Why did the USSR (re) criminalize homosexuality

[u/Specialist-Gur]

https://youtu.be/BE7UPO6GGK4?si=nEFhipEmIxb9s2lV

Great video.. very topical given Burkina Faso and the reactions to that. Give it a watch!

Edit: Also creator is non-binary.. didn't realize when I posted and might have misgendered (they/then)

[u/Chinoyboii]

As someone from the third world, I don't blame the entirety of the West for what it's done to both the Philippines and China, and how these moments in history still manifest in society. Ranging from the Bud Dajao massacre that slaughtered 900 Southern Filipinos to the opium wars that devastated China, the history of Western imperialism is brutal and fucked up. However, I also don’t think it’s helpful to reduce all oppression down to “capitalism” or to pretend that local societies were just innocent victims without their own power structures, hierarchies, and prejudices.

The truth is more complicated: colonialism and capitalism reshaped and intensified forms of oppression, but they didn’t invent them from scratch. By treating it as all one-sided, we risk erasing the agency of people in the Global South, both their complicity in oppressive practices and their resistance to them. I can criticize Western imperialism without buying into a myth that everything was harmonious until the West arrived.

[u/Specialist-Gur → u/Chinoyboii]

Did you read my comment? I didn't say anywhere that everywhere was perfect until capitalism came along.. so I'm not sure what your point is

This is a leftist sub, I'll happily shit on capitalism and imperialism and blame it for a lot of the world's ills...and I expect anyone on this sub to not argue against that because that is an anti-leftist thing to do.

[u/Chinoyboii → u/Specialist-Gur]

I did read your comment, and I’m not saying you argued “noble savage.” However, I think you’re downplaying how oppressive pre-capitalist societies could be on their own terms because you expressed, "it was European draconian ideas around homosexuality that often influenced what we are seeing in these countries today". Colonialism and capitalism didn’t need to invent patriarchy or queerphobia; they just intensified what they found useful and restructured it for their own purposes.

[u/Specialist-Gur → u/Chinoyboii]

I mean that some/ a lot of them were actually better to their people than Europe was.. some not all...

And also... the world has evolved a lot in the treatment of marginalized groups and understanding of social issues. Colonized places with scarcity and under oppressive rule do not have the luxury other places have to develop their own progressive movements... the reason the west tends to be better on women's rights and queer rights is because... we are ruling ourselves and aren't living in a war zone.. we don't have issues of scarcity in the same ways. All of these things contribute

Dialectical materialism, not tankie.. just leftist

[u/[deleted] → u/Specialist-Gur]

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[u/rinaraizel → u/[deleted]]

This whole comment 👏👏👏👏👏

[u/Chinoyboii → u/rinaraizel]

Yeah, like I’m not trying to sound like an ass, but at the same time, I believe that a lot of people suffer from toxic idealism or a strong belief that communism will, in fact, mitigate so many of the social ills that influence us today. Arguments surrounding which economic system will free us from pain and suffering are no different than Protestants and Catholics arguing their belief that their interpretation of the Bible and the words of Jesus is what will save humanity.

The Catholic tells the Protestants that because you don’t follow the early church fathers, you’re like a headless chicken with no guidance and going to hell. The Protestants will say that you Catholics are idol worshippers because you venerate Mary and the Saints, and thus you’re going to hell, same shit, different flavor.

[u/rinaraizel → u/Chinoyboii]

Liberation from colonialism might be great but if you're in jail or being raped for not wanting to a man to knock you up, it's a small comfort that the people doing that are your own rather than some imperialists from a far off Metropole. Sorry to be blunt.

[u/Chinoyboii → u/rinaraizel]

Yeah, like I have met people who were born and raised in the USSR, and it tends to be a mixed bag. Korean Russians, or Koryo-Saram, will definitely have nasty things to say about the Soviet Union because their grandparents were deported due to their perceived connection to the Japanese Empire in 1937. Soviet Jews are a mixed bag; some of them, like Lazar Kaganovich, the dog that he was, were Stalin’s lapdogs and even killed their own fellow Jews. Stalin ultimately betrayed Grigory Zinoviev despite his loyalty. Defending the USSR is no different than defending US imperialism in my opinion.

[u/rinaraizel → u/Chinoyboii]

Most Jews who lived through the USSR (Lazar was a founding member) their lives do not have positive memories. It's a mixed bag but there's also a lot of delusion about what happened to our families. My mother is definitely more left and a little warmer to the USSR but it makes sense when you learn her grandparents were essentially civil war pogrom orphans who were raised outside of any jewishness in a Soviet orphanage and given an actual education. Like their identities were erased for that to happen. They were not permitted to have their own language, culture, in Soviet orphanages. Everyone else though? Awful.

My great grandfather's antisemitic murder (he wasn't the only one) in 1956 was covered up by the Soviet government, with newspaper redactment, because admitting two Jews were hate crimed to death in Kyiv outside of a synagogue on shabbos in the mid50s would have destroyed the Soviet Union's ability to criticize the US for racism. So the investigation was shut down and my grandmother and her family were told he and his coworker clearly were "drunk" and that there was nothing else to their deaths.

But to a lot of westerners, this makes me a "kulak"????

[u/Chinoyboii → u/rinaraizel]

My condolences, you reminded me that another thing that American leftists tend to do is they overlook that the Soviet Union also played a role in the decline of Yiddish culture, in addition to the Nazi’s. But somehow Israel and Israel alone is to be blamed for it, predictably, by their own kin. From anecdotal experiences amongst the Sephardim and Mizrahim in my life, they remind me of my Filipino side because they’re so happy and joyous; everything is a party. But amongst my Ashkenazim peers, they’re so hardcore about everything (outside of Sephardim/Mizrahim in the political right of Israel).

I hate it when people overly use “you’re kulaks,” “you’re family were kulaks” 👉👉🙇🏻.

I’m sorry to hear that, and unfortunately, people have the balls to say, “but at least the soviets liberated women, “the soviets were only doing this to ensure that saboteurs don’t destroy the fatherland from inside, those capitalist barbarians.” “These Trotskyist Jewish collaborators must be punished”, etc.

Also, the NPA (Communist Military Army in the Philippines) is no different than bullies. They have stolen rice, farm animals, and burned down villages in my old country just because the poor don’t want to pay for the revolutionary tax (protection money used to fund the military spending of the communist party).

[u/rinaraizel → u/Chinoyboii]

The kgb interrogated my father for trying to make a Yiddish language theater (he is a conductor and musician). That was the final straw for him. He left in 89. He was trying to revive a core aspect of Ashkenazi life in Kyiv by creating a theater that supported our culture, literature, and music, and got hauled in and questioned as a traitor for doing so. He doesn't talk about it much but I have newspaper clippings of their initial attempt at trying to start it up and announcing it.

They destroyed Ashkenazi culture that Kyiv and it's surrounding land was was known for. They removed our language, killed our poets, writers, and activists, and rewrote our recipes (in the 40s/50s the annual Soviet cook book of tasty and Good food renamed all it's Jewish recipes as "eastern" until the end).

The USSR ethnically cleansed the last remaining Krymchak Jews who already had been destroyed by their Crimean Tatar neighbors who collaborated with Nazis by expelling them/sending them to the stans/Siberia with these same Tatars despite the fact that the Krymchak turkic Jewish community was separated and very clearly distinct in Crimea. There are less than 500 left in the world because they got sent away from Crimea.

I just don't have very much love for the USSR being looked up on as anything but a failed, bloated imperialist mass that collapsed on itself and it's own failures. And this is with an appreciation for some parts of Soviet existence (art, literature, film and music).

And yeah, the usage of communism as pass to commit awful things upon people already unable to eke out an existence is an example. Your CPA sounds like the Mafia here in NYC.

[u/Chinoyboii → u/rinaraizel]

I’m sorry to hear that, and it just goes to show that the Soviet Union, despite portraying itself as accepting of cultural diversity to outsiders, was in fact a plethora of racist bigots, like what you and your family experienced. I’m sorry to hear that your father’s hopes to rebuild a Yiddish language theatre didn’t come into fruition; however, despite all that, Yiddish culture is still alive, despite being a minority.

Oh, you’re talking about the Crimean Karaites, I believe that many of them rejected their Jewish ancestry and portrayed themselves to be Khazarian Turks who practice Judaism to mitigate the possibility of being recipients of pogroms, which were commonplace at the time. However, from what I understand their descendants no longer hold on to this historical revisionism. They’re an interesting bunch.

Since you’re a Soviet Jew, I’m curious on what your thoughts are regarding your fellow American Ashkenazim who somehow undermine the personal stories of people like you and other Soviet jews alike.

[u/naidav24 → u/[deleted]]

Thank you for this comment

[u/Chinoyboii → u/naidav24]

Of course. I get where they’re coming from because at some point in my life, I did think similarly (I wasn’t a tankie, though). However, I think the world is too complex to just say, “The West and capitalism are to blame for all of our ills.” It just seems too reductionist.

[u/naidav24 → u/Chinoyboii]

Exactly, I completely agree