The Right-Wing Turn on Social Questions Under Stalin

After the Bolshevik Revolution, the Tsarist penal code was abolished and rewritten. The ban on homosexuality was not written back into the Soviet laws. In this sense, we can see the SPD tradition of outing as both a precursor of ACT UP and to the RCP position on AIDS. It is significant that in the 80 years since the SPD did its outing, the organized left had regressed on the question while holding on to the worse of the two intentions behind it.