queer masculinities

Dan Healey: Russia 109
relevant questions. In the Anglo-American world, Cold War considerations
encouraged Russianists in political science, sociology and history
to focus on conventional politics, and even those working on the
distant past needed to stress the relevance of their interest to the
imperative of ‘knowing the enemy.’ In the post-Cold War era the
decline of academic study of Russia’s distant past has been precipitous.
Of the 70 Russian history positions posted in the United States from
1991 to 2002, only four went to scholars working on Russia before
1850. During the same years, when US universities conducted searches
for European early modernists not one early modern Russianist was
hired. 12
Such an environment has hardly been encouraging for the development
of studies of early modern Russian gender and sexualities. To take
one relevant sub-field of social history, historians of Russia were slow
to delve into women’s history, while their colleagues in French,
German, British and American history forged ahead in the 1970s.
Much ground was recovered, it must be said, in the 1980s and the field
of Russian and post-Soviet women’s studies has expanded rapidly. Our
Ph.D. candidate would be well advised to seek a sympathetic supervisor,
perhaps from among the cohort of historians of Russian women
who have emerged as the Cold War has waned.
The young scholar intent on studying queer early modern Russia
would encounter an interesting array of problems once she arrived in
Moscow or St. Petersburg to conduct her research. There is still a strong
legacy of Stalinist homophobia in Russia’s historical profession. The
Ph.D. candidate might find, to take one practical example, that her
Russian academic sponsors (who guarantee visa and archival arrangements
on payment of fees) are unenthusiastic about taking her on with
an explicitly ‘queer’ project title. Similarly when she arrives to work in
archives that are critical to her topic, openness could be a tactical error,
particularly with regard to Soviet-trained directors who grant specialized
access and some older staff who run reading rooms. Just as foreign
researchers used to do in the ‘bad old days’, our young candidate might
choose to develop an anodyne general title for her project that ensures
access without drawing unsympathetic attention to her interests.
All is not completely bleak in this regard, however. Very recently, a
small number of academics inside Russia, some of them working in collaboration
with Western scholars of gender and sexuality, have begun
to publish essays and document collections in Russian on themes in
the history of heterosexuality. Russian readers, once shocked to see any
mention of sex in print, have during the 1990s become jaded by