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Bolshevik Sexual Forensics: Diagnosing Disorder in the Clinic and Courtroom, 1917–1939
In an effort to modernize criminal and civil investigations, early Bolsheviks gave forensic doctors―most of whom had been trained under the tsarist regime―new authority over issues of sexuality. Revolutionaries believed that forensic medicine could provide scientific and objective solutions to sexual disorder in the new society. Bolshevik Sexual Forensics explores the institutional history of Russian and Soviet forensic medicine and examines the effects of its authority when confronting sexual disorder. Healey compares sex crime investigations from Petrograd and Sverdlovsk in the 1920s to the numerous publications by forensic doctors and psychiatrists of the prerevolutionary and early Soviet periods to illustrate the role that these specialists played. In addition, Healey presents a fascinating look at how doctors diagnosed and treated hermaphroditism, showing how Soviet physicians revolutionized the standard scientific view in these cases by taking into account individual desire. This study sheds light on unexplored radical and reactionary forces that shaped the Bolshevik "sexual revolution" as lawmakers defined new ways of seeing sexual crime and disorder. Forensic doctors struggled to interpret the replacement of the age of consent with a standard of "sexual maturity," a designation that made female sexuality a collective "resource," not part of an individual's personality. "Innocence," "experience," and virginity played a major role in the expertise doctors furnished in rape and abuse trials. Psychiatrists recoiled from the language of sexual psychology in their investigations of sex criminals. Yet in the clinic, Soviet physicians probed the desires of the two-sexed citizen, whose psychology served as the basis for a distinctly modern approach to the "erasure" of the hermaphrodite. Healey concludes that the vision of men and women as equals after a "sexual revolution" was undermined from the outset of the Soviet experiment. Law and medicine failed to protect women and girls from violence, and Soviet medicine's physiological and biological model of sexual citizenship erased the vision of sexual self-expression, especially for women. This groundbreaking study will appeal to Soviet historians and those interested in gender studies, sexuality, medicine, and forensics.
264 pages, Hardcover
First published June 28, 2009
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July 25, 2015
Reviewed for the Chartered Society of Forensic Sciences:
This is a long-awaited addition to the growing body of literature analysing the sexual revolution of early Soviet Union. Healey’s significant contribution is in his focus of the medical profession, especially in relation to the justice system. Therefore, I believe that this is an important book for scholars and students interested in early Soviet history and global sexual history.
It seems as if the sexual revolution in late Imperial Russia and early Soviet Union has been romanticised, and our view of it has often been by looking at words and not actions. Lenin, as did the majority of the Communist Party, called for rationalisation of sexuality, claiming that sexual theories such as Freud’s theory are merely an attempt to “justify one’s own abnormal and excessive sex life before bourgeois morality”. He identifies “free love” as a bourgeois demand (in the sense of freedom from financial considerations or freedom from childbirth). The other opinion, which was not the majority opinion of the men-led party, called for a sexual revolution and looked at sex for the sake of pleasure only as revolutionary by itself. The focus on the medical profession adds to our understanding, then, of the primary partners of the rationalisers, who “despite its practitioner’s protestations of ‘objectivity’”, “participated in setting new moral boundaries” (p. 159).
In many ways, science in general and medicine in particular replaced the Russian Orthodox Christianity as the sexual authority. As Healey demonstrates, medical doctors wished to rationalise the court’s decision. The 1922 invention of the “age of maturity” instead of “age of consent” opened the door to wider medical intervention in sexual criminal cases, as it was their role to determine if a person reached this age. This procedure, more so when lacking clear, physical signs, was particularly “mechanic” and largely ignoring psychological dimensions such as sexual desire, reinforcing women as “baby-making machines” (p. 60). The result of this move led to “no socially recognisable boundar[ies] between what might be permitted and what was forbidden” (p. 82).
By looking at rape as an everyday phenomenon (not limited to the court), we see a nuanced view of continuity. The centre of this investigations was still sexual innocency, constructed by society, instead of looking at the offender. Desire, here, was ignored just as it was ignored in the definition of “maturity”. They looked for objective evidence, such as physical traces of struggle, in order to keep their technocratic prestige. The system was based on the assumption that “‘uncorrupted’ women did not submit to intercourse without the application of some degree of necessary force” (p. 97). It shows us a rather “darker” side, if you will, of the revolution, that mechanised sex crimes and carried continuities of patriarchal view of rape, that looks at the moral character of the victim rather than that of the rapist.
The analysis of hermaphrodites is outstandingly enlightening. The Soviet treatment of hermaphrodites is interesting since it displays rather individualist and progressive tendencies. Under Soviet regime, this process was also medicalised, and in 1926 a decree also allowed doctors to change the “passport sex”. However, Soviet doctors often chose to look at social factors, such as the “gender role as they performed in the community”, seeking to reintegrate “the distressed individual into a collective” (p. 156). It is striking to see the positive use of sexual psychology, that is so missing in other realms of sexuality in the Soviet Union. In many ways, the Soviet Union had reached in the 1920s what the West only understood about 20-30 years later.
Healey’s treatment of the social effects of this medicalisation is especially impressive. Albeit limited in sources, he shows how the public not only sought medical assistance in social affairs but also used medical rhetoric and vocabulary in court. The book shows cases such as victims coming to hospitals to ask for certificates for injuries or alternatively offenders seeking to be diagnosed as psychopaths show “a crude medical consciousness” of the public (p. 186).
Even though limited in evidence, it is still very well-researched. As Healey himself recognised, many of his fascinating conclusions were reached based on very limited evidence. I hope that further research, perhaps with the discovery of more sources, will hone and add nuances to the points raised in this book. Despite that, the book still uses a rich array of sources, both from archives and published.
I do wish, however, that the book was more “organised”. I do not mean the order of the chapters or the line of thought, but the reader could certainly benefit from a well-developed index, a glossary of Russian terms and perhaps a more consistent and systematic use of these terms.
To conclude, this book serves as another evidence for the lack of sharp turn in sexuality from the 1920s to the 1930s. Not so different from Imperial Russia, the state sought “an essentialising, desexualising, reproduction-focused, and collectivist sexual framework” (p. 166). Its merit, then, is in showing the often overseen continuity from Imperial Russia to the 1930s and beyond. Beyond the continuity, it is an important work in showing the paradoxes of the medical profession in this period, between objective research and its rather subjective role in defining morality.
This is a long-awaited addition to the growing body of literature analysing the sexual revolution of early Soviet Union. Healey’s significant contribution is in his focus of the medical profession, especially in relation to the justice system. Therefore, I believe that this is an important book for scholars and students interested in early Soviet history and global sexual history.
It seems as if the sexual revolution in late Imperial Russia and early Soviet Union has been romanticised, and our view of it has often been by looking at words and not actions. Lenin, as did the majority of the Communist Party, called for rationalisation of sexuality, claiming that sexual theories such as Freud’s theory are merely an attempt to “justify one’s own abnormal and excessive sex life before bourgeois morality”. He identifies “free love” as a bourgeois demand (in the sense of freedom from financial considerations or freedom from childbirth). The other opinion, which was not the majority opinion of the men-led party, called for a sexual revolution and looked at sex for the sake of pleasure only as revolutionary by itself. The focus on the medical profession adds to our understanding, then, of the primary partners of the rationalisers, who “despite its practitioner’s protestations of ‘objectivity’”, “participated in setting new moral boundaries” (p. 159).
In many ways, science in general and medicine in particular replaced the Russian Orthodox Christianity as the sexual authority. As Healey demonstrates, medical doctors wished to rationalise the court’s decision. The 1922 invention of the “age of maturity” instead of “age of consent” opened the door to wider medical intervention in sexual criminal cases, as it was their role to determine if a person reached this age. This procedure, more so when lacking clear, physical signs, was particularly “mechanic” and largely ignoring psychological dimensions such as sexual desire, reinforcing women as “baby-making machines” (p. 60). The result of this move led to “no socially recognisable boundar[ies] between what might be permitted and what was forbidden” (p. 82).
By looking at rape as an everyday phenomenon (not limited to the court), we see a nuanced view of continuity. The centre of this investigations was still sexual innocency, constructed by society, instead of looking at the offender. Desire, here, was ignored just as it was ignored in the definition of “maturity”. They looked for objective evidence, such as physical traces of struggle, in order to keep their technocratic prestige. The system was based on the assumption that “‘uncorrupted’ women did not submit to intercourse without the application of some degree of necessary force” (p. 97). It shows us a rather “darker” side, if you will, of the revolution, that mechanised sex crimes and carried continuities of patriarchal view of rape, that looks at the moral character of the victim rather than that of the rapist.
The analysis of hermaphrodites is outstandingly enlightening. The Soviet treatment of hermaphrodites is interesting since it displays rather individualist and progressive tendencies. Under Soviet regime, this process was also medicalised, and in 1926 a decree also allowed doctors to change the “passport sex”. However, Soviet doctors often chose to look at social factors, such as the “gender role as they performed in the community”, seeking to reintegrate “the distressed individual into a collective” (p. 156). It is striking to see the positive use of sexual psychology, that is so missing in other realms of sexuality in the Soviet Union. In many ways, the Soviet Union had reached in the 1920s what the West only understood about 20-30 years later.
Healey’s treatment of the social effects of this medicalisation is especially impressive. Albeit limited in sources, he shows how the public not only sought medical assistance in social affairs but also used medical rhetoric and vocabulary in court. The book shows cases such as victims coming to hospitals to ask for certificates for injuries or alternatively offenders seeking to be diagnosed as psychopaths show “a crude medical consciousness” of the public (p. 186).
Even though limited in evidence, it is still very well-researched. As Healey himself recognised, many of his fascinating conclusions were reached based on very limited evidence. I hope that further research, perhaps with the discovery of more sources, will hone and add nuances to the points raised in this book. Despite that, the book still uses a rich array of sources, both from archives and published.
I do wish, however, that the book was more “organised”. I do not mean the order of the chapters or the line of thought, but the reader could certainly benefit from a well-developed index, a glossary of Russian terms and perhaps a more consistent and systematic use of these terms.
To conclude, this book serves as another evidence for the lack of sharp turn in sexuality from the 1920s to the 1930s. Not so different from Imperial Russia, the state sought “an essentialising, desexualising, reproduction-focused, and collectivist sexual framework” (p. 166). Its merit, then, is in showing the often overseen continuity from Imperial Russia to the 1930s and beyond. Beyond the continuity, it is an important work in showing the paradoxes of the medical profession in this period, between objective research and its rather subjective role in defining morality.
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