After Communism ended in Russia, American pornography found a huge market
There was no sex in the Soviet Union…until the 1990s
“The tyrant is dead, long live Playboy!” thundered the writer Vasily Aksyonov in the pages of the first issue of Russian Playboy. It was the summer of 1995 and the men’s magazine was but one glossy then making its debut in the Motherland, promising to bring American-style soft-core to the sex-starved Soviets.
Playboy was part of a tidal wave of pornography that flooded the former Soviet Union after it collapsed in 1991 — along with many other hitherto hard-to-find consumer goods, from bananas to Pepsi to punk rock. (Interestingly, the “feminist sex wars” were raging in the United States at the exact same time, with anti-pornography feminists like Andrea Dworkin calling porn the “orchestrated destruction of women’s bodies and souls.”)
In the early, vertiginous years of the post-Soviet period, pornography was ubiquitous in Russian cities, selling mostly on street corners and in metro stations. “Nothing prepared me for the omnipresence of this stuff,” wrote an American traveler to Russia in the pages of the magazine Off Our Backs in 1993. “One simply can’t avert one’s eyes — it’s everywhere.” One survey conducted in the early 1990s indicated that Muscovite men were in possession of 50 percent more pornography than their British brethren and 20 percent more than the average American male.
That Russian men delighted in an influx of smut may not be surprising — sex had long been taboo under Soviet rule, and pornography was simply illegal — but the way that much of it was presented as an explicit extension of nascent democracy and newfound “freedom” is.
The first issue of homegrown men’s magazine Andrei was introduced in 1991 as “essential today…the psychological freedom [of men] is a prerequisite for the emancipation of society from the crushing complexes of a distorted era.” An editorial letter in the second issue reads, “We’re certain that Andrei and its battle helped strengthen democratic tendencies in the area of social awareness and rights.” As Russia scholar Eliot Borenstein writes, the inaugural issue of Russian Playboy politicized itself a bit more humorously, with a cartoon featuring “happy rabbit-eared men and boys marching in Red Square with placards displaying the bunny image of Playboy.”
(Andrei and Playboy represented two very different takes on Russian male sexuality, with the former seeing itself as ushering in a nationalistic revolution in intelligentsia-approved ertoism and and the latter as a bullish celebration of capitalist plenty. By the seventh issue of Andrei, its editors were lamenting that the revolution they’d attempted to kick off was already over: “it was short and stormy, like the beauty of Russian women,” they wrote.)
Pornography wasn’t exactly new in Russia, but it had been strictly controlled. After an initial post-revolutionary period of sexual permissiveness in personal relationships — a socialist aspiration to free love, and looser laws around divorce and abortion, for example — pornography was expressly outlawed in the Soviet Union in 1935. Even before that, the Bolsheviks had made a point of confiscating artistocrats’ erotica — which lived in a special section of the Lenin Library only open to top party officials.
Sex itself was seen as the selfish fulfillment of individual desire, and also an act that demands privacy — a remnant of bourgeois domesticity not on offer in the U.S.S.R. (though people found creative workarounds, of course). Soviet scientists, legislators, and Ministers of Health and Culture spent decades performing rhetorical acrobatics to hitch all official talk of sex to puritanical narratives of procreative productivity and frightening cautionary tales from the front lines of its “Hygiene War.” All discussion of pornography was couched in the ominous language of psychiatric disorder and spiritual decay. As a result, the Soviet regime offered its citizens an extremely limited sex education. (“There is no sex in the Soviet Union,” a Moscow woman famously quipped in a glasnost-inspired 1986 television program promoting cultural exchange between Soviet and Americans.)
So it’s no surprise that into the 1990s, as an unprecedented quantity of pornography was finding its way into Russian hands, there was debate and concern about how to classify such imagery, not just morally but ideologically. A piece by Andrei Maksimov in a 1992 supplement to the Russian newspaper Komsomol’skaia Pravda read, somewhat tragically, “We are ashamed to admit we are excited by the naked female body because there is no [official] position, no ideology behind this excitement.”
For its part, Playboy already had cache in Russia. “Playboy has a very profound symbolic value” for Russians, Artyom Troitsky, the magazine’s editor-in-chief, told the Moscow Times in 1995, since it was “one of the favorite targets of the Soviet anti-propaganda apparatus. That makes this very exciting.” The magazine, according to Troitsky, “was a symbol of the forbidden fruit in every sense, be it sex, or the American way of life, or anything.” As Russian sociologist Igor Kon argued in the volume Eros and Pornography in Russian Culture, just as “anti-pornography slogans enabled the Party to direct popular fury and frenzy against glasnost and the democratic mass media,” so too did pro-pornography sentiment give post-Soviet citizens (men, in this case) an opportunity to snub their noses at the regime and revel in their democratic freedom.
Playboy tried hard to play up both its associations to the Soviet past, and its potential as a herald of freedom and independence. They “wanted to have it both ways,” according to Borenstein. On the one hand, they sought to represent the magazine as a mainstay of Russian maleness, a totem that had been smuggled in and passed among the elite for decades. An early issue boasted an interview with the personal translator to four Soviet leaders, who admitted he always returned from his travels with copies of Playboy in his luggage. Elsewhere in the magazine, Borenstein says, was the insistence that “the Playboy ethic of sexual freedom was the natural ally in the struggle against totalitarianism.” Troitsky even suggested it was no accident that Hugh Hefner started Playboy in 1953, the same year Stalin died.
Many scholars have examined the emasculating narrative that attended the end of the Cold War, specifically, the penetration by Western capital of a weakened Soviet Union. Borenstein, particularly in his 2008 book Overkill: Sex and Violence in Contemporary Russian Culture, argues that it is precisely this embattled masculinity that Playboy and its ilk swooped in to redeem. “In the textual and visual two-dimensional world of the Russian pornographic magazine,” he writes, “Russian men saw themselves as fighting back against national and sexual humiliation.”
Russian men may have initially glommed onto Western nudie pictures, but the reign of the soft-core men’s magazine would soon come to an abrupt end, as the internet took over and altered the pornography landscape forever. These days, it would appear that most Russians aren’t looking abroad for titillation. The top porn search term in the country is “Russian.” I guess their own broads will do just fine.
