How a century-long Russian conspiracy hid that the beloved “Nutcracker” composer was gay

Nutcracker dolls
Photo: Wikimedia Commons

The coverup began before the body had grown cold. With Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, once-in-a-generation musical genius, laying dead in the guest bedroom at just 53, his brother Modeste penned the lie later upheld by decades of historians. Modeste claimed, simply and mournfully, that his dear brother had expired from cholera after drinking unboiled restaurant water.

He left out Tchaikovsky’s ingestion of poison four days prior, a choice some scholars maintain he made to prevent the public from discovering he was gay.

It took a century for the truth to shake itself free from a conspiracy created by high-ranking Russians tasked with enabling their country’s ludicrous assertion that homosexuality is a “Western import.”

Deemed an “immoral affliction” that doesn’t occur in Russia unless

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