Paul W. Goldschmidt - Pornography And Democratization: Legislating Obscenity In Post-communist Russia

Legislating Obscenity in Post-Communist Russia

Paul W. Goldschmidt

First published 1999 by Westview Press, Inc.

Published 2019 by Routledge
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ISBN 13 978-0-367-28391-9 (hbk)

Pornography and Democratization

In the "bad old days" of the Soviet regime, there was allegedly no sex in Russia, but for at least the past decade, there has been sex and in great abundance. Naked bodies adorn even the most mainstream journals and newspapers, movies (both domestic and imported) regularly feature sex scenes, television portrays explicit sex in regular prime time hours, and all of these developments do not even begin to get at the vibrant pornography industry. Pornographic videos (mostly pirated copies of Western-produced films), magazines, newspapers, and live sex-shows can be found in Russia today. There are even pornographic webpages on the Internet that are created and maintained in Russia. Yet, for all this proliferation, there is little official understanding.

In January 1994, Nina Vasil'eva of Moscow stood accused in criminal court of seeking to "propagandize the cult of cruelty and pornography." The prosecution cited as its evidence a latex phallus found in the display case of her street-side kiosk. By having the object out in full public view, argued the prosecutor, she was deliberately trying to corrupt public mores. The court, however, had its doubts. Did the display of a marital aid constitute "pornography" or was this woman merely engaged in legitimate commercial activity? To resolve the issue, the court sought the advice of an art historian, who in turn reasoned that the public display of an imitation phallus was not pornography, nor was it even "erotic" for that matter. The sale of such items was a medical matter and the display of them for the purposes of such sale could no more be forbidden than the display of aspirin or fitness books. The case was far from atypical. On average, Moscow-based art historian Vladimir Borev (whose specific labors we will look at in ) gets 300-400 requests annually from the militsiia to help them figure out what is (illegal) pornography and what is (legal) erotica. Obviously, Russian law enforcement is having trouble with this issue. Why?

The growing visibility of the issue can certainly be blamed on the quantity of pornography in the former Soviet Union (both imported and home-grown), but the problem of controlling it cannot be fully attributed to increasing scale. Russia, as it emerges out of its authoritarian past, has to come to grips with the problems that any democracy faces. One of these problems is pornography. In the old days, the Soviet Union censored obscenity and pornography as a matter of course, along with a large number of other types of speech. As we shall see, such behavior was not unique to the Soviet period but, as we shall see, was a continuation of Russian political behavior that can be traced back to Peter the Great and before.

Since democratization began in Russia, the situation has grown distinctly more complicated. Post-Soviet reforms in the press laws have stressed the importance of rejecting censorship in order to pursue democracy. But rather than promoting actual reform, the relaxation of censorship often seems like an unintended consequence. While there are obscenity statutes, pornography flourishes on the streets. The laws are simply not enforced. Although the lack of enforcement can be attributed to a matter of priorities (i.e., that the militsiia have better things to do than enforce an obscenity statute), part of the problem is the Russian government's difficulty in defining the limits of democratic freedom and the meaning of democracy itself.