ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the rapid emergence in the 1920s in Soviet Russia of queer subjectivities, shared predominately by working-class people belonging to the generation of those born at the end of the nineteenth century. Following the decriminalisation of male homosexuality in 1917, the 1920s was a period in which working-class queer Russians had for the first time the freedom to construct their sexual subjectivities and make sense of their sexual desires and behaviours with reference to the legal, political and, in particular, medical discourses circulating in Russia at that time. The chapter is based on an analysis of letters written to Vladimir Mikhailovich Bekhterev, one of the country’s leading experts on homosexuality, by working-class queer Russians, providing a unique insight into the influence of scientific discourse on homosexuality on the lives of ‘ordinary’ Soviet homosexuals.
