How did the Soviet state govern sexual dissidence, and what forms of life, solidarity, and resistance did non-normative individuals build within that system? This lecture maps the overlapping legal, medical, and cultural frameworks through which successive Soviet regimes regulated homosexuality and gender nonconformity, from the Bolshevik sexual revolution of the 1920s through the Stalinist recriminalization of male homosexuality in 1933 and into the decades of late socialism. Drawing on archival sources, literary texts, and forensic and psychiatric records, the lecture traces both the instruments of state control and the everyday realities of those who navigated or defied them.

Special attention is given to the relationship between socialist ideology and European sexual science, and to the specific institutions, including the clinic, the courtroom, and the labor camp, through which the Soviet state attempted to define and discipline the boundaries of permissible life. The second part of the lecture turns to subjectivity and resistance, asking how individuals navigated these frameworks, and what the surviving documentary and literary record can tell us about queer experience under Soviet rule.

Dan Healey is Emeritus Professor of Modern Russian and Soviet History at St Antony’s College, University of Oxford, where he is also affiliated with the Faculty of History and the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies. His research spans the social and cultural history of sexuality, gender, and medicine in modern Russia and the Soviet Union. His books include Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia: The Regulation of Sexual and Gender Dissent (University of Chicago Press, 2001), Bolshevik Sexual Forensics: Diagnosing Disorder in the Clinic and Courtroom, 1917 to 1939 (2009), Russian Homophobia from Stalin to Sochi (2017), and The Gulag Doctors: Life, Death, and Medicine in Stalin’s Labour Camps (Yale University Press, 2024). He is co-editor of the special issue Sexual and Gender Dissent in the USSR and Post-Soviet Space, Cahiers du monde russe (2021).

Der Vortrag ist Teil der Vortragsreihe Prague Histories Forum, die gemeinsam von den Prager Außernstellen des DHI Warschau, des Collegium Carolinum und des GWZO Leipzig organisiert wird. In diesem Wintersemester 2026/27 widmen wir uns dem Thema „Gender & Queer in East Central Europe".

Alle Vorträge der Reihe finden Dienstags von 15:50–17:20 Uhr in der Kunstfakultät der Prager Karlsuniversität statt.

Venue: Špork Palace, Hybernská 3, Prague 1 | Room 303, attic floor

All of the “Prague Histories Forum” lectures will be accessible online via Zoom. Please register here:
https://maxweberstiftung.zoom-x.de/meeting/register/yq0DKEQFRjS4TW3N2dNDeA

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