Mikhail Shtern - Sex in the Soviet Union

Sex in the Soviet Union

Sexuality in the Soviet Union: how we make love, what we say to our partner, how and why we marry, how we rape, how we lie, how we search after the truth, how we perceive the sexual realities of the West ... Sexuality in the land of the Soviets, whether normal or pathological, whether that of free men or of prisoners, whether that of ordinary people or of the privileged ... Marriage, divorce, the sexual emotions of the young when they first become involved with the opposite sex ... Womans liberationdoes it exist in the USSR? And homosexuality? And those relaxing weekends in the country enjoyed by the top people in the regime, far from prying eyes ...

This is the subject of my book.

. No one can be ignorant of the fact these days: the immense Soviet Union is a secret world, a closed world. When a . foreigner lands at Sheremetyevo Airport in Moscow, he imagines that he is about to begin exploring the country. However, in the overwhelming majority of cases his hopes remain unrealised, because his visit has been programmed in advance and there are hardly any surprises in store for him. He will be shown Red Square, the Kremlin, the historic monuments of Leningrad; he will be taken to visit a factory or a model collective farm specially intended for that purpose in itineraries carefully prepared in advance. When he tries to make friends with Soviet people, not his official guides but the man in the street, he will most often find, if he is discerning enough to feel it, a fear, a tension, a constraint, which distorts the smiles, however sincere, that people try to give him. In a country where deception has been elevated to raison detat, where everything is done to present the actual state of affairs as a kind of earthly paradise, and where each citizen is obliged to rehearse in public life the dogma of official ideology, everyones time is spent trying to hide something; so our foreigner will leave the USSR without having learned anything about itneither what constitutes the daily life of Soviet people, nor their intimate thoughts.

Let us consider only one paradox: on the one hand, the Red Arrow, that comfortable, elegant train between Moscow and Leningrad in which foreigners travel first class only; and on the other hand the through train that took fourteen days transporting me from Vinnitsa prison to Kharkov concentration camp, a train into which prisoners were packed ten to a compartment, amidst filth and a stifling heat and stench. I have purposely chosen this brutal image to give an idea of the gulf that separates the external appearance of things from the hidden reality, concealed by the screen of official ideology.

Let me say straight away, this gulf constitutes the very essence of Soviet reality. The splitting of the personality, the untenable contradiction between the public, official attitude of people and their private, secret conductit is this, even more than the absence of political and individual liberties, which is destroying the Soviets, their bodies and their souls.

Yes, even their bodies. For nothing is more revealing of the splitting of the Soviets personality than their sex life. As early as the Stalinist period, the ideology of the regime had banished sex from Soviet territory. The Soviet man claimed to have been created was supposed to be a kind of superman with irreproachable morals, whose amorous activities, reduced anyway to a strict minimum and to the most chaste manifestations possible, were meant only to serve to strengthen the Red Soviet family and the socialist economy. A woman depicted in official iconography was always armed with a gun or a sickle; and if by chance she happened to have a breast exposed, this audacity was invariably tolerated only for the noble purpose of suckling a future pioneer of the socialist fatherland.

This essential characteristic of the regime, one which I shall be emphasising, remains very much alive in the Soviet Union, despite the passage of time. This partly explains the present situation, where there is more information available about life in Soviet camps than about the sexual behaviour of Soviet men and women.

Admittedly, the suppression and silence that surround everything relating to sex are not an invention of the Soviet regime: many countries have experienced the same and still do. However what is distinctive of the USSR is the strikingly omnipresent censorship of each and every moment, which has

as a result become second nature to homo sovieticus; a moral norm imposed from above, which, unlike traditional moral codes, corresponds to no reality; what is ultimately a brutal intervention by the State into the most intimate depths of human existence. In the totalitarian regime conceived by Orwell in 1984, the unsupervised sexual act is considered a defiance of the system: I have no doubt that at the heart of Communism there has always been a tendency towards this ideal state.

This then is the subject of my book: sexuality in the Soviet Union. It is neither a medical treatise nor a political pamphlet. I wish to express my point of viewthat of a endocrinologist and sexologiston the socio-sexual anomalies forced on people by the Soviet way of life, and to describe my own experience, based on thirty years of medical practice. I do not claim to have written a piece of sociological research, which is anyway impossible for reasons which I shall expand on later; but I wish to acquaint my readers with everything that I have been able to observe, even dealing with such concealed practices as homosexuality and certain activities of top people in the regime when they relax in the seclusion of their dachas. If someone in the Soviet Union were to undertake a book of this kind, his temerity would automatically put him on the black list of dissidents or suspect persons. For censorship in the Soviet Union is such that all objective research in this field is impossible.

In Western countries numerous reports on the sexual life of men and women have seen the light of day in recent years. One need think only of The Hite Report or of Beyond the Male Myth by A. Pietropinto and J. Simenauer. From the official Soviet point of view, these reports only serve to confirm the moral decadence of Western society, which is in a state of decay and has sunk so low that sexual perversions alone are likely to arouse interest. It goes without saying that in the USSR sexology is not recognised. Even the term sexologist hardly exists, used briefly during those rare and fleeting periods of liberalism which the country has known in recent years. Neither scientific discipline, nor the practice of sexology has ever been permitted in the USSR; so that the Soviet citizen who wants advice is obliged to turn to a psychiatrist, endocrinologist, gynaecologist, urologist or venereologist who might be willing to listen to him. The specialist who agrees to take on problems of this kind will never be short of work, because in the USSR the incidence of sexual deviation has reached catastrophic proportions, and there are no sexologists.

Doctors who carry out the functions of sexologists are brave pioneers, obliged to struggle against official taboos and the moral prejudices and bewildering ignorance of the overwhelming majority of the population. They can only rely on their empirical experience and their personal talentthings they cannot acquire via the official medical establishment in a country which claims world supremacy for the quality and effectiveness of its health service.

If the reader could have been present at my consultations, he would have undoubtedly been astonished. Even with a good knowledge of Russian, I am sure he would have understood nothing except the endless repetition of the word it, which can be used to refer simultaneously to the penis, the sexual act, the vagina, pregnancy, masturbation, orgasm and many other concepts the correct and current usage of whose terminology it would be futile to expect. The physicians skill entirely consists in relying on his experience and his knowledge of psychology to determine a diagnosis on the basis of all these itsor even on the basis of their not being said at all and to decide on the appropriate treatment or advice. Very often these consultations coincide with a routine medical visit. Patients frequently came to me about some glandular illness and at the end of the consultation, suddenly feeling that they could confide in me, added with some embarrassment: Doctor, theres one other little thing Id like to ask you about ...