Muscle maryas

In a remarkable photographic archive in Russia, one of the largest in the world, a surprise has been unearthed - a history of the country's gay culture. Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy report
Valery Katsuba: Yevgeny 2001
Yevgeny 2001, one of Valery Katsuba's photographs inspired by the archive. Photograph courtesy of Valery Katsuba

One thing the new Russia has inherited from the old Soviet Union is an appalling filing system. Today, a new generation of researchers is rooting through enormous warehouses full of archives, and making remarkable discoveries amid the jumble - vistas of Russia photographed by Russians, not seen for decades in the east and never seen before in the west. Valery Katsuba, himself one of Russia's rising new photographers, uncovered the historic images of sportsmen and women. The collection, one of the largest of its kind in the world, contains more than half a million images from the period 1860 to 1996 (glass and film negatives), as well as 5,600 sounds of Leningrad life recorded between 1900 and 1960.

No notes from the photographer or stamp of the studio survive for many of the photographs of the body-conscious citizens and comrades in pre- and post-revolutionary times. The people who worked in the great Soviet sorting houses for documents, music, photographs and films were dogged apparatchiks, not historians.

Alexandra Golovina, director of the St Petersburg archive, says that the lack of attribution was at least partly by Soviet design: "In those days, photographers were not stars," she says. "They were poorly educated and regarded as tradesmen. Photography was a service for the people, like a hairdresser or shoemaker."

However, the photographs found by Katsuba in Golovina's archive have a particular style - and subject matter. We were able to identify some as taken by Genrikh Magaziner, a prolific sports photographer, who from 1925 was employed by Tass, the Soviet news agency. But the bulk of the photographs, dating from pre-revolutionary Russia to the second world war, were probably produced by the studio of KK Bulla - making them an extraordinarily valuable find.

Karl Bulla was once regarded by Russians as their greatest photographer, a man often referred to as the founding father of reportage. Such sketchy biographical information as survives suggests that he was, in fact, born in Germany and moved to St Petersburg at the age of 10, where he is said to have developed an early passion for cameras. In the 1880s, he was one of very few photographers granted a permit by the tsarist secret police to work freely and go where he pleased, "as long as he does not cause jams of carriages and people".

Bulla did sufficiently well to open a studio on St Petersburg's fashionable Nevsky Prospekt, employing his two sons, Victor and Alexander. Together, the Bulla family shot pictures of military manoeuvres, balloon launches and intimate family portraits of Nicholas II, the last Russian tsar, and his family. The surviving pictures also offer a glimpse of an unexpected side of St Petersburg society: from the turn of the century, it seems the KK Bulla studio, absorbed by sports and fitness, began assembling private albums of photographs for body-conscious men and women.

Then, in 1916, Karl Bulla vanished. Why is a matter of dispute. Russia was in a state of acute instability and a world war was gathering pace, but his links with the Romanovs, and the style of his photography, revelling in the supposed excesses and moral entropy of late-empire Russia, might have helped him decide it was time to leave before the new, austere order took over.

Bulla's son Victor, left behind in St Petersburg, took to the streets, recording the rise of Bolshevism. But, 20 years later, his career, too, was abruptly curtailed. The authorities viewed the Bulla studio with suspicion because of the family's German connections and by 1937, when Stalin's terror struck Leningrad, Victor's home was raided and he was accused of being a German spy and "moral degenerate".

We were able to track down his daughter, Valentina Kamensky, who still lives in St Petersburg. She recalls the day of the raid. "The secret police charged into our apartment and pulled down everything. All the cupboards were emptied of their glass negatives. Many of them were from pre-revolutionary times. And when everything was on the floor, the police with their heavy boots somehow did this devil-dance, smashing the priceless photographs taken by our family."

The following year, on July 15 1938, Victor Bulla was judged a "people's enemy" and taken in shackles aboard a train bound for the gulags to serve a 10-year sentence. Kamensky said that the family heard about their father only one more time, a letter in 1944 informing them that he had died of cancer in an unknown prison camp.

The only reason any of the Bulla photographs have survived is thanks to Victor's prescience. Three years before his arrest, he donated to the state archive 132,683 negatives - work by his father, himself and his brother, dating from pre-revolutionary times, through the first world war, the civil war, the October Revolution and the reconstruction of St Petersburg. "History is strange," says Kamensky. "By 1958, Stalin had died and old scores were forgotten. My father was rehabilitated, although by then many in St Petersburg and across Russia barely knew the name of the Bulla studio." Karl Bulla's great-grandson, Andrey Kamensky, went on to become a KGB major.

What makes the Bulla photographs particularly striking, and may cast light on the disappearance of Karl Bulla and the exile of Victor, is the unadulterated campness of many of the works. In the early days, they focused on the private world of men: candid shots of flabby torsos at the bathhouse or of fleshy sportsmen being prodded by faux physicians in a drawing room. Later, as the times became more martial, the models selected were Herculean men and Amazonian women posing as emblems of Soviet power.

The KK Bulla studio was the first to record the discreet gay culture to which tsarist Russia turned a blind eye, according to Dr Dan Healey, a history lecturer at the University of Wales, who has published a comprehensive study on Russia and its attitude to homosexuality. Traditionally, the Orthodox Church had not taken a firm line against sodomy, and it was not until 1835 that a ban on it was extended from the armed forces to the general population. "Even then, it was rarely enforced," Healey says. "While the French and German police entrapped gay men using sting operations, the Russian police most often did nothing, enabling a gay culture to evolve in St Petersburg and, to some extent, Moscow." Men met partners in bathhouses or on the street. For women, the only escape from society's expectations of femininity was joining the Cheka (secret police) or army.

A circle of writers, dancers, musicians and artists began advancing a gay aesthetic, led by Sergei Diaghilev, the impresario behind the legendary Ballet Russe whose dancers would include Vaslaw Nijinsky and Anna Pavlova. In 1907, writers such as Michael Kuzmin published homoerotic work, including the benchmark novel Wings, in which the character of an elder mentor helps a troubled adolescent, Vanya, to understand his sexuality. By 1922, censorship laws had been relaxed in the Soviet Union and, the ban on homosexuality, seen as a remnant of bourgeois prejudice, was also lifted, leading Kuzmin to stage a public reading from Wings at the Institute of Literature, where, according to a contemporary memoir, men in the audience threw flowers on to the stage.

While the Party preferred to ignore gay life, Soviet doctors studied it. Healey has found a record of attempts by physicians to find a chemical cause for gay desire. In one instance, doctors transplanted the ovaries from a sheep and a pig into a 28-year-old female patient to see what effect, if any, it had on her sexual preferences. The experiment, unsurprisingly, foundered. So did political support for the nascent gay scene.

As Germany fell into the grip of the National Socialists in the mid-20s, so attitudes in the Soviet Union changed. Gayness was associated with Nazism. "Destroy the homosexuals - fascism will disappear," Gorky wrote. In 1933, Joseph Stalin announced sodomy would be recriminalised.

A solitary voice opposed the order. Harry Whyte, a member of the British Communist party, had moved to Moscow several years before and had a Russian boyfriend. In 1933, Whyte learned that his boyfriend had been arrested and complained to the NKVD, forerunner of the KGB, to no event. Eventually, Whyte wrote to Stalin, suggesting that the new order banning homosexuality contradicted the freedoms enshrined in socialism. His letter was released from the presidential archive in 1993 and across the top, in a distinctive hand, Stalin had written: "An idiot and degenerate ... send to the archives." The letter from Whyte surfaced 60 years later, but there is no evidence of his fate.

Karl Bulla died in exile - probably in Estonia in the 30s. Victor Bulla, his son and protégé, was by then under arrest. Their archive - rediscovered by Valery Katsuba, who has now embarked on his own project reinterpreting their work - is providing inspiration for a new generation of photographers.