often mixed. Official Soviet policy in both the RSFSR and the wider USSR in the 1920s on homosexuality fluctuated between toleration and support, attempts at legal equality and social rights for homosexual people, to open examples of state hostility against homosexuals and state attempts to classify homosexuality as "a mental disorder to be cured". In the Communist Party itself during this period of the 1920s, such divergences of opinion and policy on Soviet treatment of homosexuality was also common, ranging from positive, to negative, to ambivalent over views about homosexuals and homosexual rights. Some sections and factions of the Bolshevik government attempted to improve rights and social conditions for homosexuals based on further legal reforms in 1922 and 1923 while others opposed such moves. In the early 1920s, Commissar of Health Nikolai Semashko for example was sympathetic to homosexual emancipation "as part of the [sexual] revolution" and attempted such reforms for homosexual rights in the area of civil and medical areas. According to Wayne R. Dynes, some sections of the Bolsheviks of the 1920s actively considered homosexuality a "[social] illness to be cured" or an example of "bourgeois degeneracy" while other Bolsheviks believed it should be legally/socially tolerated and legally/socially respected in the new socialist society. The Bolsheviks also rescinded Tsarist legal bans on homosexual civil and political rights, especially in the area of state employment. In 1918, Georgy Chicherin, a homosexual man who kept his homosexuality hidden, was appointed as People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs of the RSFSR. In 1923, Chicherin was also appointed People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs of the USSR, a position he held until 1930. In the early 1920s, the Soviet government and scientific community took a great deal of interest in sexual research, sexual emancipation and homosexual emancipation. In January 1923, the Soviet Union sent delegates from the Commissariat of Health led by Commissar of Health Semashko to the German Institute for Sexual Research as well as to some international conferences on human sexuality between 1921 and 1930, where they expressed support for the legalisation of adult, private and consensual homosexual relations and the improvement of homosexual rights in all nations. In both 1923 and 1925, Dr. , director of the Institute for Social Hygiene in Moscow, published a report, The Sexual Revolution in Russia, which stated that homosexuality was "perfectly natural" and should be legally and socially respected. In the Soviet Union itself, the