Petrelis Files

NYR: Stalin Humiliated With 'Homoerotic Overtones'

In a review of the "Roosevelt’s Lost Alliances: How Personal Politics Helped Start the Cold War" by Frank Costigliola, homo related details previously unknown to me were dropped. From the March 21 edition of the New York Review of Books:

Stalin himself was famously a night worker, which turned upside down the lives not only of his immediate underlings but of many important Communists inside and outside the Soviet Union. Few could be acknowledged as truly belonging to the Party elite unless they worked all night and slept through most of the day. As a host, Stalin liked to order his underlings to sing and to dance. In the author’s words, “Stalin liked imposing humiliation with homoerotic overtones.” ...

Official Russian receptions, however, whether at Yalta or in Moscow, aimed at getting the guests drunk, presumably in order to coax from them their secrets. In reality, the hosts did not take better to alcohol than most Americans. So these nights were marked by drunken scenes, babbled declarations of brotherly love, and traditional Russian kisses on the mouth, which Costigliola calls “homosocial” behavior. ...

By the time of the Yalta conference in February 1945, some of Roosevelt’s closest advisers, including his irreplaceable assistant Marguerite “Missy” LeHand, had died; his adviser Sumner Welles had had to resign in 1943 because of charges of homosexuality [were no longer at the president's side] ...

Always good to learn more homo history trivia and share it.