Bolshevik Sexual Forensics: Diagnosing Disorder in the Clinic and Courtroom, 1917-1939

Early Bolsheviks gave forensic doctors new authority over issues of sexuality in an effort to modernize criminal and civil investigations. This study explores the institutional history of Russian and Soviet forensic medicine and examines the effects of its authority when confronting sexual disorder. It compares sex crime investigations from Petrograd and Sverdlovsk in the 1920s to publications by forensic doctors and psychiatrists of the prerevolutionary and early Soviet periods. It also sheds light on the role of forensic doctors in interpreting the replacement of the age of consent with a standard of sexual maturity and in the expertise they furnished in rape and abuse trials. Psychiatrists recoiled from the language of sexual psychology, but in the clinic, Soviet physicians probed the desires of the two-sexed citizen. Healey concludes that the vision of men and women as equals after a sexual revolution was undermined from the outset of the Soviet experiment, as 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.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 264 pages
Publication date: 15 November 2022
Publisher: Cornell University Press

In an ambitious endeavor to contemporize criminal and civil investigations, the early Bolsheviks bestowed upon forensic physicians, most of whom had received their training under the tsarist regime, a newfound authority over matters pertaining to sexuality. Revolutionaries held the belief that forensic medicine possessed the potential to offer scientific and impartial solutions to sexual disorders within the emerging society. Bolshevik Sexual Forensics delves into the institutional trajectory of Russian and Soviet forensic medicine, scrutinizing the impact of its authority when confronting sexual disorders. Healey employs a comparative analysis, drawing upon sex crime investigations conducted in Petrograd and Sverdlovsk during the 1920s, alongside a comprehensive examination of the numerous publications authored by forensic doctors and psychiatrists from the prerevolutionary and early Soviet eras. This study unveils hitherto unexplored radical and reactionary forces that played a pivotal role in shaping the Bolshevik sexual revolution as lawmakers established novel paradigms for perceiving sexual crime and disorder. Forensic doctors grappled with the challenge of interpreting the substitution of the age of consent with a standard of sexual maturity, a designation that transformed female sexuality into a collective resource rather than an integral aspect of an individual's personality. Innocence, experience, and virginity assumed significant importance in the expertise that doctors provided during rape and abuse trials. Psychiatrists, however, recoiled from the language of sexual psychology in their investigations of sex criminals. Nevertheless, within the clinical setting, Soviet physicians engaged in probing the desires of the two-sexed citizen, whose psychology served as the foundation for a distinctively modern approach to the erasure of sexual taboos.

Weight: 376g
Dimension: 152 x 228 x 18 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781501768217