Yes, there were difficulties. One time we had trouble exchanging a hundred dollar bill at the train station and had a whole funny adventure trying to sell off some of our things to raise money to get out of the little town of Taiga in order to get to Tomsk. For our video project one of our goals was to look for women with experiences during Communism, which meant women of the older generation. We were introduced to an older woman in Tomsk who had been fired from her university position when her “sexual deviancy” became known, but she refused to do an interview even after agreeing to meet with us.
I wondered sometimes why I was involved in such a project. Was I imposing Western or U.S. perceptions of same sex relationships on these people? Tracy (who was not a lesbian) and I had lots of discussions on this subject and on the idea of labeling. Why do we do this? It has political roots, but some people, like the woman in Tomsk thought we were working in “a completely narrow context,” as she put it. I tried to convince her that we only wanted to capture life stories on film, not talk about her relationship or her orientation, but she refused.
When I translated to Tracy that the professor did not want her to set up the big camera, the professor said, ”You will never convince people that this [being gay] is okay. It will never be okay because it is against nature.” Ruled by her internalized homophobia, she lived quietly, secretly, with her partner and her partner’s mother. Nevertheless, she and her partner were lovely and generous people; they made us blinis filled with cheese, topped with sour cream, great herb tea and delicious cabbage and sausage. When her partner had to leave to go back to work, she took Tracy’s face in her hands and kissed both her cheeks. Disapproving, the professor said, “Why did you have to go and do that?” I stood up wanting to get my kisses too. Her partner said, “Because they are so beautiful,” and went off in a flourish.
I’d like to be writing a novel to be able to encompass all these feelings and conversations. My book may become something else in the end. In any case, my experience with Russia, my attempts to understand and listen to people and see how they think and live has broadened my own thinking. If anything I have become more open to change, more accepting of diverse ways of life. I have even loosened up about defining myself. I see more clearly how my own history and context influence me, my work, and my identity.
Yesterday I interviewed Sasha, an anesthesiologist at the Regional Hospital. I admired his openness. He told me he never wanted to go back into the closet again and he is even willing to risk death and imprisonment to be who he is, although he didn’t feel that way in his twenties when it was very risky to be open. He mentioned how Russians had been taught to see Americans as enemies and in general to blame others rather than take responsibility for things, to look for possible enemies everywhere, including in homosexuals. While he was saying all this, I thought how similar that was to our culture, the Cold War anti-communist mentality. He was only thirty-five and enjoying explaining himself. With his stutter, I worried I wouldn’t be able to translate his words correctly later.
Traveling through these Siberian cities has been fascinating. While I’d been to Krasnoyarsk before, watching Tracy marvel at the city and enjoy Siberia gave me a certain pride. We both really liked Tomsk, too. The queer community there was welcoming and helpful. I hoped to get back in the fall. Tomsk was full of charming wooden houses of all sizes interspersing the city. Did the city government decide to keep some and get rid of others or did they build the modern buildings among them in some grand design? There was a youthful upbeat spirit in Tomsk, probably because of the presence of the university, the first in Siberia, founded in 1888.
My favorite interview of all was with Oleg Kuzmich Raspopov of Novosibirsk, a man who spent 18 years in prison camp—three separate sentences; the last he opted for was a closed (prison) psychiatric hospital. He said he had made a mistake and that it turned out to be worse than any prison camp. He was a winsome person, warm, positive, and passionate. Fifty-five years old, he lived alone with his little dog Yasha. One-man shows were his passion before being sent to prison and he won numerous prizes. He seemed comfortable in front of the camera, a real professional!
Kuzmich had endless stories. We went back to him a second time because we knew he had more to say. I noticed that when he spoke about sexual relations in prison he used the word “lyubov”—LOVE. It wasn’t just sex for him. I actually teared up as we ended the second interview. When asked what message he wanted to send to others, he said with a dramatic flair, “I hope to live to see the day when we can openly socialize, meet our comrades and brothers in a club, admire each other and freely relax with each other—openly.” I knew how much I wanted to be allied with his way of thinking rather than with that of the woman professor.
One of Kuzmich’s violations was sex with underaged boys (under 18 in Soviet law). He was not however a pedophile. When he was a twenty-year-old, he may have had relations with a fifteen- or sixteen-year-old. He talked about his attractions to younger men but I did not get a sense any of this involved coercion. It disturbed me that I was talking with someone who may have taken advantage of young people sexually. However, his interview gave important insights into Russian prison life and the situation of Soviet gays. Of course, I don’t know exactly what happened, but I do think his lengthy imprisonment was unjust and discriminatory.
Of the video eight interviews Tracy and I did, there were two women: Tanya of Novosibirsk and Lusya of Krasnoyarsk. While I’m glad we spoke to them, we did want to find out more about LGBT attitudes and life problems during Soviet times but could not find women of the older generation willing to talk to us.
Tanya was Tatar by nationality who grew up in that minority culture. Her parents, while they were educated, ended up being servants for the Communist leadership who vacationed at the Novosibirsk Communist Party dachas. Tanya met her first girlfriend at that vacation place. Tracy and I walked with her as she told this story. We had problems coordinating the filming because of Tracy not knowing Russian. It was a wonderful walk down Tanya’s memory lane. I had to translate what Tracy needed to film, while interviewing Tanya. It was a challenge. Despite Tracy’s worries, it turned out to be great footage!
The other woman in our interviews was Lusya, who I first interviewed on audio three years prior (see “Siberians: Two Interviews”). After she and her partner Nadya split up, I visited Lusya several times in Krasnoyarsk. She works in a factory, considers herself transsexual or transgender. She doesn’t intend to get an operation or do hormones. I was happy to see that she was doing better than ever. I believe part of why she felt more confident was her connections with other sexual minorities. Isolation is the worst fate! She was ridiculed and bullied as a child for her German nationality and even called a fascist. Now she has a new girlfriend. At the end of our interview, they both sang while the girlfriend played the accordion.
In these interviews, the men often spoke of the terrifying roundups of gay men in all three Siberian cities—Novosibirsk, Tomsk, and Krasnoyarsk—as late as in the mid 1980s. The fear of constant police raids and being blackmailed and bribed and questioned has taken a psychological toll. The threat of incarceration was very strong in these communities. The imprisonment of gays was probably more widespread in Russia than anywhere else, just as their gulag in its time was a more extensive prison system than in any other country.