Russian women’s home’s Weblog

From the work by Professor Dr. Igor S. Kon

The sexual revolution in Russia: From the Age of the Czars to Today.

It is usually thought that the Bolshevik crusade against sex began in the 1930s, as a part of the general process of Stalinist tightening of the screws on and suppression of the individual – and there is an element of truth in that contention. During the 1920s the USSR had allowed the existence of erotic art, sociological surveys, and biological-medical sex research. However, all of this, and particularly the “decadent” erotic art that was clearly at odds with “proletarian culture”, existed and developed despite the efforts of rather than with endorsement of the Party. It was simply that, given the times, the Party was unable to ban them and had to confine itself to half measures.

Nevertheless, it did combat them when it could. For example, in July 1924, a jount circular was issued by Glavlit (the censor’s office) and Glavrepertkom (the Main Committee for Control over Repertories and Performance), giving the following evaluation of the fox-trot, shimmy, and other popular Western dances that Russian young people had begun to copy: “As products of Western European restaurant culture, these dances are oriented on the very basest instincts. In their niggardly, monotonous movements they are essentially a ’salon’ imitation of the sex act and all manner of physiological perversion… Within the working atmosphere of the Soviet Republic’s attempts to reconstruct life and sweep away rotten petit-bourgeois decadence, dancing should be quite different – exhilarating, joyful, ennobling.”
This was only the opening salvo. The entire history of Soviet culture, from start to finish, consists of out-and-out campaigns and mandates in which sexophobia plays a leading part…

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