The Gulag Letters: The Soviet History of Gay Love

This essay complements Dan Healey’s research both in its use of new sources and on the conceptual level by reconstructing the story of a male couple, two composers, who lived together during the 1920s, a relatively liberal period for gay people in the USSR, and were separated in the 1930s following the reintroduction of the criminal article against homosexuality. Their previously unresearched extensive correspondence, written while one of them was in the Gulag and the other remained in Moscow, forms the core source base of this study, adding an intimate and profoundly human dimension to the history of homosexuality in the USSR. It shows how one of the first men charged under the article criminalizing homosexuality survived in the Gulag while maintaining relationship with a partner on the outside.