Prostitution

Abstract

In a letter to a Soviet journal a reader speculated recently that if the communists had known in 1917 that seventy years on prostitution would still be a problem they would not have made the revolution.¹ Though this seems unlikely, it is true, nevertheless, that the persistence of prostitution in the 1920s, along with private enterprise, gambling and high-living, was seen as a defeat by many Bolsheviks who had hoped that their victory over the landlords and capitalists would put an end to all traces of decadent bourgeois culture. In the early 1930s, as the Stalinist system consolidated, prostitutes, who still walked the central streets in considerable numbers, were rounded up and sent to camps; prostitution was said to have been ‘liquidated’, along with unemployment and inequality, and discussion on the topic ceased. Even during the Khrushchovian Thaw, when the ideals of the post-revolutionary period made a partial come-back, and even in the 1970s, when Soviet sociology emerged from the twilight, prostitution remained a taboo subject. Over the past six years the situation has changed. Prostitution has made headlines; it has provided material for documentaries and for public debate, for literature and the theatre. Initially, the press took the lead with descriptions of the lives and times of the modern prostitute, and commentary on prostitution’s moral and political economy. Gradually the ‘experts’ — the academics and professionals — were drawn into the debate, reporting on their research and putting their views, both in the popular press and in the specialist literature.