New perspectives on the Parajanov affair: The role of Italian activism in the transnational campaign for his release
Zusammenfassungen
This article seeks to reconstruct the 1974-1977 transnational solidarity campaign in support of the Soviet filmmaker Sergei Parajanov, who was arrested in Kiev in late 1973 on charges of homosexual relations and sentenced to five years in prison. The mobilization for Parajanov’s release raises various research questions that one can summarize as follows: Why and how was that campaign able to mobilize Western players coming from different milieux and countries? The author argues that the “Parajanov affair” may allow us to understand the extent to which the topic of homosexuality in the USSR in the 1970s represented a strand of a broader transnational framework in which sexual identity, human rights, artistic expression and even Italian political issues intersected. The author investigates the role played by some Italian actors in this campaign and in the process leading to Parajanov’s release. More generally, the Parajanov affair embodies the struggle for the freedom of artistic creativity, political thinking and sexual identity, all elements of the broader activism of the period.
Aufbau
SeitenanfangAnmerkungen des Autors
This work has been improved and completed thanks to an International Fellowship at TORCH (The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities), from 18 Jan. to 7 Mar. 2020. I would like to show my gratitude to Philip Bullock and Catriona Kelly for giving me this opportunity. I also thank Dan Healey for his bibliographical suggestions.
Volltext
- 1 Decriminalisation of homosexual sex between consenting men occurred after the October Revolution, b (...)
- 2 James Steffen, The Cinema of Sergei Parajanov (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2013), 1 (...)
- 3 Karl-Heinze Steinle, “Gay Liberation von 1969 bis heute: DDR und UdSSR,” in Monika Hingst, et al., (...)
- 4 Angelo Pezzana, Dentro & Fuori. Una autobiografia omosessuale (Milano: Sperling and Kupfer, 1996), (...)
1This article seeks to reconstruct the 1974-1977 transnational solidarity campaign in support of the Soviet filmmaker Sergei Parajanov, who was arrested in Kiev in late 1973, charged with homosexual relations and sentenced to five years in prison.1 The mobilization for Parajanov’s release raises various research questions that one can summarize as follows: why and how was that campaign able to mobilize Western players coming from different milieux and countries? The existing literature on Parajanov’s case does not deeply investigate its international scope, the various strands of that campaign or the Italian specificity. In his fundamental monograph on the filmmaker’s life and career, James Steffen does not mention Pezzana’s 1977 Moscow one-man protest against Parajanov’s conviction under Soviet anti-homosexuality laws, even if he recalls the 1977 Venice Biennale initiatives.2 Literature on sexual and gender issues in the USSR refers very briefly to the Italian factor. Steinle’s article focuses on Pezzana’s Moscow protest alone; it does not mention how Italian activism for gay rights developed or its ties to the Biennale.3 References to Pezzana’s links to the so-called “Biennale of Dissent” can only be found in his own memoirs, which, however, do not explore the other sides of the campaign; they are focused on the official charge behind Parajanov’s conviction and on his own protest in Moscow, then in Venice.4 More generally, one could say that, until now, scholarship has not explored the variety of factors encapsulated in Parajanov’s campaign properly.
2I argue that the “Parajanov affair” may allow us to understand the extent to which the topic of homosexuality in the USSR in the 1970s represented a strand of a broader transnational framework in which sexual identity, human rights, artistic expression and even Italian political issues intersected. I particularly aim to investigate the role played by some Italian actors in this campaign and in the process leading to Parajanov’s release. First, I summarize the main stages of Parajanov’s life and career before his arrest. Second, I reconstruct the birth and development of the campaign for his release, pointing out the range of players who were implicated. Then I analyse the Italian connection to the campaign through the protests of the Italian movement for gay rights, and the organisation of the Venice Biennale in November 1977.
- 5 Acronym for Fronte Unitario Omosessuale Rivoluzionario Italiano (Italian Revolutionary Homosexual U (...)
- 6 I am immensely grateful to its president Angelo Pezzana and to Maurizio Cagliuso for their kindness (...)
- 7 Archivio Storico delle Arti Contemporanee.
3The sources I use in this article are heterogeneous from the point of view of both their origin and typology. On the one hand, archival research was conducted on FUORI!5 files and magazines held at the Sandro Penna Foundation, which was founded in Turin in 1980 and today represents the main Italian body for historical and cultural research on homosexuality.6 FUORI! unpublished documents—especially news agencies releases and letters—were useful in reconstructing the initial protest against the arrest and imprisonment of Parajanov. In this respect, FUORI! leader Angelo Pezzana’s memoirs have proved very important, allowing me to recall the genesis, implementation and consequences of his 1977 protest in Moscow. On the other hand, research was also conducted at ASAC7—the Venice Biennale historical archives—and focused on the correspondence relating to the organisation of the initiatives devoted to Parajanov in the 1977 edition, also known as the Biennale of Dissent. Those initiatives’ proceedings, as well as other publications—all of them promoted in the late 1970s by the Biennale itself and devoted to the Parajanov case—have been also analysed. Last but not least, the Italian, and partly international, press of the time was systematically explored in order to understand to what extent the Parajanov case and the Italian initiatives related to it were covered by media.
Sergei Parajanov: From cinema to prison
- 8 On Parajanov’s personal and professional life, see Steffen, The Cinema of Sergei Parajanov, and Nik (...)
- 9 His real name was Sarkis Paradzhanian.
4Parajanov having already been the object of several important studies from biographical and cinematic perspectives, it is worth recalling here a few crucial events of his personal and professional life before 1973.8 Parajanov was born in 1924 in Georgia, to Armenian parents.9 After graduation from the All-Russian State Film School in Moscow, where he studied under Igor Savchenko and then Aleksandr Dovzhenko, he moved to Kiev in the early 1950s, where he spent most of his time until his arrest in 1973. His life trajectory—Armenian origins, childhood and youth in Georgia, and adulthood and career mostly in Ukraine—is crucial to understanding his interest in promoting different national identities of his three homelands and their particular value beyond the cinematic sphere, as well as the consequences of his cultural commitment.
- 10 Joshua First, Ukrainian Cinema: Belonging and Identity during the Soviet Thaw (London – New York: I (...)
5Parajanov’s first great success came in 1964 with Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (Teni zabytykh predkov, also known abroad under the title Fire Horses). The film is an adaptation of a Ukrainian literary classic written by the modernist author Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky which tells the tragic love story between Ivanko and Marichka, two young people belonging to rival families. It gives great space to the representation of the traditions of a small village settled in the mountains of Carpathian Ukraine with a style that is strongly symbolic in its use of images and colours, which features the peasant and pastoral identity of the Hutsul highlands community.10
- 11 Simone Bellezza, The Shore of Expectations: A Cultural Study of the Ukrainian Shistdesiatnyky (Toro (...)
- 12 Ibid., 130.
6The importance of Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors to the emergence of a Ukrainian national cultural identity in the 1960s can be seen in the fact that the literary critic Ivan Dzyuba and other intelligentsia figures used the film’s 4 September 1964 premiere as an occasion to publicly condemn the mass arrests of the Ukrainian intelligentsia some days earlier.11 According to Simone Bellezza, because of this film, Parajanov became a prominent representative of the new generation of intellectuals—the shestidesiatniki—in the years of Ukrainian cultural thawing.12
- 13 Parajanov himself stated that the Ministry of Culture of the Soviet Ukrainian Republic, despite its (...)
- 14 Antonín Liehm, ed., Serghiej Paradjanov. Testimonianze e documenti sull’opera e la vita (Venezia: L (...)
- 15 Birgit Beumers, A History of Russian Cinema (New York: Bloomsbury, 2008), 141. On film censorship d (...)
7Despite his stylistic deviation from the canons of socialist realism and Party censors’ reservations,13 the film was well received in the USSR, and Parajanov became popular, especially abroad, obtaining fifteen awards, including the first prize at the international Mar Del Plata festival in Argentina; he was never, however, sent abroad as a representative of Soviet cinema, due to his eccentric personality and openly critical stance towards Soviet institutions. With Teni zabytykh predkov, he became a leading cultural figure in Ukraine in the second half of the 1960s.14 In 1965, Parajanov’s Kiev Frescoes was blocked for its “mystical representation” of the Great Patriotic War. Only 20 minutes survived after the footage was confiscated and destroyed in one of the very first instances of the return of censorship of individual artistic expression during the Stagnation era.15
8Parajanov’s problems with censorship increased greatly with his visual masterpiece Sayat Nova, a biography of the eighteenth-century Armenian national poet. The film is made with a poetic style that is more visually evocative than realistic, and its use of colour in a metaphorical sense plays a central role, as noted by Birgit Beumers:
- 16 Beumers, A History of Russian Cinema, 160.
Parajanov created no narrative cinema, but a series of still lifes that occasionally moved, stirred or shifted. Like his collages, his frames abounded with objects and trinkets, details and accessories, fixating through texture and colour on the folklores and traditions of different ethnic groups.16
- 17 Parajanov himself rejects Yutkevich’s version. See Ispoved´ o lichnoi zhizni, 9’22’’.
9Soviet censorship judged the work provocative and forced Parajanov to rework it. The latter came out with a new version renamed Tsvet granata (The Colour of the Pomegranate, 1969). The version released on Soviet screens in 1973, however, was the result of a further reworking carried out by the expert Soviet director Sergei Iutkevich. The first version no longer exists.17
- 18 Bellezza, The Shore of Expectations, 144.
- 19 Andrea Graziosi, L’Urss dal trionfo al degrado. Storia dell’Unione Sovietica. 1945-1991 (Bologna: I (...)
- 20 Steffen, The Cinema of Sergei Parajanov, 186.
- 21 Ibid., 187.
10According to Steffen, since the early sixties, Parajanov had become an object of attention from the Ukrainian KGB for his meetings and correspondence with foreign citizens from capitalist countries. In 1966 he signed a collective letter to authorities condemning the secret trials of the intelligentsia and proscription of meetings between arrested people and their families.18 In 1968 he was among the signatories of the so-called “appeal of the 139” by established Ukrainian scientists, artists and intellectuals, but also workers and students, who wrote directly to the Kremlin expressing concern about the aberrations of nationality policies, the trials of 1965-1966 against the young Ukrainian intelligentsia and the issue of civil rights throughout the USSR, at a time when dissidents had been brought to court in Moscow.19 In 1969 a report by the Kiev secret services to the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Communist party indicated their belief that the director had a negative influence on his younger colleagues, expressing ideologically harmful opinions as well as the desire to defect if he travelled abroad; he also dismissively refused to offer information for his biographical entry in the Bol´shaia sovetskaia Entsiklopediia.20 Two years later, in December 1971, Parajanov returned to the Ukrainian Communist leaders’ attention thanks to a new report by the national KGB according to which the director had distinguished himself for drunkenness, depravity and speculation, as well as anti-Soviet claims and proximity to nationalist intellectuals; his possible involvement in the theft of objects from a church was also mentioned.21
- 22 Ibid., 191-192.
- 23 In summer 1948 he was arrested together with other gays in Tbilisi because of their association wit (...)
11Eventually, in December 1973, Parajanov was arrested in Kiev. Different Western sources at the time of his incarceration claimed that he was originally accused of a range of crimes in addition to that of homosexuality, specifically trafficking in art objects and “speculation.” While the initial complaint filed against Parajanov dealt exclusively with charges related to homosexuality, Soviet justice cast a wider net in the resulting investigation, including also a charge of rape. Ultimately, the prosecution settled on charges of sodomy and dissemination of pornography (in fact it was a cheap souvenir pen with naked figures broadly produced in the West at the time).22 He remained in prison until his trial, which was held in late April 1974 and ended with a sentence of five years’ imprisonment in a penal colony. According to Steffen, one of the main reasons the filmmaker was arrested only in 1973—25 years after his first short imprisonment23—was his friendship with the family of Petro Shelest, first secretary of the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Communist party. In this sense, his arrest and imprisonment must be seen in the context of the crackdown in Ukraine after Shelest was removed from the main political office of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic in May 1972 for his excessively nationalistic tendencies.
- 24 Steffen, The Cinema of Sergei Parajanov, 188-189.
- 25 Arkhiv Soiuza Kinematografistov SSSR [Archives of USSR Filmmakers Union], d. 927, cited in Valerii (...)
- 26 This was the case of the historian and dissident Valentin Moroz. See Bellezza, The Shore of Expecta (...)
12Volodymyr Shcherbytsky—Shelest’s political rival and successor—intensified the process of Russification of Ukraine and tightened measures against those who had publicly criticised the first wave of arrests of dissident intellectuals, especially the signatories of the aforementioned “appeal of the 139,” including Parajanov himself.24 The Union of Ukrainian Filmmakers did not officially voice solidarity with their imprisoned colleague, perhaps out of fear of retaliation by the political leadership or, conversely, out of envy of Parajanov, a strong personality who was not of Ukrainian origin. In reality he had never participated in the organisation’s activities, and, in accordance with the union statutes, his expulsion was ordered on the grounds that he had committed “acts of an amoral and anti-social nature,” as well as for his repeated failure to pay union dues.25 One cannot really be surprised by the union’s reaction: Parajanov’s role as spokesperson for Ukrainian culture was harshly criticised by other intellectual figures who represented the most nationalistic tendencies of the “shestidesiatniki” movement.26
The transnational campaign (1974-1977)
- 27 Jean Vidal, “Per salvare Serghiej Paradjanov. Conversazione con Jean Vidal,” Informations ouvrières(...)
- 28 “Des cinéastes protestent contre l’arrestation de Serge Paradjanov,” Le Monde, 31/1/1974.
- 29 Jean Vidal, “Per salvare Serghiej Paradjanov,” 119.
- 30 See Bent Boel, “French Support for Eastern European Dissidence, 1968-1989: Approaches and Controver (...)
- 31 Soobshchenie sovetnika Posol´stva SSSR vo Frantsii v otdel kul´tury TsK KPSS o besede s gosudarstve (...)
13The mobilisation around Parajanov’s affair developed immediately. It can be defined as transnational, as it involved not so much official state bodies and institutions as individuals, committees and organisations set up, in many cases, with no single geographical connotation, to which people from different countries belonged. This activism was not long in coming and was initially too rash. The French journalist and TV director Jean Vidal was the first to move. He had met Parajanov in the late 1960s during his stay in Armenia, where he had been invited to work on a French–Soviet TV documentary. He spent five months together with Parajanov working on a joint treatment linked to the TV documentary, which was eventually rejected.27 Vidal established the first committee in favour of the Soviet director, together with the writers Pierre Guyotat, Philippe Sollers and Marguerite Duras: the latter drafted an appeal in which, in addition to protesting the director’s arrest, they asked for information on his condition, and which was published in Le Monde with the signatures of many well-known, particularly French and Italian, filmmakers.28 In fact, Duras had falsified the signatures, being sure that the article in the French newspaper would not anger the filmmakers in question. This was not the case, however, and a few weeks later the appeal was removed.29 Then Vidal turned to the “Comité International contre la Répression”—one of the many initiatives born in France in favour of dissidents from socialist countries30—including the filmmakers Alain Corneau and Bertrand Tavernier, the actress Dominique Labourier and the actor and stage director Roger Blin. The attention initially shown by France was also diplomatic. In early August 1974, the adviser to the Soviet embassy in Paris, Iurii Borisov, and the French secretary of state for culture, Michel Guy, discussed cultural relations between the two countries. In addition to asking why the USSR did not allow the organisation of exhibitions of the Russian pictorial avant-garde or a tour of Iurii Liubimov’s “Na Taganke” theatre in Paris in 1975, Guy also focused on the Parajanov case. According to Borisov, Guy warned him that Italian filmmaker “Fellini and other ‘screaming throats’ intended to launch a campaign around this case addressed to the USSR.” Borisov replied that Parajanov had been sentenced for homosexuality, a criminal offence in the USSR.31
- 32 See “Amnesty Group looks into filmmaker’s plight,” Advocate, 14/8/1974; H. Marshall, “Testimonianza (...)
14In 1974 Parajanov’s case attracted the interest of Amnesty International, which in the end did not go ahead with its investigation because the sentence was based on the crime of “homosexual acts,” and therefore Parajanov could not be considered a political prisoner. Still, the fact that he had not been released even after the general Soviet amnesty for non-dangerous prisoners—which had been announced for 1975, the thirtieth anniversary of the victory in World War II—suggests the political background of his imprisonment.32
- 33 Herbert Marshall, “The case of Sergo Parajanov,” Sight and Sound, 1 (Winter 1974): 8-11.
- 34 Archivio Storico FUORI! (hereafter ASFUORI), file 59, Petition addressed to the Supreme Soviet of t (...)
- 35 Ibid.
- 36 “Marshall leads drive to free Soviet artist,” Southern Illinoisan, 5/3/1975.
- 37 The appeals were republished in Liehm, ed., Serghiej Paradjanov, 145-146.
- 38 Yanet Lazarian, “Liberate Serghiej Paradjanov,” Alik, Teheran, 4-5/9/1975, republished in Liehm, ed (...)
15In the United States, the most active follower of Parajanov’s case was Herbert Marshall, a British professor of cinema at the University of Southern Illinois, who had been a student of Eisenstein in the USSR in the 1930s. Since the end of 1974 he had been writing articles denouncing Parajanov’s persecution.33 In March 1975 he also promoted a petition to the Ukrainian Supreme Soviet in which a pardon was requested “because Parajanov is stated by significant Soviet critics to be the leader of the new school of Soviet cinema, and in view of the fact that he has hitherto never broken any Soviet laws or is, in any way, a criminal element.”34 The petition insisted on the damage that would be done to the USSR itself by Parajanov’s continued incarceration, as he was “acknowledged to be one of the leading film directors in the world.”35 The petition was signed by 105 academics from American and Canadian universities, including many émigrés from socialist Europe, as well as from film director circles, comprising among others Francois Truffaut.36 At the end of 1975 an appeal was sent to the Moscow and Kiev Supreme Soviets from the American National Society of Film Critics (with 26 signatories) and the New York Film Critics Circle (with 27 signatories). The signatories were critics from American newspapers and magazines, and the appeals were justified by their concern “that filmmakers from all over the world [be] free to work.”37 In 1975 information about the Parajanov case reached Iran, thanks to the Soviet Armenian journalist Janet Lazarian, who also helped publicise the case in Berlin.38
- 39 A. Korotiukov, “Il caso Paradjanov,” Cinema-Tv Digest, Newberry, 1976, cited in Liehm, ed., Serghie (...)
- 40 Société des réalisateurs, 1976, cited in Liehm, ed., Serghiej Paradjanov, 147.
16In 1976 Aleksei Korotiukov, a Ukrainian journalist who had immigrated to the USA, gave an interview to an American magazine in which he reported for the first time in the West that Ukrainian political and police authorities had exploited Parajanov’s hitherto tolerated homosexuality to target his political non-conformity and open criticisms of the Soviet system, within the broader framework of the repression of Ukrainian cultural liberalism in the 1960s.39 In the same year the Société des Réalisateurs, based in Paris, launched an appeal to filmmakers globally to sign a petition for Parajanov’s release, in part because of his cardiac issues. It emphasised the need for Parajanov’s support to be international, reflecting the global value of his work: “Parajanov’s work belongs to the international artistic legacy. It is the duty of all filmmakers to join us to send this appeal to the Supreme Soviet of Ukraine on which Parajanov’s fate depends.”40
- 41 Jean Vidal, “Le cinéaste emprisonné,” Le Monde, 25/2/1977.
- 42 Otchet o poezdke v SShA sekretaria pravleniia Soiuza kinematografistov SSSR A.V. Karaganova, 18/4/1 (...)
17In February 1977 Jean Vidal, who had initially mobilised the Parajanov support campaign, wrote an article in Le Monde in which he once again directed the attention of international media and film professionals to the case of the filmmaker, who had by this point been imprisoned for almost three years: “Will Sergei Parajanov remain in prison because the great Western directors refuse to intervene in his favour? It is a double release that public opinion must demand: that of the great creator and that of his masterpiece, Sayat Nova.”41 In spring 1977, questions about Parajanov’s case were asked at all the lectures and talks given by Aleksandr V. Karaganov—the secretary of the USSR filmmakers’ union’s directorate—during his trip to the United States, where he had been invited by the New York Museum of Modern Art.42
The first Italian connection: Angelo Pezzana and FUORI!’s commitment
- 43 “Condannato in URSS il regista Paragianov?,” L’Unità, 24/5/1974: 7.
18The first Italian newspaper to break the news of Parajanov’s imprisonment was Corriere della Sera, on 23 May 1974, the same day the main Western newspapers published it. Interestingly, the Italian Communist party newspaper L’Unità was quite sceptical. Even the title of the article itself questioned the veracity of the news. It also—wrongly—denied that the Soviet penal code considered same-sex relations as a criminal offence.43
- 44 Persecution of homosexuality was therefore entrusted to the administration. In the Fascist era, ove (...)
- 45 Giovanni Dall’Orto, “La “tolleranza repressiva” dell’omosessualità. Quando un atteggiamento legale (...)
- 46 This was the case of some high-level Christian Democrat officials in the 1960s-1980s, such as Flore (...)
- 47 Ibid.
- 48 See: Sandro Bellassai, La morale comunista: Pubblico e privato nella rappresentazione del PCI (1947 (...)
- 49 Anna Tonelli, Per indegnità morale. Il caso Pasolini nell’Italia del buon costume (Roma-Bari: Later (...)
- 50 Palmiro Togliatti, I corsivi di Roderigo. Interventi politico-culturali dal 1944 al 1964 (Bari: De (...)
- 51 Filippo Ceccarelli, Il letto e il potere, Storia sessuale d’Italia da Mussolini a Vallettopoli bis (...)
- 52 Anyway, in 1957 Laconi left the role of secretary of the communist group at the Chamber of Deputies (...)
19This position is not so surprising, as mass political parties in republican Italy had, at least until the end of the 1970s, a silent attitude towards the issue of homosexuality, which was seen as an issue not to be publicly and politically discussed. This led to a situation of “legislative taboo,” a legacy of the Fascist era: in order to give a virile and martial face to Italy, Mussolini had combined harsh condemnation with a strategy of concealing repression and safeguarding respectability. Therefore the Fascist regime did not include the crime of homosexuality in the 1927 new penal code, to deny its existence and more effectively counter its spread.44 This attitude of “repressive tolerance” survived the fall of fascism, becoming a long-term constant in twentieth-century Italian history.45 The two main competitors in the Italian post-war political arena—the Christian Democratic party (DC) and the Italian Communist party (PCI)—had long held the same conservative attitudes on homosexuality. Conditioned by both its Catholic background and strict political ties with the Vatican State, the DC never openly dealt with that topic in its legislative initiatives, asking its gay members not to make their private lives public in order to prevent criticism, often coming from liberal and right-wing magazines such as L’Europeo and Il Borghese.46 In the early 1960s, minor political parties unsuccessfully attempted to introduce a parliamentary discussion for the approval of homophobic laws in the Italian penal code.47 In the 1970s, the socialist and communist left, which in principle supported freedom of expression, was embarrassed by the pressure for full liberalisation of sexual choices out of concern not to put themselves at variance with Catholic masses (and above all with Church hierarchies), and for maintaining the deep-rooted “respectability” associated with the workers’ movement tradition. The PCI had long taken an extremely critical stance towards homosexuality, which was considered “bourgeois degeneration” as Soviet ideology contended, but also according to its conservative system of values in everyday life.48 Therefore, the PCI used to tolerate its militants’ homosexuality as long as they did not reach leading political positions or openly express their sexual orientation. That is why in 1949 Pier Paolo Pasolini was expelled from the PCI for his “moral unworthiness”—after he had been charged with “corruption of minors and obscene acts in public places”49—whereas other gay intellectuals and artists, such as Luchino Visconti and Sandro Penna, were tolerated for having a very reserved attitude in this respect. In May 1950 the Communist leader Palmiro Togliatti, under a pseudonym, attacked André Gide’s anti-Soviet positions in the party’s cultural magazine Rinascita, advising Gide to “deal with pederasty, where he is a specialist.”50 In 1954 high-level party official Pietro Secchia was attacked for his suspected homosexuality from both within and outside his party.51 In 1956 the Communist leader himself asked the gay PCI deputy Renzo Laconi not to reveal his sexual orientation openly, in order to avoid any public scandal.52
- 53 Italian Revolutionary Homosexual United Front.
- 54 ASFUORI, file 33, Laws against the homosexuals’ rights in Italy, no date but probably 1978.
20The 1974 position of the communist newspaper on Parajanov’s arrest was strongly condemned by the Italian movement for gay rights. The latter was called FUORI!, an acronym for Fronte Unitario Omosessuale Rivoluzionario Italiano,53 but in Italian the word fuori means “out,” so the term also referred to the necessity that Italian gays no longer hide their sexual preferences. Founded in 1971 in Turin—with branches in Rome and Milan—FUORI! was the first organised movement explicitly devoted to the liberation of gay people in Italy. It was established in the wake of the other homosexual liberation fronts that had been created in Western Europe after the Stonewall riots in 1969, and initially had a strong Marxist approach. In the early 1970s Italy had no direct anti-gay legislation, but, for example, homosexuals had to be excluded from military service (1964 Italian Military Code, art. 28), and anyone who did not perform military service could not access public employment, according to the Republic President’s Decree of 10 January 1957. Any free expression in favour of homosexuality by teachers in state schools was forbidden as contrary to public and familial morality. In other cases, policing of public spaces and public decency was used against male homosexuals.54
- 55 Myriam Cristallo, Uscir Fuori. Dieci anni di lotte omosessuali in Italia. 1971/1981 (Roma: Teti edi (...)
- 56 On the history of the FUORI! movement, see Cristallo, Uscir Fuori, which devotes some pages to the (...)
- 57 Ibid., 60.
21The first important action launched by FUORI! was a public protest against the “International Congress on Sexual Deviance,” which opened on 5 April 1972 and was organised in Sanremo by the Italian Centre for Sexology, a Catholic-oriented institution which interpreted homosexuality as a disease to be treated with drugs and other therapies. About 40 people, from FUORI! and foreign organisations, protested against the congress and in favour of gays’ rights and dignity, in the name of “homosexual revolution.” Congress organisers called the police, who seized posters and flyers and kept files on the protestors. The press renamed the demonstration as “the Italian Stonewall.”55 In 1974 FUORI! decided to join officially with, and become a federated group of, the Radical party, the only Italian political party openly engaged in the battle for civil rights (with respect to anti-militarism, divorce, abortion and women’s liberation, among other causes).56 Not even the so-called “extra-parliamentary left” had put gay issues on its revolutionary agenda. A rigid moralism prevailed towards gays at least until the mid-1970s. As was the case in traditional parties, homosexuals active in organisations such as “Lotta Continua,” “Manifesto,” “Avanguardia Operaia” or “Movimento Studentesco” kept their sexual choices hidden, or at most declared themselves bisexual, but they certainly were not trying to impose gay liberation as a goal of the struggle.57
22FUORI! sent a letter to several Italian important newspapers and magazines not only to condemn Parajanov’s imprisonment but also to criticise directly the article published by L’Unità that denied the existence of an antigay law in the USSR and presented the Soviet Union as an authentically socialist state:
That the [communist] newspaper [L’Unità] should be silent on the aberrations of a system that continues to define itself as socialist is a fact that concerns the civil and social conscience of public opinion; certainly it does not concern the [newspaper] editorial board itself, that pursues its objective to hide and mystify all that is repressive and authoritarian and really FASCIST in those parts, for the use and consumption of the Italian proletarians… [Parajanov was] another victim of the abuses of a society which, as regards civil rights and the free availability of consciences and the body, can continue to call itself socialist, as long as it has the not at all revolutionary awareness of having failed in the most basic Marxian principles of the new man.
- 58 ASFUORI, file 59, Fuori Editorial Staff to Corriere della Sera, L’Unità, (25/5/1974), and to Panora (...)
23The letter ended with the expression of the “most vibrant protest against a heinous crime perpetrated against those who were found guilty only because queer [Italian: diverso]” and the request to “give as much space as possible to this letter to prevent silence from falling on Sergei Parajanov and on millions of other anonymous Soviet citizens who, like him, are victims of the same fate.”58
24In 1977 the Italian role in the Parajanov support movement was even more relevant for two different but quite connected reasons: on the one hand, the personal commitment of the Italian activist Angelo Pezzana on behalf of FUORI!; on the other hand, the institutional protest carried out by the Venice Biennale, led by its president, the Socialist Carlo Ripa di Meana.
- 59 Mario Mieli, Elementi di critica omosessuale (Milano: Feltrinelli, 2017 [1977]).
- 60 Guy Hocquenghem, Homosexual Desire (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993 [1972]), 133-134
- 61 Mieli, Elementi, 90-93, 169 ff. Thoughts on the historical evolution of Russian and Soviet attitude (...)
25It is worth remembering that in 1977, before Pezzana’s protest in Moscow, Mario Mieli’s Elementi di critica omosessuale had already been published.59 His work, which theorizes the innate polymorphic tendency of human beings’ sexuality, is considered a reference for gender and sexuality studies in Italy and has been translated into several languages. Mieli held Marxist positions and was a member of FUORI! until 1974, when he rejected the federation with the Radical party in the name of more revolutionary ideas. Also quoting Pezzana in his book, he bitterly criticises not only the Italian Communist party’s attitude regarding the gay issue, but also the groups of the so-called extra-parliamentary left. While Pezzana was not aware of the historical evolution of policies on homosexuals in Russia, Mieli—as Guy Hocquenghem had already done60—mentioned the Soviet Union’s homophobic turn in the 1930s and underlined the legally repressive character of socialist regimes as compared to the formally tolerant one of Western countries. Yet, according to Mieli, the latter were substantially discriminatory.61 One can see in Mieli and Pezzana the two main incarnations of the struggle for gay rights in Italy in the 1970s: Mieli from a provocatory utopian position, irreconcilable to the bourgeois capitalist system, which he saw only as repressive of sexuality and individual freedoms; Pezzana with a more pragmatic and reformist position, aimed at obtaining as much as possible for the homosexual movement from within the institutional and political system in Italy, through his engagement in the Radical party.
26Angelo Pezzana was one of the founders of FUORI!, and he also was adjunct parliamentary deputy for the Italian Radical party. He recalled that, in summer 1977, during the international rally of national gay movements at Aarhus University in Denmark, he had the idea of making a gesture of protest in favour of Parajanov:
- 62 Pezzana, Dentro & Fuori, 82.
It was not acceptable for the Western gay community to remain silent about this shameful persecution. Of course, demonstrating in the streets of New York or Paris was more fun and did not involve any risk, while protesting in Red Square would have been a dangerous gesture, although it at least would have had significant symbolic value. I was determined to take full advantage of my function as adjunct deputy, which allowed me to have a Montecitorio [Parliamentary] card and the letterhead of the Chamber of Deputies.62
- 63 Ibid.
27Pezzana, then, conceived of a protest action that would exploit his institutional immunity. Still, other national movements seemed to be scared of the prospect of a protest in the USSR, and eventually decided only to send a solidarity telegram to the director.63
- 64 Ibid.
- 65 Ibid, 83.
28Pezzana, disappointed but still determined, decided to go ahead on his own, and contacted Ripa di Meana, the president of the Venice Biennale, who in that period was organising an initiative on Dissent. According to Pezzana, di Meana “appreciated my idea and allowed me to talk on behalf of the Venice Biennale. Even today I blame myself for being so naïve and not asking him to put everything he said in writing.”64 Pezzana phoned the correspondent in Moscow for the main Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera to announce his intentions and ask for the list of foreign correspondents in Moscow. At the end of the conversation, however, the journalist told Pezzana that “here in Moscow, all our phones are under surveillance. I believe that at this point the Soviet authorities know your intentions.” In fact, he was later detained and questioned at the Sheremetyevo airport. After a while, he was sent to the National Hotel, where he was supposed to stay with the other Italian tourists with whom he had travelled.65
29On November 15 Pezzana met about fifteen journalists and many photographers at the National Hotel. He introduced himself as a representative of the Biennale of Dissent and the parliamentary group of the Radical party. He explained the reasons for his presence in Moscow: the persecution of gay people and the Parajanov case.
Angelo Pezzana at the entrance of the National hotel in Moscow(15 November 1977)
Source: Daily American, 17 November 1977, found at Fuori! Historical Archives, Sandro Penna Foundation, Turin
- 66 Angelo Pezzana, “Un Gay alla corte dello Zar,” Fuori! Giornale di liberazione omosessuale, 7, 17 (W (...)
- 67 On 16 November 1977 the following articles were published in Italy: L.Z., “Il radicale torinese Pez (...)
- 68 “Gay lib comes to Moscow,” Guardian, 16/11/1977; “Italiaan betoogt in Moskou voor homoseksuelen,” H (...)
- 69 “Pannella soddisfatto: ‘Tutto è andato liscio’,” La Sicilia, 16/11/1977.
30Then he was asked to leave the hall, so the press conference continued in his hotel room. There Pezzana showed them a towel he had prepared with slogans in support of gay people in the USSR, of Parajanov’s release and against the article no. 121 of the Soviet penal code. Photographers took pictures with no intervention by the Soviet police or KGB; orders were probably issued not to use force in front of the foreign press.66 News about Pezzana’s protest were reported by all the important Italian newspapers67 and some foreign ones as well.68 The lack of intervention by the police was highlighted, and the leader of the Radical party, Marco Pannella, expressed “deep satisfaction” because the Soviet police had not prevented Pezzana’s initiative, and in doing so they respected the Helsinki Final Act on human rights and the rules of the new Soviet constitution. Furthermore, Pannella hoped that the screening of Parajanov’s works in Venice would be an occasion for a manifestation of solidarity in favour of the director’s release.69
- 70 Pezzana, Dentro & Fuori, 85.
31The following day Pezzana telephoned Andrei Sakharov. Sakharov initially refused to meet Pezzana because he called the issue of gay rights “a complex problem.”70 Pezzana felt “strong and unexpected resistance” from Sakharov, which was overcome only when Pezzana told him that he was a member of the Italian Parliament. In this way, Pezzana managed to persuade Sakharov to meet with him at his home. Pezzana explained that he was in Moscow “to protest the conditions of homosexuals in the Soviet Union, victims of article 121.” But Sakharov refused to lend his official support to this cause, as he feared being discredited in his country. Pezzana later recalled thinking Sakharov was being reasonable:
- 71 Ibid., 86.
He is quite right. It [homosexuality] is a horrible thing and it can be used for endless blackmail. But, you see [Pezzana recalled Sakharov saying], I won’t be able to help you. If I did, if I expressed myself on a topic such as homosexuality, it would discredit my image. They would immediately accuse me of being homosexual, and I, who for all my life have fought for civil rights in this unfortunate country, would lose credibility.71
- 72 Ibid., 87.
- 73 Healey, Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia, 247.
32Pezzana was deeply disappointed, but 20 years later in his autobiography, he justified this by recalling that at the time the accusation of homosexuality could have discredited any public figure not only in the USSR, but also in the West. Finally, Sakharov concluded by adding: “All I can give you is my appreciation for what you are doing. But, please, be careful.”72 Sakharov’s reaction can be also understood within the context of the conservative and traditional views about sexuality shown by most of the intelligentsia and political dissidents in the USSR.73
- 74 On 17 November 1977 the following articles were published: “L’esponente del ‘Fuori’ Pezzana espulso (...)
- 75 V. Valentinov, “‘Neot´´emlemoe pravo’ Sin’ora Petstsano [Mr Pezzana’s Inalienable Right],” Literatu (...)
- 76 Ibid.
- 77 Angelo Pezzana, “Un omosessuale sulla Piazza Rossa,” La Repubblica, 25/11/1977.
- 78 Pezzana, Un omosessuale sulla Piazza Rossa. In his subsequent autobiography Pezzana explicitly argu (...)
33Before Pezzana returned to the hotel, some KGB men picked him up and brought him to the Lubianka prison. They asked who had sent him to Moscow for the protest and informed him of his immediate expulsion from the USSR for “hooliganism” and “disturbance of public order.” The following day, the Italian press widely reported the news of Pezzana’s expulsion.74 Some days later the Soviet journal Literaturnaia Gazeta published an article criticising Pezzana’s gesture.75 It described him as a person “suffering from strong anti-Sovietism” and “a fighter for the right of sexual perversion.” The article noted that the issue of gay rights had not been discussed at the Helsinki Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe, and recalled that Pezzana had even criticised Amnesty International and Andrei Sakharov for not showing interest in this cause. The article exploited this indifference to argue for the supposed senselessness of his protest. Finally, it noted Pezzana’s statement that he was in Moscow “for a special task given by di Meana,” the president of the Biennale. This statement was used to confirm Moscow’s existing criticisms about the anti-Soviet meaning of the so-called Biennale of Dissent, which had just begun.76 In a letter that went unpublished in the USSR but was printed in Rome’s La Repubblica, Pezzana replied to Literaturnaia Gazeta, thanking the article’s author for the great visibility it gave the events in question, as “among all these insults and lies, the news was able to reach Soviet readers.”77 Pezzana also rejected criticisms of his supposed ignorance of the Soviet penal code and the Helsinki Final Act; he also judged false the official reasons for his expulsion from the USSR. Finally, he complained once again that Andrei Sakharov and Amnesty International had shown no official interest in Parajanov’s case and, more generally, in the conditions in which gay people lived in the USSR.78
- 79 Note also the posthumous release in 1975 of Pasolini’s Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma, even if it (...)
- 80 See: Peppino Ortoleva, Il secolo dei media: Riti, abitudini, mitologie (Milano: Il Saggiatore, 2009 (...)
- 81 See: Alessandro Massaro, “La RAI-TV esce FUORI!,” FUORI! Giornale di liberazione omosessuale, 20 (N (...)
34The Italian media reported Pezzana’s protest and his expulsion from the USSR—as well as the Biennale initiative devoted to Parajanov, analyzed below—bringing the issue of homosexuality to the fore in public opinion. Although still neglected by the main Italian political parties, the existence of gays as visible social actors was emerging more and more openly. In this respect, Italian mass culture played a key role in that representation in the late 1970s, contributing to the visibility of sexual variation. In the film industry one can see some successful movies dealing with the issue of homosexuality: Ettore Scola’s Una giornata particolare (1977), starring Marcello Mastroianni and Sofia Loren; the Italian-French comedy trilogy Il vizietto (1978, 1980, 1985) by Edouard Molinaro, which was an international blockbuster; and La patata bollente (1979) by Steno, a comic B movie in which the intolerance of Italian workers and union officials towards gays is criticised.79 In literature and music, the theme of possible bisexuality of young people was also popularised: see, for example, the bestselling novel Porci con le ali (1976, Marco Lombardo Radice and Lidia Ravera), and the success of Renato Zero’s hits Mi vendo (1977) and Triangolo (1978). The year 1977 was also crucial for the fall of taboos about the visual representation of sexuality in Italy; that year marks the beginning of wide circulation of pornographic press on newsstands and hardcore movies in specific theatres.80 Last but not least, in 1978 a FUORI! delegation attended an Italian state television program (L’accesso), due to the more pluralist attitude of Italian TV since the second half of the 1970s.81
The second Italian connection: Carlo Ripa di Meana and the initiatives of the Biennale of Dissent
- 82 On the 1977 Biennale as a counter-celebration of the founding event of the Soviet State, see Matteo (...)
35On the same day that Pezzana replied to Literaturnaia Gazeta, the Venice Biennale devoted one day to Parajanov’s works. But what was the “Biennale of Dissent”? Following professional and social protests in the late 1960s and a long parliamentary procedure, the Venice Art Biennale was deeply reformed in 1973 and transformed from a mere exhibition of art performances and objects (including films) to include the organisation of different activities focusing on a single subject of cultural and even political importance. In 1974 Carlo Ripa di Meana, a member of the Socialist party, was appointed first president of the new, reformed Biennale. In 1976, as a result of the growing global interest in dissent and the signing of the 1975 Helsinki Final Act, Ripa di Meana conceived of a project aiming to investigate the phenomenon of cultural dissent in the USSR and the Soviet Bloc. Deliberately or not, the “Biennale of Dissent” would take place in autumn 1977, just when the USSR was preparing to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of the October Revolution and to approve the new constitution.82
- 83 On the Soviet attempts to stop the design and developing of the 1977 Biennale of Venice, see the ac (...)
36All these circumstances provoked a bitter controversy both in diplomatic relations between Italy and the USSR and in Italian domestic politics. The Soviet ambassador to Italy, Nikita Ryzhov, asked the Italian minister of foreign affairs (the Christian Democrat Arnaldo Forlani) to cancel the Biennale program. The ambassador announced that the USSR and other Warsaw Pact countries would boycott it as well as withdraw from other international initiatives.83 The main issue with which Soviet officials were concerned was the emergence of human-rights discourse on the international agenda, both in Soviet Bloc countries and abroad. The Soviet reaction, in turn, worried the Italian government, which did not wish for the Biennale to damage the process of détente or Soviet–Italian relations, especially economic ones.
- 84 On the international dimensions of the “historical compromise” and the “national solidarity” govern (...)
- 85 On Craxi’s leadership of the PSI and his role in Italian politics in the 1980s, see Simona Colarizi (...)
- 86 On conflicts between Italian Communists and Socialists over the issue of Dissent, see Valentine Lom (...)
- 87 See Silvio Pons, “The Rise and Fall of Eurocommunism,” in Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad, ed (...)
- 88 On financial links between the PCI and the USSR, see Valerio Riva, Oro da Mosca. I finanziamenti so (...)
37Italian internal political struggles must also be taken into account. From 1976 to 1979, the PCI supported the DC “national solidarity” government through their vote abstention.84 The Italian Socialist party (PSI), under the new leadership of Bettino Craxi, strongly opposed this move, interpreting it as an attempt by Communists to isolate them.85 The organisation of the Biennale was in fact one of the cultural initiatives promoted by the PSI for constructing their democratic identity, in contrast to that of the PCI, which they condemned for its inability to break openly with the parties leading Soviet Bloc governments. The PSI, then, saw the Biennale as a cultural weapon with which to attack the PCI, stressing the repression of dissidents in the Eastern Bloc despite the Helsinki Accords.86 By thus arousing Moscow’s anger, the Biennale of Dissent was also testing the delicate political balance between the DC and the PCI, who had the common goal of maintaining good relations with the USSR. The PCI was divided between the desire to claim its autonomy from Moscow—this idea had led to the Eurocommunism project87—and the need to maintain good relations with the Kremlin, for financial reasons.88 Eventually, official diplomatic protest and pressure from the Soviet Union pressured the PCI into officially boycotting the event.
- 89 On the many initiatives organized in that edition, see Aa.Vv., La Biennale di Venezia. Annuario 197 (...)
- 90 More specifically, on the cinematic initiatives of the 1977 Biennale, see Stefano Pisu, “Transnatio (...)
38Cinema held a special place among the various Biennale activities.89 Four different cinematographic initiatives were organised. The film series “Cinema and Eastern Countries,” organised by Antonín and Mira Liehm, lasted one month and was considered the most extensive program of “non-conformist” cinema from Central and Eastern Europe ever organised in a Western country. Forty-nine films were screened in the series, most from Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union. In addition, three conferences were organised. The main conference, “Nationalised Cinema: Its Successes and Problems” was attended by many experts from across all of Europe. Furthermore, in the seminar “The Cinema Avant-Garde and the Problem of Dissent,” organisers tried to present innovative Soviet filmmakers of the 1920s and 1930s as pioneers of cultural dissent.90
- 91 Izvestiia, 24 Nov. 1977.
- 92 Mario Zoppelli, “La ‘Tass’ attacca il governo italiano,” Il Giorno, 24/11/1977.
- 93 TASS agency, 23/11/1977.
39One of those four events was the International Workshop on Sergei Parajanov’s works that was held on 25 November. That same day, the Biennale of Dissent was the object of brutal attacks from the Soviet press. Izvestiia wrote that “The Venice farce has begun. Ripa di Meana has only managed to gather a small company of clown-émigrés.” Intellectuals invited by di Meana were “political renegades wandering at the edge of the capitalist world… In what can they compete if not in showing their hate and rage towards their former homeland and socialism, in the impudence of their lies and calumnies?”91 The Soviet Telegraph Agency TASS suspected that the Biennale of Dissent was orchestrated abroad with the involvement of the American secret services: “The idea of organising such an anti-Soviet exhibition was not born in Italy. The instigators in the background include international Zionist organisations and the press financed by the CIA as for example Christian Russia.”92 Regardless of the origins of the event, TASS implied that it might have damaged the relationship between the two countries: “Why did the competent Italian authorities decide to ratify this dirty political farce, which is far from strengthening Italian–Soviet relations?”93
- 94 Herbert Marshall, “Comunicazione,” in M. Amiel et al., Il cinema nazionalizzato: i suoi successi e (...)
- 95 Ibid., 292.
- 96 Ibid., 293.
- 97 Ibid.
40The seminar on Parajanov’s work was introduced by Ripa di Meana, who described it as “a meeting of solidarity.” The first to speak was Herbert Marshall, who had sent a petition to have the filmmaker released to the Ukrainian Supreme Soviet, the USSR and the United Nations, receiving no answer.94 According to Marshall, the charge of homosexuality for which Parajanov was convicted was not credible, since in other, more striking cases it had been tolerated; he recalled Guy Burgess, the British spy working for the KGB.95 The real reasons were his support for the arrested Ukrainian intellectuals, the excessive national characterisation of his films, and a poetic form that was too extreme and went against the ideological demands of the Party. From the point of view of the evolution of cinematic language, Marshall compared Parajanov’s contribution to that of Eisenstein.96 According to Marshall, the world public opinion could influence the Soviet government “because all my Soviet friends who are fighting in Russia always tell me that silence never helps, while the struggle, the publicity and the pressure of the world press has served and can still serve.”97
41During the workshop, other facts emerged that helped to explain Soviet officials’ such harsh behaviour towards Parajanov. According to the scholar Marco Carynnyk – whose words were quoted by an Italian journalist – the Soviet filmmaker had been arrested and imprisoned
- 98 Roberto Bianchin, “Un ritratto del regista per parlare di dissenso,” La Repubblica, 27–28/11/1977; (...)
because he was one of the leaders of the opposition movement in Ukraine and was accused of liaising between Armenian and Ukrainian dissidents. Soviet officials began following him in 1968, when more than one hundred inhabitants of Kiev, including Parajanov himself, signed a letter denouncing Brezhnev’s repressive policies in Ukraine. In 1971 Parajanov had signed another appeal to Moscow officials, protesting the arrest of some dissidents.98
- 99 Sauro Borelli, “Alla Biennale il ‘caso Paragianov’,” L’Unità, 26/11/1977.
- 100 “The undersigned film directors and critics demand from the USSR government the liberation, for hum (...)
42The screening of Parajanov’s film Sayat Nova marked its premiere in the West.99 At the end of the conference on nationalised cinema, the participants signed a transnational appeal for his release and for the free distribution of his films.100
- 101 ASAC, Fondo Storico, Serie Cinema, b. 306, Ex 1977, CM42/Ter, Paradjanov Materiale, L. Mifsud to Ca (...)
- 102 ASAC, Fondo Storico, Serie Cinema, b. 306, ex 1977, CM42/Ter, Paradjanov Materiale, V. Arzoumanian, (...)
- 103 Sauro Borelli, “Alla Biennale il ‘caso Paragianov’,” L’Unità, 26/11/1977. After Parajanov’s worksho (...)
- 104 Mark Malkasian, Gha-ra-bagh!: The Emergence of the National Democratic Movement in Armenia (Detroit (...)
- 105 ASAC, Fondo Storico, Serie Cinema, b. 306, Ex 1977, CM42/Ter, Paradjanov Materiale, L. Mifsud to Ca (...)
43The workshop was also attended by Collective Parajanov, a committee composed of Armenians émigrés based in Marseille who were engaged in the battle for his liberation. They had proposed the screening of Sayat Nova, considering it “interesting” from artistic and “humanitarian” points of view.101 The representative of the collective, Varoujan Arzoumanian, described the copy of the film Sayat Nova as “a real screen samizdat, since not only is the film definitively prohibited in the Soviet Union, but there are only a few copies, largely mutilated and incomplete.”102 This was not the actual original version but that which Parajanov reassembled himself and that Iutkevich further cut and reworked. This version was the first to be seen on the other side of the Iron Curtain.103 Arzoumanian also insisted that the accusation of homosexuality was only a pretext: in his opinion the state’s real problem with the film was its “subversive” character, which affirmed the rebirth of Armenian national identity through art. Indeed, there was a precedent for his suspicion, as nationalist themes had also been prominent in the work of the painter Minas Avétissian and of the poet Paruyr Sevak, both of whom died in mysterious circumstances in the early 1970s, with possible KGB intervention.104 Representatives of the diaspora defended Parajanov’s rights more as an artist of Armenian descent than as a gay person suffering discrimination. Since it sent its first letter of interest to Ripa di Meana the previous summer, Collective Parajanov had been highlighting the importance of Parajanov’s masterpiece as the continuation of the “symbolic and Caucasian national lineage of his previous success, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors.”105 The Armenian collective’s purpose was to win the freedom of the filmmaker who, more than any other Soviet director, had been able to promote the values of Armenian and, more generally Caucasian, national culture. This aim seems also to be confirmed by the report on the film that was sent to the Biennale for wide distribution during the screening of Sayat Nova. The report quoted a 1968 statement by Parajanov celebrating Caucasian culture:
- 106 ASAC, Fondo Storico, Serie Cinema, b. 306, ex CM42/4, Dissenso ’77, Programma Cinema, Sayat Nova, L (...)
The Armenian Renaissance has given to the world excellent painters, poets and philosophers, among others Sayat-Nova. This is an outstanding person, wonderfully gifted. He was born in Tbilisi, the city of my childhood, where every street, every house is familiar to me. It’s maybe for this reason that I have grown fond of the figure of ashug, whose works all the people of the Caucasus sing.106
- 107 Steffen, The Cinema of Sergei Parajanov, 220-230.
44The Armenian diaspora celebrated not only their national values, but also Transcaucasian culture and even Ukrainian peasant culture depicted in Parajanov’s films. This praise of Parajanov’s national and cosmopolitan perspectives would be counterbalanced in the 1980s by the Georgian “purist” critics, following the release of The Legend of the Suram Fortress. The criticism of orientalism and alleged queer features were part “of a larger project by certain Georgian nationalist intellectuals to promote a more wholesome and ‘pure’ image of Georgian culture, weeded of ‘foreign’ or ‘cosmopolitan’ elements, especially Armenian and Persian influences.”107
- 108 Callisto Cosulich, “La penna rubata al censore ha condannato Paradjanov?,” Paese Sera, 29/11/1977.
- 109 Sauro Borelli, “Cultura e società nel ‘caso Paragianov’,” L’Unità, 27/11/1977.
45In fact, defining Parajanov’s film as a form of samizdat actually stretched the notion of the latter, suggesting that the main criterion for samizdat was, as the Russian word itself says, “self-publishing” in a clandestine way, outside of the editorial production methods and the official circulation circuits of the USSR. If this was the case, then Soviet films, even if they were subjected to censorship or withdrawn from circulation, were basically works produced within state bodies, such as the film studios across the USSR that had to formally pass a series of government checks on everything from subject matter to final editing. The contradiction inherent in judging films from the Soviet Bloc as works of cultural dissent was expressed by Callisto Cosulich, within whose critical vision and cultural environment Communists interpreted Ripa di Meana’s initiative: “That it was impossible to apply the word ‘dissent’ to the cinema of Eastern countries was evident… Parajanov carried out a provocative task in the Soviet Union: instead of seeking compromise, he sought a fight.”108 The communist newspaper was less harsh towards Parajanov, but sought to strike a balance: “It must be said, in any case, that the [Parajanov case] can and must surely find a positive solution in the firm claim of a civil tolerance.”109 The contradiction inherent in labelling the products of the Soviet state film industry as objects of cultural dissent was debated during the seminar as well as by the Italian press that covered the event. Morandini was explicit:
- 110 Morando Morandini, “Clandestino da Mosca il film di Paradjanov,” Il Giorno, 27/11/1977.
[Parajanov Day] has raised several problems: what difference is there between dissent and dissidence? What is the relationship between dissent in the socialist countries of the East and intellectual dissent of all times and countries? Where does cultural dissent end and where does political dissent begin? The cinema, on the other hand, complicates the situation.…But how can dissent be documented in the cinema since in the socialist countries of the East the film industry is nationalised, that is, strictly controlled in all its phases and, for obvious practical reasons, you cannot make films secretly?110
- 111 Riccardo Calimani, “Paradjanov, il regista sovietico in carcere per omosessualità,” Tuttolibri, 26/ (...)
- 112 V. Tosi, “Comunicazione,” in Amiel et al., Il cinema nazionalizzato, 303-304.
- 113 Ibid., 304.
46The seminar devoted to Parajanov was widely covered by the Italian press.111 The only Italian to speak was the film director and critic Virgilio Tosi, who recounted his meeting with Parajanov in his Kiev apartment in 1971 during a trip to a conference in which he tried in vain to see Sayat Nova, since the director did not have copies.112 A year later, Tosi introduced the screening of Teni zabytykh predkov at the Soviet embassy in Rome by defining Parajanov “a filmmaker of dissent, in the sense that he was certainly not a normal filmmaker… for the industrial and commercial production of a film industry like the Soviet one. It was, in a way, an exception.”113 Tosi’s definition of “filmmaker of dissent” shifted the meaning of the term to one more generic, and politically less risky “exceptionalism” in artistic or cultural production, reflecting the diversity of interpretation given to the phenomenon object of the Biennale.
47At the end of the workshop on nationalised cinema, where more than 50 people had spoken, a new appeal for the release of Parajanov and the free circulation of his films was signed:
- 114 “Appello per liberazione di Serghej Paradjanov,” in Amiel, Il cinema nazionalizzato, 307.
The undersigned filmmakers and critics urge the government of the USSR to release Sergei Parajanov for humanitarian reasons. The measure would be welcomed with relief and would attest that the government of the USSR is aware of the talent of this great filmmaker. The undersigned hope that at the same time his works, which occupy a prominent place in the history of contemporary cinema and honour the country to which Parajanov belongs, will have free circulation again.114
- 115 Camera dei Deputati, Gruppo Parlamentare Radicale, Appeal to all Foreign Ministers of the Democrati (...)
48Also created at the Biennale was an International Committee for the Liberation of Sergei Parajanov and for the Abolition of Article 121 of the Soviet penal code. The Italian section was led by the Parliamentarian group of the Radical party. The latter signed an “Appeal to all Foreign Ministers of the Democratic Countries” to ask the Soviet government for the filmmaker’s release.115 The appeal noted that the aforementioned article clearly conflicted with
the principles of the final document of the Helsinki Accords (August 1, 1975 chapter VII), in which we can read: “The participating States respect the human rights and the fundamental freedoms, including the freedom of thought, of conscience, of religion, of political conviction for all, without distinction of race, of sex, of language or religion”. Art. 121 is also in contradiction with articles no. 20, 34 and 39 of the Soviet Constitution.
- 116 Meana: “Non è vero che Pezzana fosse a Mosca per mio mandato,” Il Giornale, 24/11/1977.
- 117 Pezzana, Dentro & Fuori, 91.
49And what did Angelo Pezzana do at the Biennale of Dissent? The president of the Biennale denied that he had anything to do with Pezzana’s Moscow protest.116 According to the gay activist, di Meana feared that the Biennale might be overshadowed by the Moscow protest; in addition, the Biennale’s president did not want to damage relations with the few communist critics and filmmakers who had accepted invitations to attend Venetian initiatives.117 Pezzana, then, was not welcomed at the Parajanov workshop. He was allowed to speak only at the very end of the initiative, while participants were leaving the room. He used vivid language to make his point that, during the workshop, Parajanov’s homosexuality had not been given enough consideration, despite being the official reason for his imprisonment. The next day, Pezzana criticised this attitude on the press. He recalled:
- 118 Pezzana, “Un Gay alla corte dello Zar,” 42.
They all seemed like a pack of hungry dogs in front of a piece of meat, ready to defend themselves from the intruder: that is, from me. According to their mentality at the time, I was depriving them of a slice of the swag: Parajanov.118
- 119 Liehm, ed., Serghiej Paradjanov.
- 120 Reggiani, “Paradjanov, il cinema e il dissenso all’Est.”
50Indeed, even the volume published by the Biennale on the occasion of the seminar, which the present article has mentioned several times, focused above all on the director’s work and his problems with censorship and the Ukrainian Soviet authorities, leaving the question of his homosexuality quite in the background, since it was not considered a crucial element of the whole affair.119 Pezzana strongly criticised the lack of concrete action at the Biennale: “I propose a public manifestation of protest. Intellectuals’ appeals are not useful at all”.120 For this reason, that same day Pezzana and other Venetian members of FUORI! rallied in San Marco Square in protest of Parajanov’s imprisonment and in favour of gay rights in the Soviet Union.
- 121 Steffen, The Cinema of Sergei Parajanov, 197. It is worth remembering that Aragon also had same-sex (...)
51It is not easy to assess how influential the petition signed in Venice or the gestures of protest made by FUORI! actually were in the process that led to the Soviet authorities’ decision to release the director. It was certainly important in keeping the attention of international public opinion focused on the case, which was resolved just over a month later, thanks to a new French intervention. In fact, in the same year, the Soviet authorities decided to reward the prominent French novelist Louis Aragon on his eightieth birthday with the medal of the Order of Friendship of Peoples. The Communist writer had been married to the Russian writer Elsa Triolet, sister of Lilia Brik, who had made friends with Parajanov through her stepson, the documentary filmmaker Vasilii Katanian.121 Aragon went to Moscow to accept the award, and there it seems he pressured Brezhnev to resolve the situation; thus, on 30 December 1977, Parajanov gained his freedom.
Fuori! members’ demonstration at San Marco Square in Venice(26 November 1977)
Source: courtesy of Fuori! Historical Archives, Sandro Penna Foundation, Turin
- 122 See: ASFUORI, file 33, International Gay Association, Proposals for political action, August 1978, (...)
- 123 The protest was widely covered by the press. See: “L’ambasciatore Urss ignora il ‘Fuori’. Radicali (...)
- 124 “FUORI! Movimento di liberazione omosessuale aderente all’International Gay Association. All’ambasc (...)
- 125 Enzo Francone, “Un gay sulla Piazza Rossa,” FUORI!Notizie. Giornale di liberazione delle lesbiche e (...)
- 126 They received Trifonov’s personal Leningrad address from Simon Karlinsky, a professor of Russian Li (...)
- 127 ASFUORI, file 79, Angelo Pezzana, Vincenzo Cucco, and Marco Silombria to Boris Yeltsin, Turin, 17/9 (...)
52FUORI! was the only player in Italy to continue its engagement in the struggle for gay liberation in the USSR after the release of Parajanov, with the approval of the 1978-established IGA (International Gay Association).122 FUORI activists protested on 25 November 1978 in front of the Soviet Embassy in Rome and the Soviet consulate in Milan, asking to meet with USSR diplomats, but they were refused.123 FUORI! published their message to the Soviet ambassador in Italy. It argued that the USSR had definitely abandoned the ideals of the October Revolution and was no better than right-wing dictatorships or other intolerant forms of government.124 In 1980 the Italian activist Enzo Francone protested in Moscow’s Red Square during the Olympic Games, displaying a towel with slogans condemning the notorious Article 121 in favour of Viktoras Petkus and Gennady Trifonov’s release. Soviet police managed to stop the manifestation by beating him, along with journalists. Francone was sent back to Italy after being interrogated by the KGB about the instigator of that initiative, whether he knew Angelo Pezzana and whether they belonged to a “Homosexual Subversive International.”125 In 1986 Pezzana and Enzo Cucco, on behalf of FUORI! and the Radical party, sent telegrams of solidarity to Trifonov, who had again been harassed by the KGB, after his release in 1980.126 Last but not least, FUORI! officials sent a letter to Boris Yeltsin in mid-September 1991, that is about a year and a half before the official decriminalisation of sodomy in the post-Soviet Russian Federation (29 April 1993). Senders expressed their satisfaction “about the democratic future of Russia,” by pointing out their happiness “as gays” because Yeltsin’s country was “changing over from totalitarian to democratic rule.” The letter also recalls Pezzana’s 1977 protest against Parajanov’s imprisonment and Soviet anti-gay legislation. Finally, the writers stated the hope that in Russia “things will change for the better” and asked him to receive them officially, but Yeltsin never replied to the letter.127
Conclusions
- 128 In addition to the above mentioned articles, it is worth reminding the Hans Mayer’s reportage “Ma a (...)
53Parajanov’s case made more visible the difficult conditions in which gay people lived in both East and West. In Italy it had two major—cultural and political—consequences. First, it contributed to focusing more of the media’s attention on gay issues, as evidenced by numerous articles published in newspapers and magazines with wide circulation.128 Second, this case pressured the PCI to face up to the repression of gay people in the USSR and consider the Italian situation as well. The official communist newspaper changed its position, going from a 1974 denial of even the existence of Soviet anti-gay legislation to its vehement condemnation of it in early December 1977:
- 129 Mario Spinella, “I codici e la sessualità,” L’Unità, 3/12/1977.
Article 121 of the Soviet code is not only “brutal”…but also unequitable It is not sustainable with rational or “productivistic” arguments. Unfortunately, it is close to racist forms of discrimination. Its abolition in the USSR—and not only there—is considered necessary.129
- 130 Acronym for Federazione Giovanile Comunista Italiana.
54In 1980 this article’s author contributed to the first publication explicitly devoted to the topic of the PCI’s attitude towards homosexuality in Italy. Although it was not an official publication commissioned by the Party, its editor was a member of the Communist Youth Organisation (FGCI)130. In the foreword the book’s editor justified the relevance of the topic by linking it to the broader subject of social “minorities” about whom the Italian Communist leader Enrico Berlinguer claimed to be worried:
- 131 Fabio Giovannini, Comunisti e diversi. Il Pci e la questione omosessuale (Bari: Dedalo Libri, 1980) (...)
The link between the workers’ movement, the Communist party and that socially connoted “minority” characterised by its sexual condition (homosexuality) can therefore become “exemplary.” The sexual question is then practically a reason for highlighting other problems, other areas of intervention: it can point to new tasks and give new focus to the struggle of all the forces that want to deeply transform an Italian society looking to socialism.131
- 132 Ibid., 165-199.
- 133 Acronym for Associazione Ricreativa Culturale Italiana. In 1985 ARCIGAY became a national network a (...)
- 134 A few days before committing suicide, Mieli wrote a letter to several representatives of the Italia (...)
- 135 On that movement, see: Monica Galfrè e Simone Neri Serneri (a cura di), Il movimento del '77. Radic (...)
55Moreover, the volume should be remembered for its documentary value, as its appendix houses a substantial collection of letters on homosexuality sent by PCI militants to the communist press in the period 1978-1980.132 Furthermore, in 1980 Italian Communist and Socialist parties supported the birth in Palermo of ARCIGAY, a branch of ARCI (the main historic left wing cultural and recreational organisation).133 It was not just young Communists that were greatly interested in gay rights issues—one should also consider the party leadership’s interest in broadening their support after seeing a decline in votes in the 1979 elections. The greater PCI engagement, or at least of some of its components, was part of a framework in which the issue of gay rights had already entered the agenda of the extra-parliamentary left, after its indifference in the early 1970s. Since 1976, revolutionary gay groups had been established within some far-left political movements, and their press hosted debates on the homosexual condition. In October 1976 the first national conference of those groups was held in Genova, and it was attended also by COM (Collettivi Omosessuali Milanesi, Homosexual Collectives of Milan), led by Mario Mieli, although the latter became increasingly disappointed by extra-parliamentary left and homosexual collectives’ attitude, especially after the publication of his book. More and more isolated, Mieli also fell into depression due to difficulties in publishing his new work “The awakening of the pharaohs”, and he committed suicide in 1983.134 Homosexual collectives were also a significant actor of the “Movement of 1977,” which is usually meant to describe the impressive wave of youth uprisings, having centres in Bologna and Rome and representing the last major expression of social and civil conflicts begun in 1968 in Italy.135
- 136 See: Vladimir Kozlovskii, Argo russkoi gomoseksual´noi subkul’tury: Materialy k izucheniiu [Jargon (...)
- 137 Genady Trifonov, “Open Letter to Literaturnaia Gazeta,” in Kevin Moss, ed, Out of the Blue: Russia’ (...)
- 138 Healey, Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia, 247.
56In the USSR the Liternaturnaia Gazeta article against Pezzana and the broader campaign against the 1977 Biennale136 led the Leningrad poet Gennady Trifonov—who was arrested in 1976 and sentenced to four years’ imprisonment under the notorious Article 121—to write an open letter to the same journal in which he protested the defamatory treatment of gay people in the USSR. Obviously, Liternaturnaia Gazeta did not publish the letter, but it was translated and released abroad, and in 1978 Trifonov’s “Letter from Prison” was released simultaneously in several gay periodicals.137 Furthermore, Pezzana’s courage enabled further contacts between European queers and Soviet gays and lesbians, for instance, the Gay Laboratory in Leningrad and its links to Finnish gay groups and the International Gay Association.138 In other words, one could say the Italian activist protest was both practical politics in assistance of Soviet queers and an impulse directed at the internal Italian debate about the gay issue.
57The mobilisation in favour of Parajanov was far from monolithic. That campaign gathered diverse players each seeking their own broader aims by spotlighting the director’s fate. The Western debate on the persecution of homosexuals in the USSR took place in parallel with the more general international discourse on the repression of dissent and with inter-professional solidarity. These different involvements around the Soviet filmmaker’s case were well represented by Italian players, but did not intersect; in fact, the controversy between Pezzana and the Biennale managed by Di Meana shows that these different end goals were achieved through the same means, that is, the protest against Parajanov’s imprisonment.
58The disparity between the different sides of the Parajanov case is clearly evident. One can see at least three different positions relating to priority interests and aims:
-
first, the Socialist di Meana’s political goal of mediatising the filmmaker’s imprisonment as a concrete example of the cultural dissident oppressed by the Soviet regime, and, through this, of attacking the Italian Communist party;
-
second, the professional solidarity of film directors and critics attending—or writing about—the Biennale of Dissent and the specific workshop devoted to Parajanov; and
-
third, the goal of Pezzana and FUORI! to make visible the case as a paradigm of state persecution of gay people in the USSR.
- 139 For instance, the already mentioned Trifonov, the Lithuanian Viktoras Petkus, the Belorussian arche (...)
59In addition, the specific national interest of many intellectual diasporas—specifically from Armenia and more broadly from socialist countries—must be taken into consideration to understand the wide mobilisation created around Parajanov’s case. This crossroads of sub-campaigns concentrated around a Soviet intellectual working in an expression of mass culture—although he was far from a mainstream director—explains why this case was the object of wider mobilisation with respect to other Soviet non-conformist cultural figures arrested on homosexuality charges.139
- 140 See Jan Eckel, Samuel Moyn, eds., The Breakthrough: Human Rights in the 1970s (Philadelphia: Univer (...)
- 141 Silvio Pons, La rivoluzione globale: Storia del comunismo internazionale 1917-1991 (Torino: Einaudi (...)
- 142 http://www.ohchr.org/en/professionalinterest/pages/ccpr.aspx.
- 143 Moyn, The Last Utopia, 155.
- 144 http://www.jimmycarterlibrary.gov/documents/speeches/.
- 145 “Award Ceremony Speech.” Presentation Speech by Aase Lionæs, Chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Commit (...)
60More generally, the Parajanov affair embodies the struggle for the freedom of artistic creativity, political thinking and sexual identity, all elements of the broader activism of the period. In the late 1970s human-rights discourse rose to the top of the global agenda. At that time the strong growth of transnational movements and nongovernmental organisations gave voice to international public opinion that increasingly privileged human rights over nation-state supremacy or ideological blocs, and universal moral principles over traditional political ideas.140 In fact, the 1975 Helsinki conference’s Final Act, which favoured the establishment and development of dissident movements in Central and Eastern Europe within the framework of a longer “time of crisis” of international communism141 was what inspired di Meana to pursue the Biennale project. In March 1976 the United Nations put into force an International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights that had been signed ten years prior.142 Historians consider 1977, the year that mobilisation around the Parajanov case reached its peak, as “the year of human rights.”143 In January, the new president of the United States, Jimmy Carter, focused his inaugural address on engagement with human rights as a parameter for US foreign policy.144 In December, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Amnesty International for its effort “to secure the release of people imprisoned for their opinions who have made no use of violence or incited others to do so.”145 Yet, Amnesty International’s refusal to support Parajanov’s cause had already shown the limits of that emerging, transnational culture of human rights.
Anmerkungen
1 Decriminalisation of homosexual sex between consenting men occurred after the October Revolution, before new re-criminalisation in 1934 under Stalin. See: Dan Healey, Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia: The Regulation of Sexual and Gender Dissent (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2001), 100-125. On the repression of sexual variation in the early Soviet regime, even when homosexuality was not criminalised, see: ibid., 153-162; Laura Engelstein, “Soviet Policy Toward Male Homosexuality: Its Origins and Historical Roots,” Journal of Homosexuality, 29, 2-3 (1995), 155-178.
2 James Steffen, The Cinema of Sergei Parajanov (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2013), 194-197.
3 Karl-Heinze Steinle, “Gay Liberation von 1969 bis heute: DDR und UdSSR,” in Monika Hingst, et al., eds., Goodbye to Berlin?: 100 Jahre Schwulenbewegung (Berlin: Verlag rosa Winkel, 1997), 301, cit. in Healey, Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia, 349.
4 Angelo Pezzana, Dentro & Fuori. Una autobiografia omosessuale (Milano: Sperling and Kupfer, 1996), 81-92.
5 Acronym for Fronte Unitario Omosessuale Rivoluzionario Italiano (Italian Revolutionary Homosexual United Front). FUORI! has been the first Italian organisation for the defence of gay rights.
6 I am immensely grateful to its president Angelo Pezzana and to Maurizio Cagliuso for their kindness and help during my research in Turin.
7 Archivio Storico delle Arti Contemporanee.
8 On Parajanov’s personal and professional life, see Steffen, The Cinema of Sergei Parajanov, and Nikolai Blokhin, Izgnanie Paradzhanova [Parajanov’s exile] (Stavrapol´: IPF Stavrapol´e, 2002).
9 His real name was Sarkis Paradzhanian.
10 Joshua First, Ukrainian Cinema: Belonging and Identity during the Soviet Thaw (London – New York: I.B. Tauris, 2015), especially chapters III and IV.
11 Simone Bellezza, The Shore of Expectations: A Cultural Study of the Ukrainian Shistdesiatnyky (Toronto: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 2019): 130-131.
12 Ibid., 130.
13 Parajanov himself stated that the Ministry of Culture of the Soviet Ukrainian Republic, despite its dissatisfaction with the film, could not block its release as two days later the 100th anniversary of Kotsiubynsky’s birth had to be celebrated. See on this his unfinished documentary Ispoved´ o lichnoi zhizni [Confession on Private Life] (1990), 6’51’’.
14 Antonín Liehm, ed., Serghiej Paradjanov. Testimonianze e documenti sull’opera e la vita (Venezia: La Biennale di Venezia, Marsilio Editori, 1977), 67-68.
15 Birgit Beumers, A History of Russian Cinema (New York: Bloomsbury, 2008), 141. On film censorship during the Khrushchev, and especially Brezhnev eras, see Martine Godet, La pellicule et les ciseaux: la censure dans le cinéma soviétique du Dégel à la perestroïka (P.: CNRS Éditions, 2010).
16 Beumers, A History of Russian Cinema, 160.
17 Parajanov himself rejects Yutkevich’s version. See Ispoved´ o lichnoi zhizni, 9’22’’.
18 Bellezza, The Shore of Expectations, 144.
19 Andrea Graziosi, L’Urss dal trionfo al degrado. Storia dell’Unione Sovietica. 1945-1991 (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2008): 345. See also Kenneth C. Farmer, Ukrainian Nationalism in the Post-Stalin Era. Myth, Symbols and Ideology in Soviet Nationalities Policy (The Hague – Boston – London: Martinus Nijoff Publishers, 1980), 183; Bohdan Nahaylo, The Ukrainian Resurgence (Toronto-Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 263. The petition is partially translated in Liehm, ed., Serghiej Paradjanov, 74.
20 Steffen, The Cinema of Sergei Parajanov, 186.
21 Ibid., 187.
22 Ibid., 191-192.
23 In summer 1948 he was arrested together with other gays in Tbilisi because of their association with a Georgian KGB official. He was released after some months thanks to an amnesty. Steffen, The Cinema of Sergei Parajanov, 29. In postwar USSR there was perhaps a revived link between foreign spying and homosexuality. Dan Healey, Russian Homophobia from Stalin to Sochi (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 169.
24 Steffen, The Cinema of Sergei Parajanov, 188-189.
25 Arkhiv Soiuza Kinematografistov SSSR [Archives of USSR Filmmakers Union], d. 927, cited in Valerii Fomin, ed., Letopis´ rossiisskogo kino 1966-1980 [Yearbook of Russian Cinema 1966-1980] (M.: Kanon-Pljus, 2015), 426. Very few voices from the Soviet film industry milieu supported Parajanov’s cause: among others, the film critic and screenwriter Viktor Shklovskii, who asked the Catholicos of all Armenians for intercession in order to have the director released. See S. Parajanov, Ispoved´ [Confession] (M.: Azbuka, 2001), 629-630.
26 This was the case of the historian and dissident Valentin Moroz. See Bellezza, The Shore of Expectations, 250-251. Moroz’s attitude was criticized by the filmmaker Henry Gabay, who was Parajanov’s fellow at VGIK. See Henry Gabay, “Serghiej Paradjanov,” in Liehm, ed., Serghiej Paradjanov, 129-132.
27 Jean Vidal, “Per salvare Serghiej Paradjanov. Conversazione con Jean Vidal,” Informations ouvrières, 791 (March 1977), re-published in Liehm, ed., Serghiej Paradjanov, 117.
28 “Des cinéastes protestent contre l’arrestation de Serge Paradjanov,” Le Monde, 31/1/1974.
29 Jean Vidal, “Per salvare Serghiej Paradjanov,” 119.
30 See Bent Boel, “French Support for Eastern European Dissidence, 1968-1989: Approaches and Controversies,” in Poul Villaume and Odd Arne Westad, eds., Perforating the Iron Curtain. European Détente, Transatlantic Relations, and the Cold War, 1965-1985 (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2010), 215-241.
31 Soobshchenie sovetnika Posol´stva SSSR vo Frantsii v otdel kul´tury TsK KPSS o besede s gosudarstvennym sekretarem po kul´ture Mishelem Gi po voprosam sovetsko-francuzskikh kul´turnykh otnoshenii 16 avgusta 1974 g. [Message from the USSR Embassy in France’s advisor to the Culture Department of the CPSU CC on a conversation with State Secretary for Culture Michel Guy concerning Soviet-French cultural relations 16 August 1974] [the conversation held on 8/8/1974 in Mentone during the awarding ceremony of French “Ordre des Arts et des Lettres” to M.L. Rostropovic and A.I., published in S.D. Tavanec, eds., Kul´tura i vlast´ ot Stalina do Gorbacheva. Apparat TsK KPSS i kul´tura 1973-1978. Dokumenty. Tom 1 [Culture and Power from Stalin to Gorbachev. CPSU CC Apparatus and Culture 1973-1978] (M.: Rosspen, 2011), 453-455.
32 See “Amnesty Group looks into filmmaker’s plight,” Advocate, 14/8/1974; H. Marshall, “Testimonianza,” in Liehm, Serghiej Paradjanov, 139-140.
33 Herbert Marshall, “The case of Sergo Parajanov,” Sight and Sound, 1 (Winter 1974): 8-11.
34 Archivio Storico FUORI! (hereafter ASFUORI), file 59, Petition addressed to the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, signed by 105 signatories, March 1975.
35 Ibid.
36 “Marshall leads drive to free Soviet artist,” Southern Illinoisan, 5/3/1975.
37 The appeals were republished in Liehm, ed., Serghiej Paradjanov, 145-146.
38 Yanet Lazarian, “Liberate Serghiej Paradjanov,” Alik, Teheran, 4-5/9/1975, republished in Liehm, ed., Serghiej Paradjanov, 141-144.
39 A. Korotiukov, “Il caso Paradjanov,” Cinema-Tv Digest, Newberry, 1976, cited in Liehm, ed., Serghiej Paradjanov, 133-138.
40 Société des réalisateurs, 1976, cited in Liehm, ed., Serghiej Paradjanov, 147.
41 Jean Vidal, “Le cinéaste emprisonné,” Le Monde, 25/2/1977.
42 Otchet o poezdke v SShA sekretaria pravleniia Soiuza kinematografistov SSSR A.V. Karaganova, 18/4/1977 goda [Report on A.V. Karaganov’s (Secretary of USSR Film-makers Union Directorate) travel to the US, 18 April 1977], published in Tavanec, ed., Kul´tura i vlast´ ot Stalina do Gorbacheva, 96.
43 “Condannato in URSS il regista Paragianov?,” L’Unità, 24/5/1974: 7.
44 Persecution of homosexuality was therefore entrusted to the administration. In the Fascist era, over 20,000 measures of injunction were brought against homosexuals. Gays were also exiled to Italian islands. See: Lorenzo Benadusi, Il nemico dell’uomo nuovo. L’omosessualità nell’esperimento totalitario fascista (Milano: Feltrinelli, 2005).
45 Giovanni Dall’Orto, “La “tolleranza repressiva” dell’omosessualità. Quando un atteggiamento legale diviene tradizione,” in Arci gay nazionale (a cura di), Omosessuali e Stato (Bologna: Cassero, 1988), 37-57.
46 This was the case of some high-level Christian Democrat officials in the 1960s-1980s, such as Florentino Sullo, Emilio Colombo, and Mariano Rumor.
47 Ibid.
48 See: Sandro Bellassai, La morale comunista: Pubblico e privato nella rappresentazione del PCI (1947-1956) (Roma: Carocci, 2002).
49 Anna Tonelli, Per indegnità morale. Il caso Pasolini nell’Italia del buon costume (Roma-Bari: Laterza, 2015).
50 Palmiro Togliatti, I corsivi di Roderigo. Interventi politico-culturali dal 1944 al 1964 (Bari: De Donato, 1976), 203.
51 Filippo Ceccarelli, Il letto e il potere, Storia sessuale d’Italia da Mussolini a Vallettopoli bis (Milano: Longanesi, 2007 [1994]), 93-94.
52 Anyway, in 1957 Laconi left the role of secretary of the communist group at the Chamber of Deputies and was appointed as secretary of the party at regional level. See: Maria Luisa Di Felice, Renzo Laconi: Una biografia politica e intellettuale (Roma: Carocci 2019), 475-476.
53 Italian Revolutionary Homosexual United Front.
54 ASFUORI, file 33, Laws against the homosexuals’ rights in Italy, no date but probably 1978.
55 Myriam Cristallo, Uscir Fuori. Dieci anni di lotte omosessuali in Italia. 1971/1981 (Roma: Teti editore, 1996), 45-48.
56 On the history of the FUORI! movement, see Cristallo, Uscir Fuori, which devotes some pages to the Parajanov affair (131-133); and Angelo Pezzana’s autobiographies, Dentro & Fuori and Un omosessuale normale (Roma: Stampa alternativa, 2010). More generally, on the history of the Italian movement for gays’ rights, see Gianni Rossi Barilli, Il movimento gay in Italia (Milano: Feltrinelli Editore, 1999).
57 Ibid., 60.
58 ASFUORI, file 59, Fuori Editorial Staff to Corriere della Sera, L’Unità, (25/5/1974), and to Panorama, 27/5/1974.
59 Mario Mieli, Elementi di critica omosessuale (Milano: Feltrinelli, 2017 [1977]).
60 Guy Hocquenghem, Homosexual Desire (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993 [1972]), 133-134.
61 Mieli, Elementi, 90-93, 169 ff. Thoughts on the historical evolution of Russian and Soviet attitude towards homosexuality are also present in the recent collection of Mieli’s writings La gaia critica: Politica e liberazione sessuale negli anni settanta. Scritti (1972-1983) (Venezia: Marsilio, 2019).
62 Pezzana, Dentro & Fuori, 82.
63 Ibid.
64 Ibid.
65 Ibid, 83.
66 Angelo Pezzana, “Un Gay alla corte dello Zar,” Fuori! Giornale di liberazione omosessuale, 7, 17 (Winter 1977- Spring 1978): 41.
67 On 16 November 1977 the following articles were published in Italy: L.Z., “Il radicale torinese Pezzana a Mosca chiede la libertà per gli omosessuali,” La Stampa: 19; “Mosca. Protesta di Angelo Pezzana,” Il Messaggero; “A Mosca un esponente del ‘Fuori’ per sostenere gli omosessuali,” La Repubblica: 1; “Il radicale Pezzana manifesta per la libertà degli omosessuali,” Il Manifesto; “Dimostrazione di Pezzana a Mosca in favore degli omosessuali russi,” Il Giornale; “Pezzana manifesta a Mosca: libertà per gli omosessuali,” Paese Sera; “Libertà per i ‘diversi’,” il Resto del Carlino: 8; “Italiano a Mosca chiede libertà per gli omosessuali,” Corriere della Sera: 8; C.B., “Protesta del ‘Fuori’ a Mosca,” L’Unità: 13; “Manifesta a Mosca per gli omosessuali,” Il Tempo; “Italiano a Mosca manifesta a favore dei ‘diversi’ russi,” Il secolo XIX; “Mosca. Pezzana manifesta pro-omosessuali russi,” Il Giorno.
68 “Gay lib comes to Moscow,” Guardian, 16/11/1977; “Italiaan betoogt in Moskou voor homoseksuelen,” Het Parool, 16/11/1977; “Italian demands gay rights in Russia,” Daily American, 17/11/1977.
69 “Pannella soddisfatto: ‘Tutto è andato liscio’,” La Sicilia, 16/11/1977.
70 Pezzana, Dentro & Fuori, 85.
71 Ibid., 86.
72 Ibid., 87.
73 Healey, Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia, 247.
74 On 17 November 1977 the following articles were published: “L’esponente del ‘Fuori’ Pezzana espulso dall’URSS,” L’Unità; “Espulso dall’URSS il radicale italiano che aveva manifestato per gli omosessuali,” Corriere della Sera; “Pezzana espulso dall’URSS,” Paese Sera; “Pezzana (presidente del FUORI) espulso dall’URSS,” Il Giorno; “Pezzana è espulso dall’Unione Sovietica,” La Stampa; “Espulso dall’URSS Angelo Pezzana il ‘difensore’ degli omosessuali,” Il Resto del Carlino; “Espulso dall’URSS l’italiano ‘diverso’,” Il secolo XIX; “Il radicale Pezzana si è incontrato col dissidente Sakharov,” Il Messaggero; “Intanto a Mosca parlano di farsa,” La Repubblica. In the following days were published: Sergio Trombetta, “Espulso dall’Urss, il radicale Pezzana critica i russi e la loro ‘ambiguità’,” La Stampa, 18/11/1977; “Mosca ha detto ‘Fuori!’ Lui va alla Biennale,” Stampa Sera, 19/11/1977; T.F., “C’è un diverso sulla piazza Rossa,” L’Espresso, 46, 20/11/1977.
75 V. Valentinov, “‘Neot´´emlemoe pravo’ Sin’ora Petstsano [Mr Pezzana’s Inalienable Right],” Literaturnaia Gazeta, 47 (23/11/1977): 9.
76 Ibid.
77 Angelo Pezzana, “Un omosessuale sulla Piazza Rossa,” La Repubblica, 25/11/1977.
78 Pezzana, Un omosessuale sulla Piazza Rossa. In his subsequent autobiography Pezzana explicitly argues that the author of the article was sympathetic to the cause of gays in the USSR. In a very clever way, in fact, he had recounted not only the chronicle of Pezzana’s adventure but also of article 121, of the condemnation of Parajanov, of the condition of homosexuality in the USSR. Pezzana, Dentro & Fuori, 91.
79 Note also the posthumous release in 1975 of Pasolini’s Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma, even if it was partially censored and had limited distribution.
80 See: Peppino Ortoleva, Il secolo dei media: Riti, abitudini, mitologie (Milano: Il Saggiatore, 2009), 162-193.
81 See: Alessandro Massaro, “La RAI-TV esce FUORI!,” FUORI! Giornale di liberazione omosessuale, 20 (Nov-Dec 1978): 12.
82 On the 1977 Biennale as a counter-celebration of the founding event of the Soviet State, see Matteo Bertelé, “Venice 1977: (counter) celebrations of the October Revolution,” Twentieth Century Communism, 13 (2017): 67-87.
83 On the Soviet attempts to stop the design and developing of the 1977 Biennale of Venice, see the account written later by Di Meana himself: Carlo Ripa di Meana, L’ordine di Mosca: fermate la Biennale del Dissenso. Una storia mai raccontata (Roma: Liberal Edizioni, 2007).
84 On the international dimensions of the “historical compromise” and the “national solidarity” governments, see Silvio Pons, Berlinguer e la fine del comunismo (Torino: Einaudi, 2006).
85 On Craxi’s leadership of the PSI and his role in Italian politics in the 1980s, see Simona Colarizi and Marco Gervasoni, La cruna dell’ago. Craxi. Il partito socialista e la fine della Repubblica (Rome and Bari: Laterza, 2005).
86 On conflicts between Italian Communists and Socialists over the issue of Dissent, see Valentine Lomellini, L’appuntamento mancato: La sinistra italiana ed il dissenso nei regimi comunisti, 1968-1989 (Firenze: Le Monnier, 2010).
87 See Silvio Pons, “The Rise and Fall of Eurocommunism,” in Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad, eds., The Cambridge History of the Cold War, Vol. III: Endings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 45-65.
88 On financial links between the PCI and the USSR, see Valerio Riva, Oro da Mosca. I finanziamenti sovietici al PCI dalla rivoluzione d’ottobre al crollo dell’Urss (Milano: Mondadori, 1999).
89 On the many initiatives organized in that edition, see Aa.Vv., La Biennale di Venezia. Annuario 1978. Eventi del 1976-77 (Venezia: La Biennale di Venezia, 1979).
90 More specifically, on the cinematic initiatives of the 1977 Biennale, see Stefano Pisu, “Transnational Mobilization and Domestic Political Exploitation. The 1977 Venice Biennale of Dissent,” in Andreas Kötzing, Caroline Moine, eds., Cultural Transfer and Political Conflicts: Film Festivals in the Cold War (Göttingen: V&R, 2017), 123-139.
91 Izvestiia, 24 Nov. 1977.
92 Mario Zoppelli, “La ‘Tass’ attacca il governo italiano,” Il Giorno, 24/11/1977.
93 TASS agency, 23/11/1977.
94 Herbert Marshall, “Comunicazione,” in M. Amiel et al., Il cinema nazionalizzato: i suoi successi e i suoi problemi. Atti del convegno “Il Dissenso culturale” (Venezia: La Biennale di Venezia, 1979), 291.
95 Ibid., 292.
96 Ibid., 293.
97 Ibid.
98 Roberto Bianchin, “Un ritratto del regista per parlare di dissenso,” La Repubblica, 27–28/11/1977; Morando Morandini, “Clandestino da Mosca il film di Paradjanov,” Il Giorno, 27/11/1977.
99 Sauro Borelli, “Alla Biennale il ‘caso Paragianov’,” L’Unità, 26/11/1977.
100 “The undersigned film directors and critics demand from the USSR government the liberation, for humanitarian reasons, of Sergei Parajanov. This measure would be greeted with relief and would attest that the USSR government is aware of this film director’s great talent. The undersigned wish also that Parajanov’s films be freely distributed as they occupy a relevant place in the history of contemporary cinema and bring honour to the director’s country,” in M. Amiel, et al., eds., Il cinema nazionalizzato, 306.
101 ASAC, Fondo Storico, Serie Cinema, b. 306, Ex 1977, CM42/Ter, Paradjanov Materiale, L. Mifsud to Carlo Ripa di Meana, Marseille, 12/7/1977.
102 ASAC, Fondo Storico, Serie Cinema, b. 306, ex 1977, CM42/Ter, Paradjanov Materiale, V. Arzoumanian, “Comunicazione,” in M. Amiel et al., Il cinema nazionalizzato, 297. Other members of Marseille Paradjanov Collective presents in Venice were: Anaïs Doroumian, Patrick Bardou, Christine Rossmann, Nadine Cosson, Vahram and Houri Varzhabedian, Azad and Suzanne Arzoumanian, Varoujan Arzoumanian and Wanda Zanirato, Marseille, 31/10/1977.
103 Sauro Borelli, “Alla Biennale il ‘caso Paragianov’,” L’Unità, 26/11/1977. After Parajanov’s workshop, his two most renowned films were screened: Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (the film was provided by the Cinemathèque suisse de Lausanne, and Sayat Nova. Dissenso ‘77. Settore Cinema. Programma effettivamente eseguito al Cinema Olimpia. See: ASAC, Fondo Storico, Serie Cinema, b. 306, ex CM42/4 1977, Dissenso ‘77, Programma Cinema.
104 Mark Malkasian, Gha-ra-bagh!: The Emergence of the National Democratic Movement in Armenia (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996): 215.
105 ASAC, Fondo Storico, Serie Cinema, b. 306, Ex 1977, CM42/Ter, Paradjanov Materiale, L. Mifsud to Carlo Ripa di Meana, Marseille, 12/7/1977.
106 ASAC, Fondo Storico, Serie Cinema, b. 306, ex CM42/4, Dissenso ’77, Programma Cinema, Sayat Nova, La Couleur de la Grenade, en 8 tableaux.
107 Steffen, The Cinema of Sergei Parajanov, 220-230.
108 Callisto Cosulich, “La penna rubata al censore ha condannato Paradjanov?,” Paese Sera, 29/11/1977.
109 Sauro Borelli, “Cultura e società nel ‘caso Paragianov’,” L’Unità, 27/11/1977.
110 Morando Morandini, “Clandestino da Mosca il film di Paradjanov,” Il Giorno, 27/11/1977.
111 Riccardo Calimani, “Paradjanov, il regista sovietico in carcere per omosessualità,” Tuttolibri, 26/11/1977; Enrico Rondoni, “Dietro ad ogni quadro ci sono anni di lotta,” L’Umanità, 10/12/ 1977, 4-5; “Paradjanov è un genio. ‘Il resto’ è solo di Stato,” Vogue, Jan. 1978; Italo Moscati, “Il dissenso non fa spettacolo,” L’Europeo, 2/12/1977, 7; R.B., “Il dissenso su schermo panoramico,” La Repubblica, 26/11/1977; Stefano Reggiani, “Paradjanov, il cinema e il dissenso all’Est,” La Stampa, 26/11/1977; Dario Zanelli, “Faccio un film e vado nel ‘gulag’,” Il Resto del Carlino, 26/11/1977; Lino Micciché, “Il dramma di Paragianov ripropone il tema dei diritti dei ‘diversi’,” Avanti!, 27/11/1977.
112 V. Tosi, “Comunicazione,” in Amiel et al., Il cinema nazionalizzato, 303-304.
113 Ibid., 304.
114 “Appello per liberazione di Serghej Paradjanov,” in Amiel, Il cinema nazionalizzato, 307.
115 Camera dei Deputati, Gruppo Parlamentare Radicale, Appeal to all Foreign Ministers of the Democratic Countries (n.d.)
116 Meana: “Non è vero che Pezzana fosse a Mosca per mio mandato,” Il Giornale, 24/11/1977.
117 Pezzana, Dentro & Fuori, 91.
118 Pezzana, “Un Gay alla corte dello Zar,” 42.
119 Liehm, ed., Serghiej Paradjanov.
120 Reggiani, “Paradjanov, il cinema e il dissenso all’Est.”
121 Steffen, The Cinema of Sergei Parajanov, 197. It is worth remembering that Aragon also had same-sex relations, even if it was not so well known at the time.
122 See: ASFUORI, file 33, International Gay Association, Proposals for political action, August 1978, Coventry, England.
123 The protest was widely covered by the press. See: “L’ambasciatore Urss ignora il ‘Fuori’. Radicali protestano,” La Stampa, 26/11/1978; “‘Socialismo è anche libertà sessuale’: protesta del Fuori contro il codice penale sovietico,” Corriere della Sera, 26/11/78; Stefano Jesurum, “Gay di tutto il mondo l’Urss è maschilista,” La Repubblica, 26-27/11/1978.
124 “FUORI! Movimento di liberazione omosessuale aderente all’International Gay Association. All’ambasciatore dell’Unione Sovietica presso il Governo Italiano,” published in Lotta Continua, 24/11/1978.
125 Enzo Francone, “Un gay sulla Piazza Rossa,” FUORI!Notizie. Giornale di liberazione delle lesbiche e degli omosessuali, 26 (Oct. 1980): 1-2. An extensive account of Francone’s experience is reported in ASFUORI, file 79, Olimpiadi 1980 + Fremito Gay sulla Piazza Rossa. In March 1979 Francone had already been the protagonist of a protest against the homophobic Komeini revolution in Teheran. See: Cristallo, Uscir Fuori, 187-189.
126 They received Trifonov’s personal Leningrad address from Simon Karlinsky, a professor of Russian Literature at the University of California, Berkeley who was deeply engaged in the poet’s cause. ASFUORI, file 64.
127 ASFUORI, file 79, Angelo Pezzana, Vincenzo Cucco, and Marco Silombria to Boris Yeltsin, Turin, 17/9/1991.
128 In addition to the above mentioned articles, it is worth reminding the Hans Mayer’s reportage “Ma allora è diverso!,” L’Espresso, 49, (11/12/1977): 70-76.
129 Mario Spinella, “I codici e la sessualità,” L’Unità, 3/12/1977.
130 Acronym for Federazione Giovanile Comunista Italiana.
131 Fabio Giovannini, Comunisti e diversi. Il Pci e la questione omosessuale (Bari: Dedalo Libri, 1980): 7.
132 Ibid., 165-199.
133 Acronym for Associazione Ricreativa Culturale Italiana. In 1985 ARCIGAY became a national network and it still is the major player for the defence of gay rights in Italy.
134 A few days before committing suicide, Mieli wrote a letter to several representatives of the Italian gay movement in which he complained about the lack of attention towards him and stated: “Thank goodness that the gay movement was founded by Angelo Pezzana in Italy and not by ambiguous figures like yours.” He referred to Ivan Teobaldelli, who had co-founded the gay magazine Babilonia in 1982. Angelo Pezzana’s Private Archives, Mario Mieli’s typewritten letter, Milan, 7/3/1983. I thank Angelo Pezzana for allowing me to cite this unpublished document.
135 On that movement, see: Monica Galfrè e Simone Neri Serneri (a cura di), Il movimento del '77. Radici, snodi, luoghi (Roma: Viella, 2018).
136 See: Vladimir Kozlovskii, Argo russkoi gomoseksual´noi subkul’tury: Materialy k izucheniiu [Jargon of Russian Homosexual Subculture: Study Materials] (Benson: Chalidze Publ., 1986), 185.
137 Genady Trifonov, “Open Letter to Literaturnaia Gazeta,” in Kevin Moss, ed, Out of the Blue: Russia’s Hide Gay Literature (San Francisco: Gay Sunshine Press, 1996), 224-225, 230-232.
138 Healey, Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia, 247.
139 For instance, the already mentioned Trifonov, the Lithuanian Viktoras Petkus, the Belorussian archeologist Lev Klein, and the Leningrad theatre director Zinovii Korogodskii (arrested, but not imprisoned).
140 See Jan Eckel, Samuel Moyn, eds., The Breakthrough: Human Rights in the 1970s (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia. Human Rights in History (Cambridge-London: Harvard UP, 2010); Sarah B. Snyder, Human Rights Activism and the End of the Cold War: A Transnational History of the Helsinki Network (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2013).
141 Silvio Pons, La rivoluzione globale: Storia del comunismo internazionale 1917-1991 (Torino: Einaudi, 2012): 325-398.
142 http://www.ohchr.org/en/professionalinterest/pages/ccpr.aspx.
143 Moyn, The Last Utopia, 155.
144 http://www.jimmycarterlibrary.gov/documents/speeches/.
145 “Award Ceremony Speech.” Presentation Speech by Aase Lionæs, Chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, on the occasion of the award of the Nobel Peace Prize for 1977 in the University Festival Hall, Oslo, 10/12/1977. http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1977/press.html. (accessed 1/1/2021)
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| Titel | Angelo Pezzana at the entrance of the National hotel in Moscow(15 November 1977) |
| Abbildungsnachweis | Source: Daily American, 17 November 1977, found at Fuori! Historical Archives, Sandro Penna Foundation, Turin |
| URL | http://journals.openedition.org/monderusse/docannexe/image/12499/img-1.jpg |
| Datei | image/jpeg, 372k |
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| Titel | Fuori! members’ demonstration at San Marco Square in Venice(26 November 1977) |
| Abbildungsnachweis | Source: courtesy of Fuori! Historical Archives, Sandro Penna Foundation, Turin |
| URL | http://journals.openedition.org/monderusse/docannexe/image/12499/img-2.jpg |
| Datei | image/jpeg, 938k |
Zitierempfehlung
Papierversionen:
Stefano Pisu, „New perspectives on the Parajanov affair: The role of Italian activism in the transnational campaign for his release“, Cahiers du monde russe, 62/2-3 | 2021, 443-472.
Online-Version
Stefano Pisu, „New perspectives on the Parajanov affair: The role of Italian activism in the transnational campaign for his release“, Cahiers du monde russe [Online], 62/2-3 | 2021, Online erschienen am: 04 Januar 2024, abgerufen am 11 Februar 2026. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/monderusse/12499; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/monderusse.12499
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