It was a hundred years ago this week. The first snows had just fallen on Petrograd lighting up the dark. The Bolshevik Revolution promised to transform the lives of gay men across the world. Russia became, for a moment, a shining ideal of liberation and equality. At a time when they were persecuted and imprisoned in Britain, Germany and America, gay men were at the heart of Russia’s Bolshevik revolution. Its idealistic leaders, Lenin and Trotsky offered a new world order of equality, opportunity and freedom, where gay men and lesbians would flourish.
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Despite enduring a gruesome civil war, the Revolution kept true to its word. The crowning moment for same-sex intimacy came in 1922 when the new Soviet criminal code decriminalized sex between men (women had never been criminalized), declaring that the state had no business in sexual matters, ‘as long as nobody’s injured, and no one’s interests are encroached upon’.
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Would the Revolution have survived without these gay men? They symbolized all the Revolution aspired to be. Trotsky and Lenin needed and wanted them. Trotsky even traded British hostages, including the British Ambassador, just to bring Chicherin back to Russia from Brixton prison in December 1917.
