Soviet textbooks on criminology argued that prostitution is a social disease inherent in a society where decaying capitalism reigns, and Soviet women are not able to be sold for money. Experts say that the number of prostitutes is always the same. It's not about social order. At all times there is a group of women who are ready to sell their love for money.
Beginning of prostitution in the USSR
After the February Revolution, sex workers (as prostitutes were then called) tried to create trade unions and somehow defend their rights. The time of brothels was over, there were no yellow tickets, prostitution in the USSR was no longer controlled by the police, so the market for intimate services began to live according to its own laws. The Bolsheviks solved the problem very simply: prostitution was declared one of the forms of evading labor service.
The representatives of the most ancient profession, of course, have not disappeared anywhere. This activity was continuedthose who used to work in legal brothels and those who found clients on the streets. The ranks of women selling their own bodies have been replenished by citizens who are completely far from this "case". During the day they worked on a typewriter in some new Soviet office, and in the evening they went to the panel.
Execution and camps for priestesses of love
Lenin hated prostitution and considered such women a huge threat to society. In the days of war communism, he was always afraid of riots and uprisings. Once Vladimir Ilyich demanded to be taken out of Nizhny Novgorod and shot almost two hundred prostitutes, who, in his opinion, soldered the soldiers. In Petrograd, a special concentration camp was created for priestesses of love. Punishments for prostitution in the USSR were harsh, but it did not help to reduce the number of women who traded their bodies.
A brothel in Soviet Moscow
In the autumn of 1925, investigator Lev Sheinin interrogated Antonina Apostolova, the widow of a general in the tsarist army, who organized the first brothel right in the center of the capital. It all started with a statement from an angry Soviet official who came to visit and unexpectedly found his wife in the arms of a strange man.
This was the main principle of Antonina Apostolova: she picked married, well-to-do women, but frankly bored. Apostolova met future priestesses of love with fashion designers in the capital, in women's hairdressing and perfume shops. As a rule, these were the wives of the new Soviet nomenklatura. decentliving space and abundance in the house did not make them happy.
Prostitution during the NEP
When Lenin introduced the NEP, the standard of living in Moscow rose significantly. Private shops and restaurants opened, men with money appeared, and the number of prostitutes increased. The authorities were very inconsistent in the issue of prostitution in the USSR: at first they were shot for it, but then they simply turned a blind eye.
The services of prostitutes at that time were used by 40 to 60% of the adult male population. Against the backdrop of high demand in the market for paid intimate services, the organizational structure quickly recovered. Prostitution in the pre-perestroika period became a punishable occupation from 1922, when the Criminal Code was adopted. Pimps and brothel keepers were put behind bars and their property was taken away, but the number of brothels did not decrease.
According to all the laws of capitalism, several levels of prostitutes immediately formed. There were so-called professional women who dressed in fur coats and uniforms of employees. Prostitutes of a lower rank looked like gray mice and served their clients in basements or just on the street. In the twenties, priestesses of love served men even in the cemetery. For example, a gatehouse with girls was discovered at the Pyatnitskoye cemetery in Moscow during one of the raids.
The case of Antonina Apostolova
The general's elite brothel continued to operate. The investigation against Antonina Apostolova began after a letter from one of the women was discovered. One of the best employees of the brothel was tortured for a long timeconscience. She was infinitely ashamed in front of her loving husband, who, of course, knew nothing. She couldn't admit it, but she didn't want to live like that anymore. The woman decided to commit suicide.
During the investigation, Apostolova denied her guilt for a long time and did not want to testify. In court, when asked how she classifies her profession, the general's wife replied: "It's not for me to go to a dressmaker." The case was resonant. The caretaker of the first known Soviet brothel was given ten years for the nomenklatura.
Labor re-education of women
Since 1929, a severe persecution of prostitutes began. Priestesses of love were sent to a kind of labor dispensaries controlled by the NKVD. It was something between a prison and a hospital. As a rule, part of a hostel or old rooming houses were assigned for them. There were six such dispensaries in Moscow alone.
Re-education began with a lecture on the dangers of sexually transmitted diseases, then the prostitutes were sent to some factory. It was assumed that advanced workers would favorably influence representatives of the oldest profession, but in fact it turned out that factory workers became prostitutes: prostitution flourished in the Soviet era. Even with such brutal methods, the authorities were unable to fight the girls who were ready to sell their love for money.
Punitive measures
The word "prostitution" in the USSR began to appear less and less in police reports and in newspapers. More streamlined phrases began to be used (for example,“a morally unstable woman”), but at the same time, the attitude towards priestesses of love in society became more rigid, and mores in dispensaries began to resemble camp ones. Women were beaten, raped and humiliated.
The dispensary organized in the Trinity-Sergius Monastery was especially famous. There were rumors that prostitutes were forced to dig up the graves of famous people (buried in tsarist times) in order to remove valuable jewelry. Arrested priestesses of love began to be sent to Solovki, but at the beginning of the thirties, few were still familiar with the Gulag. In a few years, everyone will know what the camp is.
Spies to work with foreigners
Prostitution in the USSR was considered a crime, and if the sale of intimate services was carried out to foreigners, then an aggravated crime. Girls who had intimate relationships with foreigners immediately came to the attention of the KGB. They were not only followed and recruited, but also trained: they were real Soviet spies.
The first foreigners appeared in the Soviet Union at the end of the twenties, but in general, before the war, foreign guests were very exotic, so prostitutes worked mainly for the domestic consumer. Shortly before the war, foreigners became much more. Friendship Houses were created, where foreigners were entertained, and prostitution in the USSR became practically legal. After the Second World War, all the women who were seen there were sent to camps.
In the mid-fifties, currency prostitution flourished. How was it in the USSR? Girls of easy virtue became activeto communicate with foreigners, and foreign guests got into the epicenter of female attention. After two weeks of the World Festival of Youth and Students, many pregnant women appeared in the Soviet Union, who subsequently gave birth to black children.
Combating STDs
Until the mid-fifties, Soviet prostitutes practically did not use contraceptives. The result was shocking statistics of sexually transmitted diseases. Millions of people suffered from relatively mild illnesses, but hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens suffered from syphilis. The statistics were immediately classified and they began to actively fight, and not with the disease itself, but with the sick. The doctor had the right to call the police if the patient refused treatment.
Prostitution during perestroika in the USSR
Sex and perestroika are close concepts. At the time of glasnost, the USSR had not yet begun to talk openly about sex, but there were already prerequisites. Sex and perestroika is all about the book by Vladimir Kunin, who followed the work of prostitutes in a hotel for several months, and then brought to the editorial office a manuscript called "The Prostitute." They didn’t print such a work, but after the name change everything went smoothly: “Intergirl” blew up the Soviet Union, which had very little time to live.
The truth about forced prostitution
In the early years of glasnost, society saw the whole world around us, the history of the war with different eyes, and a lot of terrible and disgusting truth was revealed. Eyes opened andprostitution in the Gulag camps, more precisely, on how women were turned into dumb slaves, on whom the heads of the camps made money.
