As the contradictions of decaying capitalism sharpen, the bourgeoisie renounces its progressive and democratic gains and makes it impossible to fight for new freedoms in order to preserve its class rule.
Since relative overpopulation is a condition for capital accumulation, the capitalist class can resort to drastically pro-natalist policies when the rate of profit falls. This manifests itself in the attack on women’s rights and the accompanying idealization of the family and the consequent ideological attack on the rights of LGBT people.
The question of sexual minorities was not alien to Marxists. This work by the British communist Harry Whyte proves it. It was written in the form of a letter to Joseph Stalin in connection with the recriminalization of same-sex relations in the USSR. In it, Whyte not only defended the rights of sexual minorities, but also offered a historical-materialist explanation of bourgeois homophobia. In order to properly appreciate its significance, it is necessary to know its historical context.
From proletarian revolution to bureaucratic counterrevolutioni
The Bolsheviks abolished the Tsar’s anti-homosexual law less than eight weeks after the October Revolution of 1917. Under Stalin, the counter-revolutionary bureaucracy retreated from these revolutionary positions, criminalizing homosexuality again in 1933-34.
After October, the revolutionaries tried to study sexuality and gender, as they studied all social and economic relations, through a scientific lens. The Bolsheviks recognized that same-sex love hurt no one and that it was wrong to punish anyone because of their sexuality.
A historic breakthrough was the promulgation of the Soviet Criminal Code in 1922 and its amendment in 1926, in which homosexuality was not considered a crime. Only sex with youth under 16, male and female prostitution, and pimping were punished. Soviet law did not criminalize the person who prostituted themself, but those who exploited them.
Historian Dan Healey places this achievement in a broader historical context. “Soviet Russia was by far the most significant power since the French Revolution to decriminalize male same-sex relations, while Britain and Weimar Germany continued to prosecute homosexuals. Soviet health authorities courted the left-leaning sex reform movement headed by Berlin sexologist and homosexual rights campaigner Magnus Hirschfeld. Biologists and doctors chiefly sponsored by the Commissariat of Health began to investigate homosexuality as a scientific and medical phenomenon, often from sympathetic perspective”.
In 1923, the People’s Commissar of Health, Nikolai Semashko, went to the German Institute of Sexual Sciences and reportedly expressed his pride there that his government had abolished the tsarist penalties for same-sex love. He said that “no unhappy consequences of any kind whatsoever have resulted from the elimination of the offending paragraph, nor has the wish that the penalty in question be reintroduced been raised in any quarter.”.
The Bolsheviks attempted to replace mysticism and idealism with a scientific approach to all social and economic issues, including gender expression and sexuality, and what in modern nomenclature would be called „transsexuality”.
As Healey states: “Soviet psychiatry of the 1920s took an interest in women who convincingly occupied a male gender identity and in accordance with the evolving sexological categories of European science, labeled them ‚female homosexuals’ or occasionally, ‚transvestites.’”.
One of the most famous of these people was the soldier Evgenii Federovich M., born Evgeniia. In 1922, while serving in a regiment, Evgenii Federovich married a postal worker in a provincial town. When Evgenii’s biological sex was discovered, local authorities accused the marriage of a „crime against nature.” But the People’s Commissariat of Justice said the marriage was „legal, because concluded by mutual consent” Evgenii defended himself using the concepts of an era in which homosexuality and the intermediate sex were intertwined. He advocated the acceptance of „same-sex love (…) as a particular variation” of human sexuality, and stated confidently that once persons of the „intermediate sex” „no longer oppressed and smothered by their own lack of consciousness and by petty-bourgeois disrespect” their lives would become „socially worthwhile”.
Of course, it is difficult to throw off the centuries-old yoke of superstition in a short time. As Trotsky stated in another context: „Legislation alone does not change people. Their thoughts, emotions, outlook depend upon tradition, material conditions of life, cultural level, etc. The Soviet regime is not yet twenty years old. The older half of the population was educated under Czarism. The younger half has inherited a great deal from the older. These general historical conditions in themselves should make any thinking person realize that, despite the model legislation of the October Revolution, it is impossible that (…) prejudices (…) should not have persisted strongly among the backward layers of the population.”ii Conservative attitudes persisted. Decriminalization was also not uniform across the republics. In Soviet Azerbaijan in 1923, in Soviet Uzbekistan in 1926 and in Soviet Turkmenistan in 1927, laws were passed against sodomy and the keeping of „bachi” – cross-dressing boy prostitutes. For example, the penal code of the Uzbek SSR contained eight paragraphs against male homosexual relationships with others, adopted against „survivals of primitive custom.” Thus, a distinction was not made everywhere between homosexuality and sexual violence against children.
The negative phenomena were intensified by the poverty inherited from the tsarist regime and the period of civil war. The Soviet power was unable to create the material foundations for lasting progressive social changes. In addition, poverty forced unequal relations of distribution, resulting in a bureaucratic degeneration of Soviet power. At the same time, the new bureaucratic layer idealized the social conditions that brought it to power. Trotsky described the process as follows:
“The revolution made a heroic effort to destroy the so-called ‘family hearth’ – that archaic, stuffy and stagnant institution in which the woman of the toiling classes performs galley labor from childhood to death. The place of the family as a shut-in petty enterprise was to be occupied, according to the plans, by a finished system of social care and accommodation: maternity houses, creches, kindergartens, schools, social dining rooms, social laundries, first-aid stations, hospitals, sanatoria, athletic organizations, moving-picture theaters, etc. The complete absorption of the housekeeping functions of the family by institutions of the socialist society, uniting all generations in solidarity and mutual aid, was to bring to woman, and thereby to the loving couple, a real liberation from the thousand-year-old fetters. Up to now this problem of problems has not been solved. The forty million Soviet families remain in their overwhelming majority nests of medievalism, female slavery and hysteria, daily humiliation of children, feminine and childish superstition. We must permit ourselves no illusions on this account. For that very reason, the consecutive changes in the approach to the problem of the family in the Soviet Union best of all characterize the actual nature of Soviet society and the evolution of its ruling stratum.
It proved impossible to take the old family by storm – not because the will was lacking, and not because the family was so firmly rooted in men’s hearts. On the contrary, after a short period of distrust of the government and its creches, kindergartens and like institutions, the working women, and after them the more advanced peasants, appreciated the immeasurable advantages of the collective care of children as well as the socialization of the whole family economy. Unfortunately society proved too poor and little cultured. The real resources of the state did not correspond to the plans and intentions of the Communist Party. You cannot “abolish” the family; you have to replace it. The actual liberation of women is unrealizable on a basis of ‘generalized want.’ (…)
The triumphal rehabilitation of the family, taking place simultaneously – what a providential coincidence! – with the rehabilitation of the ruble, is caused by the material and cultural bankruptcy of the state. Instead of openly saying, “We have proven still too poor and ignorant for the creation of socialist relations among men, our children and grandchildren will realize this aim”, the leaders are forcing people to glue together again the shell of the broken family, and not only that, but to consider it, under threat of extreme penalties, the sacred nucleus of triumphant socialism.”iii
The conservative reaction was intensified by the effects of economic change in the 1930s. During the Second Five-Year Plan (1932-1937), it is estimated that approximately 82% of all new industrial workers were women. This resulted in a decline in the birth rate. The bureaucracy turned to old patriarchal „family values”, culminating in the criminalization of abortion in 1936. This ideological retreat also resulted in a backlash against other progressive developments in the sexual sphere.
On September 15, 1933, Genrich Yagoda, deputy chairman of the OGPU, proposed tightening the law against male homosexuality. In a letter to Stalin, Yagoda argued that state security was threatened by the establishment of „networks of salons, centers, dens, groups and other organized formations of pederasts, with the eventual transformation of these organizations into outright espionage cells. (…). Pederast activists, using the caste-like exclusivity of pederastic circles for plainly counterrevolutionary aims, had politically demoralized various social layers of young men, including young workers, and even attempted to penetrate the army and navy.”
The paranoia that Yagoda expressed in his letter resulted from the difficult situation of the bureaucratic stratum. During industrialization, the priority was the production of means of production, which meant neglecting the production of consumption goods. The resulting shortages were felt primarily by workers who were aware of the privileges of the nomenklatura. In the early 1930s, strikes, demonstrations and workers’ riots took place in Soviet industrial centers. Voices of support for Trotsky and Bukharin appeared at the rallies. The culmination of the wave of discontent was the anti-bureaucratic uprising in Vichuga in April 1932, in which several thousand proletarians took part.iv In September of the same year, the OGPU detected the Union of Marxists-Leninists (the so-called „Ryutin group”), an opposition organization that called for the forceful overthrow of the Stalinist leadership. At the turn of 1932 and 1933, a temporary coalition of various anti-Stalinist-communist groups was established.v
At the same time, the international situation of the USSR deteriorated after the Nazis came to power in Germany (which was at least partly the result of the sectarian policy of the Stalinist Comintern) and the Japanese invasion of Manchuria (which, according to the intentions of the Japanese militarists, was to be a beachhead to the attack on Siberia). The tense external and internal situation intensified paranoid moods among the nomenklatura.
Upon receiving Yagoda’s letter, Stalin handed it over to his Politburo associate Lazar Kaganovich, stating that „these scoundrels must receive exemplary punishment, and a corresponding guiding decree must be introduced in our legislation.”
In 1933-1934, the prohibition of male homosexuality throughout the USSR – punishable by five years in prison – was enacted without public fanfare. Of the eight Moscow trials of men accused of public homosexuality between 1935 and 1941, only one case in 1935 showed that the accused was aware of the new law.
People’s Commissar of Justice Nikolai Krylenko referred to the anti-homosexual law in his 1936 speech to the party’s Central Executive Committee as directed against „the remnants of enemies (…) who do not wish to admit that they are doomed by history to finally concede their place to us.” Thus, by reducing homosexuality to „bourgeois deviance”, the persecution of gays was included in the framework of the official theory of „exacerbating the class struggle under socialism.” It proclaimed that as the construction of socialism progresses, the few remnants of the overthrown property classes will fight more and more violently, which justifies the aggravation of terror (of course, all the classics of Marxism preached the opposite).
Not all communists agreed to official homophobia, however. One person who raised a voice of protest was the young British communist Harry Whyte.
Who was Harry Whyte?vi
Harry Whyte was born in 1907 in Edinburgh. His father worked as a painter and started his own business shortly before his son was born. At the age of 16, Whyte left school and started working as a journalist. Initially, he worked in the bourgeois press, but his humble background meant that his political consciousness gradually evolved to the left. In 1927 he joined the Independent Labor Party and in 1931 the Communist Party of Great Britain. He began working in „Russia Today” (an organ of the Society of Friends of the USSR) and „Daily Worker” (an official organ of the CPGB).
He soon moved to the USSR, where he worked at the „Moscow Daily News”, the English-language version of the daily „Moskovskie Novosti”. He distinguished himself as a shock worker and was admitted to the editorial board.
Whyte’s stay in the USSR coincided with the legal changes discussed above. He followed them with concern, because he was a homosexual himself, and among the first arrested were his friends. The Scottish communist conducted a number of consultations with psychiatrists on the state of scientific knowledge about homosexuality and with the officers of the OGPU and PC of Justice on the new law. Whyte considered it unjust and irrational to punish someone for an unchangeable innate trait. Tormented by doubts, he finally decided to write to Stalin asking for an authoritative statement on the matter.
In a letter to the General Secretary, Whyte outlined his reasoning, presented the position of Soviet science at the time, gave a Marxist analysis of the issue, pointed to evidence that homosexuals could be productive members of society, argued that they could be valuable communists and builders of socialism, and that they should be accepted even if it was possible to „cure” same-sex attraction.
Stalin never replied to the letter. He limited himself to a laconic comment written in pencil on the first page of the letter: “To the archives. Idiot and degenerate. J. Stalin”.
In 1935 Whyte left the USSR and was soon expelled from the party. In Great Britain, he took part in organizing medical aid for the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. He gradually became disillusioned with communism and returned to work in the bourgeois press. He spent the rest of his life as a foreign correspondent for various newspapers. In 1960 he died in Turkey, where he stayed as a correspondent for Reuters.
Harry Whyte was a young idealist with the makings of a good theoretician, but his failure to understand the process of bureaucratic degeneration of the USSR caused his disillusionment with the Soviet reality to alienate him from the cause of communism. It is a tragedy because his letter is a valuable Marxist work.
Whyte as a theorist of LGBT liberation
Whyte’s letter has its limitations. Understanding of LGBT issues has made significant strides in almost a century, and it would be unfair to accuse him of failing against modern standards.
In places, the idealism of the young Scotsman borders on naivety. For example, when he describes how, after the arrest of his friend, he voluntarily reported to the OGPU and confessed that he had participated with him in potentially illegal acts. Whyte didn’t get in any trouble then, but it’s hard to imagine a similar situation just 2-3 years later.
But this idealism is also a source of courage. Evaluating the change in law, Whyte states: “The law (…) stated that the Soviet government had renounced the principle of persecution of homosexuality altogether. Such a principle is fundamental and, as you know, the basic principles are not changed in order to adapt them to new circumstances. To change the basic principles to this end is to be an opportunist, not a dialectician.” This begs the question, who is the opportunist? Of course, the state and party leadership, including the addressee of the letter himself, previously addressed as „the leader of the world proletariat.”
Even more radical than his criticism of Stalinist homophobia is his criticism of bourgeois homophobia: “Even taking into account the differences in the legislation of different countries on this issue, can one speak of a specifically bourgeois approach to this issue? Yes, one can! Regardless of the laws, in its whole class tendency, capitalism is opposed to homosexuality. This can be traced throughout history, but it is especially evident now, in the general crisis period of capitalism.” (Italics mine.)
Whyte recognizes that lasting and real LGBT liberation is impossible under capitalism – and especially under the general crisis of capitalism – and can only be achieved against the bourgeoisie and after its overthrow. Since the only class capable of this is the proletariat, the fate of LGBT people must be tied to the revolutionary labor movement.
In his pamphlet on Leninvii, György Lukács considers the thesis about the actuality of the revolution to be the core of Leninism. Its premise is the entry of capitalism into a phase of decline. This fact means that the bourgeoisie has ceased to be a progressive class, and the democratic demands put forward by it in the past are possible to be implemented (or rather: dialectically overcome) only by the proletariat. The task of the proletariat, therefore, is to link (not voluntaristically, but in their objective connection) these bourgeois-democratic demands with the general task of overthrowing the bourgeoisie.
We see that Whyte’s reasoning follows this line; thus it is a Leninist approach to the LGBT issue. The historical tragedy of the LGBT movement lies in the fact that it emerged precisely in the era of capitalism’s decline. Hence, although in the abstract the postulates of the movement are completely compatible with capitalism, in reality its achievements have always been uncertain. For example: the first country where same-sex marriage became legal was the Netherlands in 2000; the first country where same-sex marriage ceased to be legal was Bermuda in 2018 – both of these historic events within one generation!
That is why, in times of general crisis of capitalism, when capitalists seek a demographic solution to it, when the darkest reaction viciously attacks the LGBT community, Harry Whyte’s work retains its relevance.
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Footnotes:
iThis section is mainly based on the work „Lavender and Red” by Lesie Feinberg (https://www.workers.org/books2016/Lavender_and_Red.pdf).
iiLeon Trotsky, „Thermidor and Anti-Semitism”: https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1937/02/therm.htm.
iiiLeon Trotsky, „The Revolution Betrayed: What is the Soviet Union and Where is it Going?”: https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1936/revbet/ch07.htm.
ivJeffrey J. Rossman „A Workers’ Strike in Stalin’s Russia: The Vichuga Uprising of April 1932”; [w:] Lynne Viola [red.] „Contending with Stalinism: Soviet Power and Popular Resistance in the 1930s”, CUP 2018 (https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/255/edited_volume/chapter/2131758).
vPierre Broué, „The ‚Bloc’ of the Oppositions against Stalin in the USSR in 1932”: https://www.marxists.org/archive/broue/1980/01/bloc.html.
viThis section is mainly based on the following articles: https://www.marxist.com/letter-to-stalin-can-a-homosexual-be-in-the-communist-party.htm; https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/communist-pioneer-gay-rights
viiGyörgy Lukács, „Lenin: A Study on the Unity of his Thought”: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/1924/lenin/
VOLLHANDFRÜHLING 