Dan Healey's Russian Homophobia from Stalin to Sochi investigates the histories and roots of anti-queer violence that prevails in today's Russia. Starting with 2013, Healey describes it as “Russia's year of political homophobia” (6), which began with the introduction of the “gay propaganda law” and continued through a series of anti-gay legislations and political sentiments. The book, however, is not a chronological exploration of political homophobia “from Stalin to Sochi,” as the title might suggest; nor is it always about political homophobia as such. Healey notes that his intention is not to “trace a unified history of homophobia in Russia,” but rather, to ask a set of “provocative questions” (19).

Answers to these questions are offered by looking at rich and diverse materials in a range of geo-temporal locations. Chapter 1, for example, traces the changes in attitudes towards same-sex relations shaped by the structural and material violence of penal institutions/the Gulag. The chapter also follows the socio-temporal effect of “after the Gulag,” such as the post-camp transformations; imprisonment in late Soviet times; or the experiences of Gulag survivors. Following archival materials from police investigations, Chapter 2 takes us to the semi-urban areas of the Soviet 1950s by looking at the violence men inflicted on women and effeminized men, while forging sexual and emotional ties between themselves. If the first two chapters describe Soviet queers through the eyes of others—doctors, prison guards, non-queer prisoners, police investigators—Chapter 3 offers a rare insight into queer subjectivity itself by analyzing the diaries of Vadim Kozin, a gay Soviet singer who was imprisoned in the Gulag and spent the rest of his life in Kolyma, never returning to the metropolitan Russian center. The metropolis is where the next chapter takes us, describing formations of “queer solidarities” in late Soviet Moscow, such as marriages of convenience between gay men and lesbian women; hidden urban geographies of gay men's meeting places; the secret linguistic intimacy of the queer jargon; and meetings in private apartments and friends’ close circles. Chapter 5 turns to the analysis of Russian gay pornographic traditions and aesthetics during the rapid democratization of the 1990s as a way of exploring the relations between desire, visibility, and national identity. Continuing the question of nationalism, Chapter 6 demonstrates the tightening connection between heteronormativity and nationalist biopolitics during Vladimir Putin's early years. Rich and beautifully detailed in their archival work and storytelling, these chapters do not strive to be representative or systematically chronological. Instead, they present the readers with a range of windows into Soviet queer lives. Some of those windows allow us to peek into the most intimate corners of queer subjects’ feelings and thoughts; others tell a patchy story of external objectification, judgement, and disdain.

The last section of the book turns to more theoretically grounded answers to “provocative questions” set by the author at the start of the book. How can Russian queerness be seen, recognized, understood, and remembered? Returning to 2013, a year that launched an “assault on queer knowledge in Russia” (150), the final three chapters discuss the “stunted archive” of Soviet queer history, and the political consequences of its partiality. Here, Healey lays out several dilemmas: the lack of factual knowledge about details and the extent of anti-queer persecution; as well as the lack of direct access to the archives. The latter can happen due to censorship, but more often occurs due to the layers of mediation: some original documents are edited; some stories are only known via the “ubiquitous post-Soviet genre of sensational ‘archival revelations’” (153); and some biographies are told either through the hostile eyes of non-queer memoirists, or through the self-censorship of heteronormativity and internalized shame.

But perhaps the more crucial question, which Healey continuously and honorably grapples with, is that of perspective, language, and framing, embedded in the very terms “homophobia,” “gay,” “lesbian,” “queer,” “bisexual,” or “trans.” On the one hand, Healey is acutely aware of “the awkwardness of … global Western categories and questions, when applied to the Russian case” (192). Yet on the other hand, his framing insistently returns to the western LGBT language and liberatory assumptions, in notions such as “reclaiming Russian LGBT lives” (193), or looking for a “happier future” for Russian LGBT communities” (150). The ontologization of “LGBT” centers on western terminology at the expense of the myriad other terms that constitute queerness in Russia, and which Healey documents so beautifully. How, then, might we challenge it?

We may start by thinking of the dangerous collapse of “gay” into “queer.” The use of terms such as homophobia or LGBT is limiting in a book that focuses heavily on men, and it is not a matter of insufficient research, I argue, nor a matter of limited archives. Rather, it is a matter of perspective. How would the “LGBT” story look, we should ask, if it began with the silencing of female sexualities? How would the story of homophobia look if it were told from the point of view of women on the receiving end of their “gay” partners’ violence? How would an analysis of Russian queerness look from a trans-centered perspective, if the focus shifted from the legal persecution of male homosexuality to a deeper, often unspeakable, but incredibly violent disdain towards any form of gender crossing, temporary or ongoing? Not more, but perhaps fundamentally different research is needed for the future of Russian queer studies. Despite the limitations of Russian Homophobia, Healey's book is, no doubt, a wonderful inspiration for such a future.