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

Frances Bernstein, in her excellent book on the sex question in the early decades of the Soviet experiment, makes a convincing case for the centrality of sexual enlightenment—in both its discursive and its institutional manifestations—in the project of creating a Communist society populated with newly transformed Soviet citizens. Her discussion of the relationship among state goals, the emergence of new medical institutions, and the representations, whether textual or visual, of Soviet sexual enlightenment will engross anyone who is interested in how the state and its institutions regulated behavior in the process of creating the new Soviet man, woman, and child. Bernstein’s story is one that transcends the boundaries of place and engages in questions that apply to all twentieth-century authoritarian regimes. This book is about the emergence of a modern Soviet sexuality against which processes elsewhere could be measured.

Bernstein explores the intersections of the official discourses on sexuality and the establishment of institutions that regulated sexual behavior, public health, and science in order to understand the consolidation of Soviet power in the 1920s. Hers is an argument that emphasizes central continuities between the 1920s and 1930s. She describes how the knowledge about sexuality produced by medical professionals in the 1920s ultimately “would pave the way for the state’s adoption of repressive policies toward sex during the 1930s” (5). The so-called dictatorship of sex that is in her title was the product of revolutionary era sexual enlighteners who reified notions of biological sexual difference and used them to establish their legitimacy and authority. In this sense, there is little of the “freedom” of sexual expression sometimes associated with revolutionary processes. Rather, Bernstein emphasizes how official normative discourses—reinforced through public health institutions—occupied center stage as the Soviet Union formulated its new morality and attempted to regulate its citizens’ most intimate behavior. In this sense, her book teaches us a lot about everyday life within the Soviet Union and elsewhere, from the power of science to define and regulate behaviors to official state campaigns to transform individuals.

Bernstein’s book begins in 1918 with the founding of the People’s Commissariat of Public Health and ends with the halting of open discussions about sexuality in the early 1930s. As a careful scholar, though, Bernstein tracks the historical roots of Soviet sexual science through both time and space. She compares the processes that she finds with (citing Foucault) the modern European “liberal democratic” model of regulation through discipline and professional power. In this spirit, she also raises the question of continuity and whether the Soviet experiment can be imagined as a continuation of the late tsarist institutional environment (and here mentions Laura Engelstein’s Keys to Happiness on Russian sexuality at the turn of the century).¹ Ultimately, Bernstein concludes that the processes in prerevolutionary Russia are not parallel to her Soviet context. “The medical response to the sex question from 1918 to 1931 represents fundamentally a different kind of control,” she informs her readers. In these early Soviet decades, she finds, sex—imagined as an issue of public health—“was managed rather than prohibited through the expert treatment of specialists and a program of education” (8).

The main actors in Bernstein’s story are medical experts (and their patients) of various kinds. Although she comments on the fact that there is some ethnic homogenization among the doctors, who tend to be Jewish, she does not notice any gender differences among doctors/experts, who are both male and female. The experts themselves were relatively out of touch with the discoveries of their contemporaries in the West, and many of the theories that were at the center of Soviet discussions were already “out of date elsewhere” (11). Moreover, the Soviet program of sexual enlightenment had a “collectivist orientation” rather than the liberal individualism that characterized the West. Yet these individuals—the subjects of the studies—tended to be men. Women, it turns out, were...