18th century] medical treatises, “that only those women who had an excessively large clitoris could engage in sodomy with each other” (quoted in Brown, 74). From the phallocentric conviction that there can be no genuine sexuality, normal or abnormal, natural or unnatural, between partners unless one of them possesses a penis or penis-like organ, there arose the hypothesis that women who were capable of committing “unnatural” sexual acts upon other women must of necessity be physiological hermaphrodites.
Tarnovsky undertakes his initial gynecological examinations of “tribades,” most of who were women under arrest for violent crimes who also had a history of sexual relationships with other women, in an effort to prove or disprove the theory of his day that such “organic tribades” were physiologically different from “normal” women. His examinations lead him to conclude that even organic tribades are physically normal in every way. Therefore, he is able to lay to rest scientifically, he believes, the early modern theory that women-loving women were/are in effect hermaphrodites. He also argues against the theory popular in the European medical community of his own day that lesbianism is a manifestation of moral degeneracy and criminality.
While Tarnovsky’s treatment of lesbian sexuality lacks the element of moral condemnation that characterizes many ecclesiastical writings on the subject and while it does not treat lesbianism as a pathology or a crime, it differs little in the main from other European and Russian late-nineteenth-century professional writers’ views. Tarnovsky himself frequently cites the works of well-known western sexologists, especially De Mothe and Kraft-Ebbing. Despite his claims for the authenticity of his own case studies of non-criminal lesbian women, there is no hard evidence that the women whose sexual lives and habits he describes from his clinical practice were actually “real” women. Perhaps the most mysterious unanswered question about the lesbian informants in Tarnovsky’s study is: What induced these unnamed women, whom the doctor himself argues are among the “most secretive people in the world,” to tell Tarnovsky the most intimate details of their personal lives? Unique as it may be among Russian writings on female same-sex sexuality, Perversion of Sexual Feeling in Women must be approached with extreme caution as a source of information on the lives and sexuality of real Russian lesbian women of the 1880’s and 1890’s. It can, however, be read with profit, as I shall demonstrate here, for what it implies about one late-nineteenth-century Russian physician’s apparent obsession with lesbians, whether real or imagined from books and personal fantasy.
On the whole, Tarnovsky’s opinions about lesbians reflect turn-of-the-century medical stereotypes. He distinguishes two types of “tribades,” active and passive, and affirms the widespread medical opinion of his day that the truly “inborn tribade” is always “active” while “passive tribadism” is not inborn, but acquired, usually beginning with the practice of masturbation in childhood. In sum, Tarnovsky believes that mature passive tribades are hyper-feminine and active tribades feel they are males in female bodies. This feeling, which today might be read as a sign of trans-sexual identity, does not necessarily find a reflection in the woman’s appearance due to the fact that active tribades are among the most secretive people in the world and are very successful in hiding their feelings from everyone except passive tribades.
In a word, Tarnovsky’s “typical” lesbian pair is composed of what some people today would call a femme and a stone butch. Convinced that the majority of active tribades allow no touching of their own genitals during sex and reach orgasm through seeing their partners in ecstasy from their lovemaking, Tarnovsky would disagree with the medieval churchmen who made no distinction between active and passive ways of achieving “outflow”. Any but the most naïve reader begins to suspect that the lesbian women in Tarnovsky’s clinical practice might not have been entirely forthcoming, however, when she reads his assertion that “cunnilingus is very rarely practiced and when it is, then it occurs only among prostitutes or professional tribades” (Tarnovsky, 134). On the other hand, with this statement Tarnovsky affirms the existence of Russian public women (“professional tribades”) who apparently serviced female clients, not only in St. Petersburg, but “in other large cities in Russia” (Tarnovsky, 122).
Tarnovsky states that “tribadism is rife in whorehouses” (125) and in women’s prisons, for which latter phenomenon he gives the standard explanation: “The simple impossibility of women’s having sex with men” (Tarnovsky, 126). It is obvious that Tarnovsky knew nothing of the well-documented cases of sexual relations between men and women in Russian prison camps, a fact of life reflected even in nineteenth-century Russian literature, for example, Leskov’s story, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District (1865). Tarnovsky’s faute de mieux explanation for lesbian activity in female prison populations would seem to be based as much on his bookish sources and personal fantasies as on the facts of life in Russian prisons.
Other of Tarnovsky’s explanations , for example his opinion that “every potential homosexual woman manifests masculine tendencies in her childhood” (128), reiterate prevailing medical and even popular opinion of his day. A homosexual girl, Tarnovsky argues, reaches a true understanding of her sexuality only later in life “when, with the development of an abnormally directed sexual drive, other masculine tendencies emerge in her instinctually; only then does the idea enter her mind – is she not in fact really a man?” (Tarnovsky, 130) While somewhat unconventional in insisting that “active homosexual women” (131) are externally in no way different “from ordinary women,” Tarnovsky falls back on prevailing cultural models of lesbians in concluding that “the main defining peculiarity” of an active tribade is her “aversion to men” (131). Again, one notes that Tarnovsky’s conclusion not only echoes contemporary medical opinion of his day in Europe and Russia, it also contradicts several centuries of official church teaching on female same-sex sexual practices and “play.”
Perhaps the most valuable aspect of Tarnovsky’s book lies in the bits and pieces of information he conveys that do seem to provide an extremely rare and arguably credible glimpse into the lives and interactions of late-nineteenth-century lesbian women in Russia when they were “among their own kind,” as Tarnovsky terms what may have constituted informal groups in a kind of urban lesbian sub-culture. There is some independent first-hand evidence that such groups existed in the pre-World-War-I era, for example the comment in the notebooks of the poet Marina Tsvetaeva concerning her lover, Sophia Parnok, an un-closeted lesbian, and “her whole [Moscow] female circle.” Although there is to my knowledge no evidence that might confirm what Tarnovsky reports about the behaviors of the “tribades” in St. Petersburg he is personally acquainted with is accurate, or that it reflects a concrete social reality, I believe that some of his observations ring true. The following four passages from Tarnovsky’s book seem to sound a note of authenticity about lesbian life amidst the conventional symphony of medical stereotypes that resonates from his work in the main.
Unfortunately, the quasi-insider observations about lesbian women as people tend to get lost in the tedious case studies Tarnovsky cites from both European and Russian legal literature that provide the bulk of what he knows about tribadism. These case studies deal with Russian women who have committed crimes or are certifiably insane, and even Tarnovsky tacitly acknowledges the limited usefulness of such criminal and pathological women who also happen to be tribades for learning about the sexuality of non-criminal, mentally and physically healthy lesbian women. On the whole, Tarnovsky’s case studies of lesbians add a Russian variant to the anti-lesbian genre of pronouncements of doctors and magistrates on the “proliferation of tribades in bordellos and prisons,” which provide evidence not of lesbian sexuality but of “the fascination that the lesbian exerts on the … male imagination” (quoted in Burgin, “Laid Out in Lavender,” p. 323, n. 2). This lesbophobic fascination has proved more enduring than Tarnovsky’s book, which is hardly known in Russia today and would not deserve the attention I have given it were it not for the fact that in twenty-first-century so-called “scientific” as well as general attitudes to female same-sex love differ little from those expressed by Tarnovsky and his fin-de-siècle European colleagues.
In the aftermath of the 1905 Revolution there was a tendency for those few Russian jurists and medical men who dealt with lesbianism to associate it with prostitution. The theory that lesbianism was an attribute of the sexual pathology of prostitutes was popularized in Europe by Cesare Lombroso, the founder of the field of criminal anthropology. According to Lombroso, lesbians like prostitutes manifested pathological symptoms of promiscuity, sexual insatiability and exhibitionism. As Laura Engelstein has demonstrated in The Keys to Happiness, Lombroso’s Russian disciples, Pauline Tarnovskaia and her husband, Veniamin Tarnovsky, supported Lombroso’s view that degeneracy, of which prostitution and lesbianism were prime indicators, created a class of inborn criminals. Nevertheless, the husband-and-wife Tarnovsky’s tended to ignore lesbianism in their studies of Russian prostitutes.
Tsarist law put no restraints on two women having sex, and this possibility was rarely discussed. In the criminal cases involving lesbians that Ippolit Tarnovsky highlights in Perversion of Sexual Feeling in Women, there is no legal or medical attempt to link the defendants’ violent crimes with their sexuality. They found their way into Tarnovsky’s research because they were prisoners who acknowledged having sexual relations with other women. As prisoners, they had no choice but to submit to gynecological examinations.
There are only a few references to lesbianism in the legal and public discourse of pre-World-War-I Russia. In his Crimes of the Flesh, V.D. Nabokov claimed that lesbianism was more common in Russia than sodomy, yet ignored by the law. A 1907 pamphlet written by I. Kankarovich asserted that Russian prostitutes offered lesbian services to idle upper-class women who were bored with normal sex. (The existence of public women whose clientele included women is alluded to, interestingly enough, in a poem of the lesbian poet, Sophia Parnok, where the poet speaker addresses a prostitute she has pleasured: “And here from a thousand nights you’ve sold / is one night you’ve given to me” (Collected Poems of Sophia Parnok, No. 47)) Finally, another Silver Age commentator, Dr. B.I. Bentovin, in his 1907 book Body for Sale. Sketches in Contemporary Prostitution, offers the opinion that some older prostitutes were inclined to lesbianism and slept with young recruits as a way of preparing them to accept female as well as male clients. Like many members of the pre-war professional intelligentsia, Bentovin was convinced that lesbian love was the preserve of the well-to-do classes and had no adherents among the Russian peasantry. Put in the context of such idealization of the peasantry, Tarnovsky’s unequivocal statement that sexual deviation occurred in all classes of Russian society does indeed seem a radical and original opinion.
In the early Soviet period and throughout the 1920’s same-sex acts between women attracted significant legal and medical attention for the first time in Russian history. The term “homosexuality” acquired broad usage in the literature and “female homosexual” was the name of choice, far more popular than “lesbian,” which was rarely used in psychiatry. Doctors diagnosed female homosexuality on the basis of gender nonconformity in dress, manners, gait, gestures, and choice of occupation. A doctor also tended to look for a pattern of sexual development in the patient that differed from what he considered “normal.” Most Russian doctors at this time did not distinguish transvestitism from homosexuality. For the Soviet psychiatric profession, as, one surmises, for most of the general public, acting, dressing and speaking “like a man” was the most significant marker of possible homosexuality in a woman.
In his book Sexual Crimes (1927), the criminologist L.G. Orshansky begins his description of the typical “mannish lesbian” by asserting that the sexual object choice of such a woman is “unnatural” in the same way as a necrophiliac’s. He states that “the number of homosexual men and women is apparently greater than is commonly supposed, but the men reveal their homosexuality more easily and aggressively while the women hide theirs under the appearance of friendship” (Orshansky, 85). The rest of Orshansky’s typology of lesbians, which was summarized at the end of chapter one, is somewhat updated, but essentially recycled Tarnovsky et al.
By the 1920’s all medical authorities in the Soviet Union has rejected the idea that the sex organs of female homosexuals differed in structure and physiology from other women’s. Homosexuality was now considered not a physical pathology but a psychological one with the result that Russian psychiatric literature of this time delineated the putative homosexual personality. Such a personality was thought to be characterized by tendencies to extreme emotions (especially jealousy) and violence. Researchers’ accounts of female homosexuals which often claim to be reporting verbatim the subject’s own words but never actually quote them, emphasize the women’s violent feelings. Since a significant number of the lesbians studied by psychiatrists were also women under arrest for violent crimes, however, the linkage between lesbianism and a proclivity for violence in such a sample appears almost tautological.
The lack of objectivity and critical thinking that beset these scientific studies of female homosexuals in the Soviet 1920’s at times simply boggle the mind. For example, a forensic psychiatrist, N.P. Brukhansky, studying a love affair between two women, analyzes it on the basis of his own interpretation of their putative love letters to each other. He provides no evidence that the love letters actually existed. In a study of a transvestite woman, Evgeniia Fyodorovna M., a certain Dr. Edelstein quotes at length from a diary he claims was written by Evgeniia herself in order to illustrate her typically homosexual emotionality and psychopathic mentality. It would be difficult to argue with Edelstein since Evgeniia Fyodorovna’s account of her illness does not exist as a text independently of her doctor’s quotations from it in his article, 40% of which is made up of Evgeniia’s words. It could be that Edelstein doctored his patient’s text more effectively than he doctored his patient. How much of her “own account” this female homosexual wrote is impossible to say.
What can be independently verified is Evgeniia Fyodorovna’s status as a transvestite. She dressed as a man, altered her identity documents by changing her name to Evgeny Fyodorovich, apparently fell in love with a female colleague in the office where she worked and concluded a registered marriage with her lover in 1922, after which the couple lived together as man and wife. “In short order, the management in the work-place insisted that the two women put an end to this scandal, but the women refused, claiming that their intimate lives were nobody’s business but their own. … The employer brought his complaints to the local prosecutor and Evgeny/Evgeniia was charged with an unspecified ‘crime against nature’” (Healey, 83).
The Canadian scholar, Dan Healey, who has made available to Western researchers much interesting archival material (like the Evgeny/Evgeniia story) that documents Soviet psychiatric and legal attitudes to female homosexuality in the 1920’s, notes that the psychiatric literature contains several examples of women who passed as men in the manner of Evgeny/Evgeniia. Healey argues that “masculinization [i.e. dressing in men’s clothes—DB] was a strategic choice adopted by some women in order to reconcile their sexual and personal identities in the uncertain atmosphere of post-revolutionary Russia” (Healey, 89). This may be correct, but I wonder if Healey is not interpreting these Soviet women’s behavior somewhat anachronistically. Phrases like “strategic choices” and “sexual and personal identities” seem to me to have little relevance to the lives of Soviet female transvestites and/or lesbians of the 1920's. Leaving aside for the moment the very complex and often unknowable relationship between sexual orientation and transvestitism in the long history of women passing as men, I question whether a Russian lesbian woman of the 1920’s would consider her sexual predilections or tastes to be an identity. My research into the lives of several lesbians of that time such as Sophia Parnok, Faina Ranevskaya, Olga Tsuberbiller, Anna Barkova and others has convinced me that Russians do not conceive of “identity” the way many westerners do, especially nowadays. Due mainly to “the uncertain atmosphere of post-revolutionary Russia,” Soviet women and lesbian women of that time in particular would have been careful to guard the privacy of their intimate lives in order to keep the authorities and an intrusive government out of those lives. Therefore, I think the “strategic choice” a 1920's Russian lesbian would have made if she wished to reconcile the realities of life with her personal tastes would have been to standardize her appearance and manners in order to blend in and not appear “un-standard.” Lesbian or non-lesbian, Russian (and not only Russian) women generally observed and observe the dress code that prevails in their specific social and professional milieus in order to protect their privacy and individuality. For this reason, I believe case studies like Evgeny/Evgeniia’s to be more exceptional than typical if only because they drew the attention of social scientists. The majority of women with variant tastes were doubtlessly more successful in not getting studied.
In his article on “Evgeniia/Evgenii” Healey also discusses one new approach to homosexuality in the 1920’s that had strong proponents in the Soviet Union – namely the glandular etiology of homosexuality. This endocrine theory seemed to dovetail perfectly with the Marxist-Leninist dogma that man alone was master of his fate, had the power to shape and change nature and that the only reality was material, scientific, objective reality. The newly-born Soviet state had its homegrown Eugene Steinach (an Austrian biologist who pioneered the endocrine theory of homosexuality) in the person of the botanist Michurin who was doing remarkable experiments in cross-breeding vegetables to produce new hybrids.
The above-mentioned Steinach had made surgical attempts “to cure” male homosexuality through testicular transplantation. Such surgical procedures were made mainly on male homosexuals, but one instance was recorded of an attempt at curing a lesbian in Russia by means of “hetero-transplantation.” In 1928 a Dr. Ia.I. Kirov at Kharkov University implanted sections of pig ovaries under the right breast of a 27-year-old peasant woman, Efrosiniia V., who was persuaded to submit to the operation by Dr. Kirov himself.
Russian forensic psychiatrists who studied and wrote about female homosexuality in the 1920’s like their western European peers and like their forerunner, Dr. Tarnovsky (whether they knew his work or not), continued to consider active, or congenital female homosexuals to be gender-transgressive women. In the psychiatric literature of the 1920’s gender misidentity and transgression of gender-role norms became firmly associated with female same-sex sexuality. Healey notes that the “forensic psychiatrist Brukhansky … displayed concern about gender misidentity and associated it closely with same-sex desire. Valentina P., who murdered her former lover in 1924, ‘always wore masculine dress and a cap’ and only consented to wear a skirt when her lover, Olga, asked her to. … Valentina did not know a single feminine needlework skill [pace Nadezhda Durova!—DB] and preferred men’s work… She carried herself with ease and bravado, her manners were rough.’ Another lesbian described [by Brukhansky] passed as a man, working in a post office under a man’s name, and her male persona…was evidence for Brukhansky that she was a homosexual” (Healey, 89-90).
Psychiatric and legal interest in female (and male) homosexuality in the Soviet period came to an abrupt end in 1934 when male homosexuality was re-criminalized. The active promulgation of Stalinist “family values” began in earnest two years later when abortion was banned and divorce was made much more difficult to obtain. Virtually nothing was written, studied, spoken, or perhaps even whispered about lesbianism for the duration of the Stalin era and beyond until the 1980’s. After 1934 homosexuality officially did not exist in the USSR. Lesbian women camouflaged themselves as passive actives or so-called normal Soviet female citizens.
The reverberations of the long and obdurate Soviet silence on homosexuality can still be heard today, in the post-Soviet era. In the introduction to his book, Lunar Light at Dawn: Faces and Masks of Same-Sex Love (1998), the title of which plays upon Rozanov’s 1911 theory of same-sex love as lunar love (see chapter four), the sociologist Igor Kon, a pioneer in Russian gay studies, makes clear one cost of silence: “This book is the first work of its kind in Russia. It is written for the general reader with a high school education. However, it is based on the study of a huge body of specialized writing in various fields of knowledge… Since this theme was suppressed in our country for many years, I was forced to make use predominantly of foreign sources. … In order to avoid being modishly “Americo-centric,” I have tried to compare American research data with the facts and conclusions of European studies.” (Kon, 6).
The subject of Kon’s book is not homosexuality in Russia (though one chapter is devoted specifically to that theme with about sixteen pages more specifically focused on female homosexuality in Russia from the turn of the twentieth century until the present. In keeping with the clearly educative goals of his study, Kon describes the theme of his book as “same-sex love as a cross-cultural phenomenon common to humanity” (Kon, 6). The purpose and publication of a book like Kon’s in 1998 speaks volumes about the state of the general Russian public’s awareness and knowledge of homosexuality in its historical and cultural contexts. As Kon notes, “Soviet society was distinguished by extreme intolerance of any kind of nonconformity and uncommon behavior, even of an absolutely innocent sort. Homosexuals were the most stigmatized social group” (Kon, 319). A poll of 7th-9th graders in sixteen post-Soviet schools done in 1997 suggests that tolerance of homosexuals may be increasing in Russian society, especially among the young. Asked to indicate their agreement with the statement, “Homosexual relationships should not be condemned, they are purely a personal (i.e. private, not societal) matter,” 37.7% of the boys and 53% of the girls in the sample agreed wholeheartedly, 17% and 19% said they agreed more than not. Overall, the adolescent respondents in the sample appeared to be two to three times more tolerant of homosexuality than their parents (Kon, 321).
At the beginning of the 1990’s, a western-style gay and lesbian rights movement got started in Russia though it was confined for the most part to Moscow and St. Petersburg. One of the lesbian activists in this Russian gay liberation movement, Olga Zhuk, has the honor of publishing the only book by a Russian woman devoted wholly to female same-sex love. Entitled Russian Amazons. The History of the Lesbian Subculture in Russia in the 20th Century (1998), Zhuk’s work is most useful for its second part which brings to light previously unknown primary source material on the lesbian subculture in the Soviet prison camp system. Zhuk’s research reveals that so-called lesbian “families” were not an uncommon phenomenon in women’s prison camps. Such lesbian couples were invariably composed of a Tarnovsky-style stone butch and femme, whose respective sexual roles in the family unit they comprised were fixed and unchanging: the butch partner was masculine and took an active role in sexual and lifestyle matters, and the femme partner was feminine and took a passive, totally submissive role. The prison administrations were generally ineffective in breaking up lesbian families and preferred to use the lesbian subculture for their own purposes. Camp secret police investigators often used the threat of allowing suspects to be made into lesbians by the violence-prone “butches” in the prison population to extract information from them or get them to become informers.
The western-inspired and partially financed Russian gay and lesbian liberation movement of the 1990’s was short-lived and had little success in rallying Russians to the cause of so-called “sexual minorities.” Kon believes part of the problem lay in the movement’s “uncritical imitation of the American gay and lesbian movement” (Kon, 329). He also notes that most Russians, including gays and lesbians, are uncomfortable with the idea of the politics of the personal. They regard their sexuality as private and prefer not “to force their private life out into the public arena” (Kon, 329). The notion of a “gay identity” is also alien to many Russians, according to Kon, not to mention issues of “identity politics.” As one Russian gay man commented to an American journalist, and his sentiments have been echoed by Russian lesbians: “’I don’t want to belong to any subculture. I know that that’s fashionable in the West, but the fact that I prefer to sleep mostly with gay men doesn’t mean that I want to spend time and socialize mainly with them’” (quoted by Kon, 330).
We have seen, then, that Russian attitudes to female same-sex sexuality, regardless of who expresses them – churchmen, laymen, scientists or spies – have not in essence changed over time. Today’s Russian lesbian women (or rose women), while rejecting the moral condemnation and pathologizing impulses of the clerics, physicians, scientists and shrinks who have studied and written about the sexuality of Russian roses, under different names, since the 14th century, would probably agree more than disagree with the selfsame attitude expressed by all Russian authors of lesbianism: namely, lesbianism is not an identity, not a way of life, not a political issue, but an inborn preference or predilection for sleeping with roses.