Abstract
The old-fashioned propriety and drabness of life in the Soviet Union suggested to visitors and observers in the post-war era that sexuality was deeply hidden, and that there was little question of a Western style ‘sexual revolution’ taking hold. The ‘socialist’ USSR lacked the capitalist West’s commercial culture that used sex to promote consumption. Soviet media were tightly controlled by a very prudish censorship. The regime forbade private, non-governmental organisation, so feminists and sex radicals, extremely rare in underground intellectual life in any case, could not agitate publicly for change. Yet social and economic change transformed sexual behaviour, and citizens challenged the regime’s sexual authoritarianism by direct and indirect means. There was a sexual revolution in the Soviet Union during the 1960s and 1970s, and it was marked by significant differences to the simultaneous revolutions in the West.
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Notes
For reasons of space I do not discuss lesbian and gay sexuality here, but see Healey D (forthcoming) From Stalinist Pariahs to Subjects of ‘Managed Democracy’: Queers in Moscow 1945 to the Present. In: Evans J & Cook M (eds) Queer Cities, Queer Cultures. London: Continuum.
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Ibid., 148–50, citing L.E. Darskii, A.G. Vishnevskii, A.G. Volkov, V.A. Boldyrev.
Darskii L (1979) Sotsial’no-demograficheskie issledovaniia problem rozhdaemosti. Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniia 3, 12–13; cited by Rywkin, Moscow’s Muslim Challenge, 76.
Juviler, Soviet Society and Culture, 45; see also Kharchev, Opyt sotsiologicheskogo issledovaniia, 171–3.
Kon, Seksual’naia kul’tura v. Rossii, 173–5; Golod S (1996) XX vek i tendentsii seksual’nykh otnoshenii v Rossii. St Petersburg: Aleteiia, 38–71, 93.
Kon I (1966) Polovaia moral’ v svete sotsiologii. Sovetskaia pedagogika 12, 64–77.
Inkeles A (1968) Social Change in Soviet Russia. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 219; Stern M & Stern A (1981) Sex in the USSR. London: W. H. Allen, 109–110.
Ibid., 180–1. On socialist attempts to define love, see De George R (1969) Soviet Ethics and Morality. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 97.
Kon I (2005) Seksual’naia kul’tura v Rossii (2nd edition). Moscow: Airis, 246; Stern & Stern, Sex in the USSR, 111.
Stern & Stern, Sex in the USSR, 109–110; Kon, Seksual’naia kul’tura v Rossii, 245; Healey D (2008) ‘Untraditional Sex’ and the ‘Simple Russian’: Nostalgia for Soviet Innocence in the Polemics of Dilia Enikeeva. In: Lahusen T & Solomon Jr. P (eds) What Is Soviet Now? Identities, Legacies, Memories. Berlin: Lit Verlag.
See, for example, Firsov B (2008) Raznomyslie v SSSR. 1940–1960-e gody. Istoriia, teoriia i praktika. St Petersburg: Evropeiskii Dom.
Kon, Seksual’naia kul’tura v Rossii, 239, 244, 247. See also Kon I (2008) 80 let odinochestva. Moscow: Vremia.
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Yurchak A (2006) Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Ibid., 36–76.
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Yurchak, 60-e: Mir sovetskogo cheloveka, 141–51; quote at 141; Rotkirch, Living through the Soviet System, 101; Chuikina S (2002) ‘Byt neotdelim ot politiki’: Ofitsial’nye i neofitsial’nye normy ‘polovye’ morali v sovetskom obshchestve 1930–1980-kh godov. In Zdravomyslova E & Temkina A (eds) V poiskakh seksual’nosti. St Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin, 123.
Temkina A (2008) Seksual’naia zhizn’ zhenshchiny: Mezhdu pochineniem i svobody. St Petersburg: Evropeiskii universitet v Sankt-Peterburge.
See, for example, Northrop D (2004) Veiled Empire: Gender and Power in Stalinist Central Asia. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
During the 1990s and early 2000s, Russia’s population declined by 750,000 per year. For debates on some of these issues see, for example, Rivkin-Fish M (2006) From ‘Demographic Crisis’ to ‘Dying Nation’: The politics of language and reproduction in Russia. In: Goscilo H & Lanoux A (eds) Gender and National Identity in Twentieth-Century Russian Culture. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press; Healey, What Is Soviet Now?
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© 2014 Dan Healey
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Healey, D. (2014). The Sexual Revolution in the USSR: Dynamics Beneath the Ice. In: Hekma, G., Giami, A. (eds) Sexual Revolutions. Genders and Sexualities in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137321466_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137321466_14
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