Russia, September 30, 1998
Sex Ed Soviet Style
No nasty pictures, but a surpising revelation about Russian intamacy
Moscow Times, September 30, 1998AIDS Epidemic Was Russia's Sexual Revolution
By Irina Glushchenko
The early years of perestroika were set against the backdrop of the West's spiralling AIDS epidemic. This was also when the first telemost, or live U.S.-Soviet television link-up, took place. I watched all but one of these broadcasts. Later, my grandmother excitedly told me what I had missed on that occasion: "An American woman asked something about sex, but one of our women got up and said there was no sex here!"
The phrase "There is no sex in the U.S.S.R." subsequently went down in the annals of history and provided millions with a laugh at that unfortunate woman's expense. So how exactly do people have children in the Soviet Union, people would ask with a snigger? But if we stop to consider just what sex meant for us, then she was right in a way f there really was no sex in the Soviet Union.
Back
in the 1970s, reports from the United States often appeared on the pages
of the newspaper Literaturnaya Gazeta, the staple diet of every educated
family. I still remember one article about New York's 42nd Street. Although
it didn't give any particular details, the fleeting mention of the words
striptease, sadism, masochism, sexual deviance, prostitution and pornography
caused a sweet sensation of horror, nonetheless. Near the end, it said that
naked girls dance in cafes on the street. "It would really be something to
go there," wishful teenagers would comment as they read the piece. (I did
go there in 1992, and I was extremely disappointed.)
Russian clubs today
Reading these reports we naturally pictured countries in the West, and the United States in particular, as the center of all earthly depravity and sin. When a family acquaintance returned from a business trip in the United States, my grandmother even asked him how much sex he saw while he was there. It's a shame I don't remember how he replied.
In the Soviet Union the word sex was only used in social and political articles about the flaws of capitalist society and occasionally in translated works of literature. It certainly did not figure in speech as a rule. Distinct from the word pol, or gender, and polovaya zhizn denoting sexual relations in a functional sense, the word sex was laden with mystery and impropriety.
And it certainly had no place in family life.
Although the actual concept of a conventional family was in itself utterly bourgeois in its origin, the Soviet state carefully guarded the foundations of the family, primarily because things were easier that way. The authorities had to know who lived where, and this was done by means of registration and residence permits. The family was the lowest level of society that the state was able to regulate and everything that happened outside the boundaries of the family was regarded as suspicious and undesirable. Since it was impossible to eradicate life on an individual basis altogether, family life was paradoxically regarded as belonging to the sphere of public and not private life. And amidst all of this, the role of sexual relations in society was limited to childbearing exclusively within the family.
Since promiscuous sexual freedom was seen as undermining the foundations of the family, the state created various administrative obstacles to extramarital sex. Unmarried couples could not share hotel rooms; nonresidents were not allowed to stay the night in student dormitories. Soviet people basically had nowhere to be alone. These norms survived right up to the end of the Soviet period, although in less draconian form.
There was no sexual education in schools, since this could lead youngsters into evil ways. There was certainly no instruction in taking precautions, going on the assumption that if a person is unsure about this aspect, he or she just won't go through with it. The greater the risk, the less the desire. "How do you best avoid pregnancy?" went the old joke. "By drinking tomato juice." ? "Before or after?" ? "Instead of."
Once, when I was in the fourth grade, our teacher took all the girls to one side and told us about menstruation and a few other things. As much as they were innocent in themselves, these explanations were delivered in a suitably menacing way, designed to ward us off certain contacts with boys. The way she portrayed it, once we reached sexual maturity we were pretty much likely to get pregnant from kissing. After this talk one girl went to her parents complaining that "they're telling us about adult love." That was the end of the talks.
The magazine "Health" was a limited source of knowledge, and a few spartan facts could be gleaned from medical encyclopedias. Another unique form of sexual education was provided by lecturers travelling around resorts, droning on about venereal diseases, which inevitably put you off any sort of sex life whatsoever.
So is this all to say there was no depravity in the Soviet Union? Of course there was. But it wasn't sex. Sex presumes the presence of a certain culture. Children were born here not as a result of sex but of polovaya zhizn. You have to admit there is a difference.
I remember how our press came down on the West's "sexual revolution" and how the rebellion of young people against bourgeois society in the late '60s was perceived in the Soviet Union as a sign of the final breakdown of the bourgeoisie. Nor did the hippies escape the vitriol, because although they rejected bourgeois society, they also rejected order and authority. The most feared thing in the Soviet Union was any spontaneous, uncontrollable and chaotic process that did not yield to planning. The authorities didn't like drifters who frequently changed their place of work, and they frowned absolutely upon "casual encounters" and a "disorderly polovaya zhizn."
At
the end of the 1970s there were some changes, mainly in youth culture. This
was immediately reflected in the Russian language, with the introduction
of the term seksualno ozabochenny, or "sexually preoccupied," and the appearance
of the concept of the "Swedish family," believed to have been inspired by
the example of the pop group Abba, where everyone sleeps in one bed and no
one is sure who fathered whom.
Not Abba, but worthy to practice procreation with!
By the time perestroika came around, the AIDS menace was gathering momentum in the West. With the gradual opening-up of our society we could no longer afford to ignore such a terrible danger. And so it happened that the AIDS scourge acted like a magic wand on our country, since any struggle against the disease was inconceivable without sexual enlightenment.
And off came the lid. Under the flag of this struggle, strange as it seems, prostitution was virtually legalized, pornography appeared and sexual liberation flourished. If in the West the appearance of AIDS was the end of the sexual revolution, here it was only the beginning.
Irina Glushchenko is a theater critic who writes for Nezavisimaya Gazeta and Dom Aktyora. She contributed this essay to The Moscow Times.
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Well...well...'There is no sex in The USSR'?...It wasn't official. I grew up in Moscow of The Sixties and the beginig of The Seventies in artistic circles. Sextual freedom was such that I shock my well educated American friends when I tell stories about that freedom. Actualy after 30 years in The West I can tell that it was crazier than anything I saw in US or Europe. In The West people talk a lot about it, Russians did a lot, but didn't talk.