1. I acknowledge with pleasure the suggestions and advice given by Michael O’Rourke and Lindsey Hughes. Professor Hughes generously drew my attention to several features of Muscovite civilization and to recent scholarship relevant to same-sex sociability and intimacy; rather than acknowledge many instances individually I thank her here for her energetic assistance with this paper. Any mistakes are of course mine alone.
2. James H. Billington, The Icon and the Axe: AnInterpretive History of Russian Culture (New York: Vintage, 1966); Daniel H. Kaiser and Gary Marker, eds, Reinterpreting Russian History. Readings 860–1860s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
3. Russian historians traditionally refer to Kievan Rus’ (ca. 800–1240), the ‘Mongol Yoke’ (1240–1480), Muscovy (1480 to ca. 1700) and Imperial Russia (to 1917).
4. Brian James Baer, ‘Russian Gays/Western Gaze: Mapping (Homo)Sexual Desire in Post-Soviet Russia’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 8.4 (2002): 499–520, commenting on Laurie Essig, Queer in Russia: A Story of Sex, Self and the Other (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 1999).
5. Brian James Baer, ‘Vozvrashchenie dendi: gomoseksual’nost’ i bor’by kul’tur v post-sovetskoi Rossii, [The Return of the Dandy: Homosexuality and Culture Wars in Post-Soviet Russia]’ O muzhe(n)stvennosti, ed. Sergei Ushakin (Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2002) 556–81. See also his comments in ‘Russian Gays/Western Gays’ and idem, ‘The Other Russia: RePresenting the Gay Experience’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 1.1 (2000): 183–94.