Under Joseph Stalin, the Soviet Union recriminalized homosexuality in a decree signed in 1933. The new Article 121, which punished "muzhelozhstvo" with imprisonment for up to 5 years, saw raids and arrests. Female homosexuals were sent to mental institutions. The decree was part of a broader campaign against "deviant" behavior and "Western degeneracy". Following Stalin's death, there was a liberalisation of attitudes toward sexual issues in the Soviet Union, but homosexual acts remained illegal. Discrimination against LGBT individuals persisted in the Soviet era, and homosexuality was not officially declassified as a mental illness until 1999.
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Since 2000, a campaign by Russian president Vladimir Putin and the Russian Orthodox Church to promote "traditional Russian values" and oppose "liberalism" in regards to homosexuality has led to many pieces of anti-LGBT legislation being passed federally, including the banning of distribution of "propaganda of non-traditional sexual relationships to minors" in 2013, an amendment in Russia's constitution banning same-sex marriage passed in 2020, and expansion of the 2013 propaganda law signed in 2022 to apply it to anyone, regardless of age.
Treatment was less bad in Cuba iirc but still included sending people to go work on sugar plantations, which is pretty back-breaking and horrifying labor. I mean, horrifying to the point that the Spanish colonial state were willing to force their slaves to do it, you know?
Luckily this isn't an issue anymore as cuba has somewhat recently liberalized their constitution and legislated free medical care for trans people and decriminalized homosexuality, probably in no small part due to the "thaw" that Obama put in place (probably one of his small wins), opening them up for better tourism and money, that trump then reversed and Biden has maintained.
But shhh, you didn't hear any that from me, Cuba's only allowed to be evil.
"Cuban gay writer Reinaldo Arenas wrote, "[T]he decade of the sixties ... was precisely when all the new laws against homosexuals came into being, when the persecution started and concentration camps were opened, when the sexual act became taboo while the 'new man' was being proclaimed and masculinity was being exalted.""
The Soviet government of the Russian Soviet Republic (RSFSR) decriminalised homosexuality in December 1917, following the October Revolution and the discarding of the Legal Code of Tsarist Russia.
The legalisation of homosexuality was confirmed in the RSFSR Penal Code of 1922, and following its redrafting in 1926. According to Dan Healey, archival material that became widely available following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 "demonstrates a principled intent to decriminalize the act between consenting adults, expressed from the earliest efforts to write a socialist criminal code in 1918 to the eventual adoption of legislation in 1922.