The Dictatorship of Sex: Lifestyle Advice for the Soviet Masses (review)

After the Bolshevik Revolution, medical professionals and public health officials decried what they saw as a sexual “crisis” in early Soviet Russia. Rampant prostitution, an increase in venereal disease and masturbation, and widespread casual sex, they claimed, were only some of the sexual ills and depravities that threatened public health and undermined efforts to build a new socialist society. To combat this alleged crisis, sexual enlightenment became an official part of the Soviet state’s new health agenda.

In The Dictatorship of Sex: Lifestyle Advice for the Soviet Masses, Frances Bernstein examines Soviet sexual education in the 1920s. She points out that the approach to sexuality during those years differed significantly from the prohibitions and legal strictures that dominated the prerevolutionary era and the 1930s, which criminalized and punished sexual behavior deemed problematic (e.g., homosexuality and abortion). Instead of prohibition, the sexual enlightenment program relied on exhortation. Through an elaborate arsenal of sex educational materials—including health newspapers and journals, popular pamphlets, traveling health exhibits, and posters—Soviet physicians and public health officials aimed to advance “healthy” and “normal” sexuality. Bernstein rightly points out that this approach to sexuality, though not legally prohibitive, was nonetheless restrictive. Sexual enlighteners advanced a rigid vision of medicalized sexuality “firmly harnessed to heterosexual reproductive monogamy” (p. 8). They did not promote individual sexual pleasure as a key component of “normal” sexuality. Instead Soviet sexual enlighteners defined “normalcy” in mostly negative terms—“as the absence of a series of deviant and dangerous behaviors, and education focused on those forms of expression that were to be avoided” (p. 7). Ultimately, Bernstein argues, medical professionals and public health officials promoted a heterosexual “sexless-sex model.” Ideal Soviet citizens would get married, but not too early, and engage in sexual activity, but not too frequently, primarily for the purpose of procreation.

In one of her most fascinating chapters, Bernstein examines how sexual enlighteners emphasized not only the dangers of prostitution and venereal disease (the usual sexual suspects), but also the supposed hazards of “underage” sex, masturbation, and early marriage. These practices were viewed as negative not because of their alleged violation of morality, a claim often made in the West. Instead, Soviet doctors and public health officials argued for the deleterious effects of these practices on the individual body and the crusade for socialism. As Bernstein notes, seeing these behaviors as perilous rested on two assumptions: the glandular basis of sex and the limited supply of bodily energy, including hormone supply. Sexual activity before the body reached full maturity, it was argued, would overburden the sex glands and deplete the “growing body of the hormones necessary to ensure normal physical and mental development” (p. 134). Early sexual activity would therefore damage one’s personal health and weaken “societal commitment” to socialist construction. Supposedly, masturbation was dangerous for similar reasons: it diminished the body’s hormonal level, which impeded proper physical growth and led to a decline in mental energy and willpower, thereby adversely affecting an individual’s capacity for contributing to the building of a new socialist order. Masturbation was also seen as an antisocial and excessively individualistic behavior, which weakened feelings of “comradeship.” When masturbation was not a solitary affair but a group activity, it was considered incorrectly collectivist. Sexual enlighteners saw early marriage as harmful because, as with “underage” sex, it involved “premature” sexual activity that could produce unhealthy side effects, such as impotence and infertility. In addition, early marriage could lead to early pregnancy or its termination, both of which were perceived as threatening to a young woman’s body.

Although scholarly literature often depicts the Soviet 1920s as sexually liberated and the 1930s as sexually repressive, Bernstein offers a different view. She acknowledges that the recriminalization of prostitution, sodomy, and abortion in the 1930s reintroduced significant restrictions. But, according to Bernstein, the “sexless-sex model” promoted in the 1920s laid the groundwork for the Stalinist repression of sexuality in...