Twenty years ago this spring, the cult classic Little Vera came crashing into Soviet movie theaters with over a minute of onscreen sex. It shattered a fragile alternate reality where sex, as well as other, darker undersides of human life, did not exist. Looking from another angle, however, it also showed why Soviet culture treated sex as such a grave affair.
April, 1989. In the minds of many Americans, the U.S.S.R. was "a society that is not just puritanical but almost completely ignorant about sexuality." This puritanical society, which would soon explode into the glitter of strip clubs, sexually explicit advertisement, and streetwalkers, masked one of the most dubious - and perhaps premature - sexual revolutions in the world. First, after declaring universal suffrage, the Bolsheviks tried to do away with family as we know it, declaring marriage and monogamy an unnecessary bourgeois relic and making abortion readily available. Then, after a decade of disastrous promiscuity, Stalin heralded in a new age of "family values" - and covert abortions. Although officially women were emancipated and had equal access to labor (as well as a monopoly on housework) Russians wouldn't dare speak candidly about sex until the glasnost policies of the late 1980s. And while Americans were debating how women could be more like men, it is ironic that Soviet magazines in 1989 were dealing with the same contradictions as feminist pundits today address in the "Mommy Wars."
But even prior to that, somewhere, somehow Soviet people had to read about sex. What they read sheds light not just on Soviet sexual ideology, but how people themselves preferred to view the topic. And, for lack of all the sensual glitz that surrounded it in more sophisticated places, the Soviets' take on sex was, well, plain serious. In other words, the best place to talk about it was Health magazine.
"A young man writes us: ‘When I was 14, I wanted to experience closeness with a young woman. What is this - is this desire normal, or is it not?' Of course, there are different answers to this question," writes one V. I. Cherednichenko, a teacher of a subject called "ethics and psychology of family life." In the March 1987 issue of Health, Cherednichenko used euphemisms to answer an obvious question. "I believe the best answer is the truth. And when teaching boys I explain that physicians believe that attraction is normal - its absence is not."
Prudish? Hypocritical? Or simply straight-forward? In fact, Cherednichenko was writing an article about the need for sexual education among ninth-graders. Sounds late by current standards, but given the social conservative backlash, you had to start somewhere. Even so, the author had no reason to doubt that the subject at hand was, indeed, very serious business:
"I offer an anonymous form and learn than 28 percent of girls and 54 percent of boys in the ninth grade believe they could enter into premarital intimate relations.... All girls are generally familiar with the consequences of early sexual relations: they wrote about the possibility of sexually-transmitted diseases and about the fact that an abortion could lead to infertility, they correctly talk about the psychological discomfort that a young woman who has lost her chastity long before marriage could face. But then why is it that nearly a third of the ninth-grade girls thought premarital relations possible?"
Most articles - even those from the more daring, and sometimes outright kinky 1989 - insisted that healthy sex had to take place inside a marriage (or at least inside a lasting, loving union). They cautioned that extramarital and promiscuous behavior was disastrous for a woman. "From sexual freedom to tragedy - just one step," warns a subheading of doctor's warning on page 10 of the August 1987 issue. "A 14-year-old girl came in for a doctor's visit to the women's clinic," reads the lead. "She asked for an abortion. When the doctor asked who was the father, she heard the following answer: ‘I don't know, we were playing daisy.'"
The same article goes overboard in trying to prove its point with some spurious research: "According to the American Institute of National Health [sic], a woman who has had seven sexual partners usually becomes infertile."
There was certainly a positive side to sex, which is evident from articles in the "He and She" section. Again, however, this positive side was conditional on a loving, monogamous, and preferably marital relationship. An article by a sexologist called "Letter to an Unknown Woman" warned a young wife against withholding sex from the husband: "The marital bed is sacred: it is the place of one of the greatest mysteries of nature. And certainly not the place for fakery, diplomacy, or pragmatics!" Another article that featured a man and a naked woman in a passionate embrace advised that "perversion is not a wider spectre of sexual caresses. It is a spiritless, accidental liaison only for the sake of achieving sexual release. No caresses that give pleasure to the loved one can be considered perverted."
For some Western readers, use of words like "sacred" and the persistent invocations of the dangers of sex sound strange in a secular, vehemently atheistic setting. This is more the stuff of pro-life brochures. But as these words were being written, abortion was legal, and according to some official statistics outnumbered live births three to one.
But perhaps that might be one of the reasons why sex was indeed such a grave matter - especially for girls. Contraception was available, but Soviet society had its own unique concept of women's lib. Women did not work for their own personal fulfillment. They also did household chores, frequently without the aid of modern appliances. The drama of Little Vera surrounded, introducing a husband into an already crowded apartment. That plus a baby (or abortion) might have been a good reason for women to think hard about their decisions to have sex. Against such a backdrop, these "quaint" articles were, for all their propaganda, making the first feeble attempts to protect Soviet women.
By Anna Arutunyan
