Pod Insights Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society Sex Work in Soviet Russia About this episode After the Russian Revolution in 1917, sex work was a prime example of what capitalism did to society.
Under communism, sex work would no longer need to exist in society.
Spoiler: it very much still existed.
How were sex workers treated in Soviet Russia? Why were they glamourised? And what's the sex industry like in Russia today?
Joining Kate today is expert on all of this and more, Professor Emily Schuckman Matthews, to take us back to Soviet Russia.
This episode was edited by Tim Arstall. The producer was Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Freddy Chick.
All music from Epidemic Sounds.
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1:19 Kate Lister? Hello, my lovely betwixters. It's me, Kate Lester. How are you doing? Oh, welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets. It's so nice to see you again. But before we go any further together, I do have to tell you, and I will keep telling you, because quite frankly, we care. We do care on this show. We care about your feelings and that you're not triggered. So here you go. This is an adult podcast, spoken by adults, other adults, about adulty things and adulty ways, and sexual subjects, and you should be an adult too. And we call that the Fair Do's Warning, because fair do's, we did tell you it was going to get spicy. Right on with the show.
1:52 Kate Lister? We are in Moscow in the early 1980s, and I'm loitering outside an in-tourist hotel. Trying my very best to look like I am not loitering outside of an in-tourist hotel. These are the Soviet Union's official hotel chain for foreign visitors, where Westerners are carefully welcomed, closely watched, and charged a small fortune for the privilege. Now officially, officially, sex work doesn't exist under communism, and it certainly doesn't exist in the Soviet Union. Huh. So it's funny then how these elegantly dressed women keep striking up conversations with every foreign visitor who walks through the hotel doors. I wonder what they're up to then.
2:36 Kate Lister? Now, this is either the most friendly nation on earth, far friendlier than I've been led to believe, or, or, somebody's telling a few porky pies here. Shall we find out which? Let's get on with it.
3:12 Kate Lister? Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kate Lister. When the Soviet Union was established in 1922, sex work was seen as symptomatic of capitalism. They had a theory that it only existed because poverty existed. And if you took the wealth away from the rich and if everybody was even Stephens, there'd be no need for anybody to do it. That was the theory at least. And if that was true, there wouldn't be any sex work under communism. So what happened when that didn't happen? Huh? How did sex workers work under these conditions? How'd you go about researching them? And what did the state think was going on? I'm thrilled to be joined by Professor Emily Shuckman Matthews,
3:57 Kate Lister? who has researched sex work in Russia from the early 20th century to the present day. And if you liked this episode, then do check out our other one on sex work in Imperial Russia, which was a kind of a prequel to this one, if you haven't already. Right, without further ado, let's get on with this.
4:21 Kate Lister? Well, hello and welcome to Perthrix's The Sheets. It's only Emily Shuckman Matthews. How are you doing?
4:29 Speaker 02 I'm great. Thank you so much for having me.
4:31 Kate Lister? No, it's my absolute pleasure because, you know, we don't talk a lot about Russian history on this podcast, but it's such a fascinating area, especially at the moment.
4:41 Speaker 02 Yes, it's always an exciting and interesting time in Russia. There's many different aspects of things going on that are that are always interesting to research.
4:51 Kate Lister? You are the, well, you've been the author of many different things, but a particular area of yours is the history of sex work in Russia. Now, that is right up my alley, but how did you come to study that?
5:02 Speaker 02 Yeah, you know, I've always really been fascinated by the intersection of politics and culture and gender and sex work really intersects with all of those issues and especially in Russia. Because I'm largely a cultural studies scholar, there's so many cultural manifestations of artists and writers and politicians themselves engaging with this topic. I also just find studying the literature, these are the most interesting characters. They're much more sort of dynamic than a lot of the the people who are sort of following the rules out there. So I find the characters endlessly fascinating.
5:37 Kate Lister? Absolutely. We had Professor Colleen Lucy on a couple of weeks ago to tell us about, oh, she's brilliant, to tell us about sex work in imperial Russia. That was fascinating. And she told us about how it was legalized, but very, very heavily regulated and state-controlled and had these yellow tickets. And then we kind of stopped when we got to the First World War and the revolution. So I'm hoping that this is where we can pick up because things seem to have got vastly different after that.
6:09 Speaker 02 Yeah, I mean, you have the revolution that sweeps in in 1917 and everything really does change. I mean, everything kind of gets flipped upside down. And what's fascinating about the 20th century and particularly the Soviet period, when it comes to sex work and prostitution is that in 1917, you have the revolution, you have these feminist Bolsheviks that sort of sweep into the leadership of the party. You have Lenin himself, who talk about prostitution as the sort of essential manifestation of bourgeois capitalism.
6:42 Kate Lister? Wow.
6:43 Speaker 02 The promises of the revolution are really so many people talk about sex work itself as like the prime target for sort of assessing the the progress for women, assessing the way the revolution serves the need of women and brings them up to levels of equality. Then you get to nineteen ninety and you have a survey that shows a third of Soviet high school students would consider selling sex for hard currency. You have a survey that has Soviet women ranking hard currency prostitution ninth out of a list of twenty professions.
7:21 Speaker 02 So you have a lot of change that happens in this time period that really shows in many ways the kind of promises and failures of the revolution.
7:31 Kate Lister? Oh, my God, that is that is a spread, isn't it?
7:36 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's really fascinating.
7:38 Kate Lister? So I suppose let's let's take it as a sort of like right back to the beginning because there'll be a lot of people listening who who they're not well versed in Russian history. If they've listened to this podcast, they'll know that Rasputin had a big penis, but they might not know much more than that. Sorry, everyone. But can you tell us a bit about what this revolution was? Because like, obviously, we know there was a revolution and there was Lenin, but like, what happened?
8:00 Speaker 02 Yeah, so you have the Bolsheviks who come to power. They promise, you know, they're Marxist communists. They promise that they're gonna lead the country towards communism, towards equality, end of oppression. They come in with many of them really truly believing this. And things get off to a really rocky start. There's a civil war. During that time, poverty is widespread. People are really suffering. Sex work during that time flourishes. Eventually, the Bolsheviks really gain full control of the country and they start implementing their policies. Because the country is in such kind of economic disarray after this civil war, they start what's called the new economic policy, short, usually say NEP.
8:45 Speaker 02 And during this policy, it's sort of a gradual kind of introduction of the Bolshevik ideas. So they have sort of quasi capitalism, but they're also introducing other policies aimed at instituting their ideologies. And particularly as this relates to women, there were a lot of focus on bringing women into the workforce, having equal pay, hoping that things like state subsidized childcare would help to alleviate the burdens for women.
9:19 Kate Lister? This sounds quite progressive.
9:21 Speaker 02 A lot of it, a lot of it really was. And there were a lot of people like Alexandra Collentai, Nadya Krupskaya, who all really were pushing these very, sort of what we would call progressive feminist ideals. And they were integrated into a lot of the early policy decisions that were happening. And unfortunately, they kind of wither away as the promises of communism don't really take effect. So some of them remain. There is full employment for women. It becomes required by law to be employed.
9:53 Kate Lister? Okay, that's like, I see where you were going and oh, you've gone too far now.
9:58 Speaker 02 So then a lot of women end up, what sort of happens is they end up with this double burden, where they're required to work outside of the home because you still have a very patriarchally structured society. They come home and have the double burden of caring for children and, you know, cooking and cleaning and all those things. So, so those promises for a lot of women are not really realized of sort of full equality.
10:22 Kate Lister? I appreciate the ideals at work there. And for the time, that does feel very progressive. But it's just interesting to see you talk about it and how easy and how quick that can run away from you. And it's just like, oh, no, no, no, now it's gone. That's not the way that we actually wanted that to go. And of course, we've got the, the First World War, 1917. That's right in the, in the midst. Wow, Russia's having a hell of a time.
10:46 Speaker 02 Very volatile time in the late teens and in the early twenties. Yeah.
10:50 Kate Lister? Yeah.
10:51 Speaker 02 Yeah. So nap kind of comes around in the, in the early twenties, sort of through most of the 1920s. And prostitution then in this time really flourishes. People are still looking for. Economic opportunities and then you get these men that they called Nepmen who become the symbols of kind of the betrayal of the revolution. And they dress, they dress like very fashionably and they're out drinking and they're coming home late. Um, and they're paying for sex work. And so they become the kind of villains of the, of the revolution as betrayers of the kind of Bolshevik ideals.
11:32 Speaker 02 And there's some evidence that like procuresses during this time were sometimes called Nepmanchas. So women, they were sort of the female counterpart of this male Nepmen because they were embracing capitalism. They were running brothels and profiting off of, at the time, what the government would describe, right? Is the exploitation of women who were selling sex.
11:55 Kate Lister? Could you describe, like, like, help me understand why they were so anti-sex work? What was it that they saw? Why did they attack it the way that they did?
12:05 Speaker 02 It evolves, but initially it's fully on the grounds of that sex work is a symbol of capitalism. And the whole point of the revolution is to, you know, destroy capitalism, usher in communism based on equality. And they saw sex work as entirely exploitative and that women should be brought in as equal comrades functioning to commit their ideals towards the promotion of communism, help the country move towards that. And so on those ideological grounds, they felt like there was no space for women's equality if prostitution existed.
12:43 Kate Lister? Why did they think that sex work was symbolic of capitalism? Because it's being paid, the people providing the service are effectively workers. Why would they see that as, as opposed to anything else, as opposed to any other form of labor?
12:55 Speaker 02 It just wasn't viewed through the lens of labor. It was viewed through, through the just exploitation of, it's just exploitation.
13:05 Kate Lister? So did they see it as like, like you're buying people?
13:07 Speaker 02 Right.
13:08 Kate Lister? Right. So they really focus in on that. And what kind of, how do they go about attempting to? Dismantle sex work, the the early Bolshevik movement.
13:16 Speaker 02 Yeah, so they they actually don't outlaw it because they they sort of claim that socialism is going to solve this problem. So they don't really ever create, yeah, they don't ever create laws against it until nineteen eighty seven because they just claim that they solve it and never really get solved. But by having a law, that would admit that it exists. So they don't want to have a law because that admit that admits the revolution is like failed in a way. So they have employment. So they do bring women into the workforce and that does to some extent reduce economic need for people turning to to sex work out of economic need. Of course, it still exists for a variety of reasons,
13:56 Speaker 02 but on a on a lesser level. And even though they don't have explicit laws against sex work, they do have laws against running brothels or being a procurer. So that is illegal. They also utilize other legal mechanisms like vagrancy or parasitism are the terms that they use. So work shirking, things like that, because you were required to be employed. If you weren't doing that, you were subject to arrest. It also became illegal to infect somebody with a venereal disease. So you could be arrested or sent away on those grounds. And so, of course, that was there are there all these ways that they can kind of regulate commercial sex without actually having laws, you know, explicitly against it.
14:41 Kate Lister? So they figured if everyone's in work, if we give everybody a job, there'll be no need for anybody to sell sex and it will just disappear.
14:49 Speaker 02 And that men who are buying sex from female sex workers would be true, good Bolsheviks, good communists and not want to exploit their comrades who are their equals.
15:02 Kate Lister? Exactly. That's how that works.
15:04 Speaker 02 Exactly how that works.
15:05 Kate Lister? But that's interesting that it didn't work. Absolutely. I mean, it never worked. Does it is any attempt to to abolish or to stamp out kind of it ignores what's actually going on here? Do we? Because if they're pretending that it didn't happen, if they've got a sort of like a fingers in the air, like la la la la, no, no, no, no approach, what records? Do it to exist for historians like you to go back and try and understand, well, what were people doing then? How widespread was sex work at this time?
15:31 Speaker 02 Yeah, there is some evidence. I primarily look at literature and film during this time. And so there's a lot of ways that because prostitution was seen as such a symbol of capitalism, there's some very didactic literature and early films that are being made in the twenties that are directed and focused like about this topic. So Alexandra Collantai, who's one of the, you know, leading sort of Bolsheviks of the time, writes a short story called Sisters, and it tells the story of a husband and wife who are committed Bolsheviks. They sort of participated in the revolution together. They got married, they had a child, and then he gets sucked into the Nepmen, and he starts partying, and he starts going out and drinking and coming home
16:15 Speaker 02 with various women. And at the same time, she loses her job because she's at home tending for their young child who ends up dying. Then one night, he brings home a prostitute, and the next morning, the wife wakes up and finds her in her kitchen. So the two women get to talking. And at first, the wife's, you know, blaming blaming this young woman, but then they they chat and they realize that it all the blame really lies with her husband that
16:42 Kate Lister? Well, quite like that.
16:44 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's very interesting because she says, you know, he, I can't believe that this Bolshevik who should be respecting you, you know, he believed in the revolution, and here he is exploiting you. She ends up identifying with the woman as really basically no different than herself, that she's only economically secure because she's married. And this woman is not married and had lost her job. And so they they they end up going to the Jeannat D'Elle office, which is the office of kind of women's affairs, where the Bolsheviks, you know, will serve women's needs. And they they part the the story ends a sort of, and we parted as sisters. So there's this real emphasis on women's equality and
17:25 Speaker 02 that that, you know, economic need is really the only thing sort of separating maybe women who aren't in the sex trade and women who are.
17:33 Kate Lister? See, again, there's so much in that that that's very progressive. I'm just it's like, it's like, you know, I can see all the working out, but you've just arrived at the wrong. Solution there, that's what's hap- but you mentioned marriage there, that's an interesting subject. So if they've got this idea that everyone has a job and then there'll be no need for anyone to sell sex, no one will want to buy sex anyway because they're all good Bolsheviks, how does marriage figure into this?
17:59 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's complicated. So along with this ideology of equality comes also the sort of free love movement in the 1920s, like a real reduction in, you know, any sexual mores. So I think the other idea is that it's way less taboo to have, you know, sex before marriage or things like that. So people assume there will just be less purchasing of sex because of that, because of the loosening kind of social restrictions on relationships between the men and women prior to marriage.
18:32 Kate Lister? And were there loosening relationships?
18:33 Speaker 02 Yeah, definitely. There definitely were.
18:35 Kate Lister? Wow. So they had a bit of a sexual revolution of their own?
18:39 Speaker 02 Yeah, very much so. Yeah, the 20s are a really kind of wild time in Soviet Russia.
18:45 Kate Lister? So we've got to talk about the man with the moustache because, you know, we have like the Bolsheviks and Lenin and they had these ideas and it's progressive, but then it's kind of like, oh, it's not. And then Stalin.
18:56 Speaker 02 Yeah, he kind of ends the party. Yeah. Yeah. So.
19:01 Kate Lister? Tell me about that.
19:02 Speaker 02 You know, as, as the 20s progress, as the revolution kind of isn't fulfilling all the promises that people thought, by the time you get to the late 1920s, you have this kind of turn, return towards conservatism. And along with that, for example, they dissolve the Geanat Diel, which is the organization, you know, devoted, their whole job is to promote communism amongst women and women's equality. They totally dissolve it. They send Alexandra Kalantai as a diplomat outside of the Soviet Union so that she won't, you know, bother them. And when Stalin comes to power, they first off claim that they
19:42 Speaker 02 solved the problems of prostitution. And they return to a very conservative ideology of more traditional gender roles. They start having pro-natalist policies so that there's a lot more babies. Women are still expected again to work outside of the home. They're still required to do that. But then that double burden really starts taking, you know, especially stronghold on women and that continues really to the present day.
20:08 Kate Lister? They are tired.
20:09 Speaker 02 Yeah.
20:09 Kate Lister? We are tired.
20:10 Speaker 02 Yeah, for sure.
20:11 Kate Lister? Okay, so that's interesting. So there's a move, a swing back towards conservatism, even within Marxist communism itself. What did that look like? So you said that they dissolved the Institute for Women, but like on the ground, what did that look like? I mean, was it sort of an end to this? You described it as a period of free love.
20:34 Speaker 02 Yeah, the Nep period is over. They, they're done. You start having, you know, really traumatic policies like collectivization, the purges are starting. You have much more authoritarianism than existed in the 1920s and much stricter enforcement of anything that would be outside of the sort of acceptable ideologies. So sex workers become viewed rather than sort of as victims of capitalism, which they were in the 20s. They become threats to the state. They are dissidents, they're dangerous. They don't believe in the values of the revolution. They've refused to participate. So they are often arrested, they're sent to labor camps
21:18 Speaker 02 for rehabilitation. They may or may not come back from those. They're expelled from urban centers. Of course, that doesn't mean sex work isn't happening in provinces. It is for sure. But there's much more authoritarianism and punitive treatment of not just sex workers, but anybody who's kind of deemed, you know, not participating fully in the communist vision.
21:46 Kate Lister? I'll be back with Emily after this short break.
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22:39 Kate Lister? So there's been a shift then from viewing people selling sex as like as victims and as sisters, as you said, that film said, into now they're a direct threat, now they're a problem that needs to be attacked.
22:55 Speaker 02 They're seen really as a threat to the nation, like the whole survival depends on.
22:59 Kate Lister? They can't win, can they?
23:01 Speaker 02 Yeah.
23:01 Kate Lister? Why do you think that they had such a focus on sex work again? Because they could have, there's many, many of the things that they could have picked on and had to go out. Like they could have gone after teachers, they could have gone after chefs. Why sex work?
23:16 Speaker 02 You know, I think, and this is what I focus on a lot in my work, is that the sex worker becomes symbolic of anybody who's sort of refusing to follow the rules, especially women, because they operate outside. And even though they're, you know, can arguably be sort of victims of the patriarchy, they very much are also sort of in ways liberating themselves from it, working outside of it. They're not following the rules. They're not serving their role often as, you know, promoting the family and they are seen as labor shirkers. So all of these, all of these things, so focus on them gets concentrated as sort of a symbol of everything, everybody,
23:59 Speaker 02 even who's sort of against the Soviet regime.
24:02 Kate Lister? Did they pass laws this time?
24:04 Speaker 02 No, there's still no laws.
24:05 Kate Lister? Still no?
24:06 Speaker 02 No, there's no laws because of course, if they, again, if they have a law, then that means it exists. And so there's a lot of denial that it exists. There's some work that Siobhan Hearn has done in the archives. It shows these very kind of delicate conversations that leaders of the party have to have by sort of like, well, what do we do about this? That we know is happening, but we can't admit it's happening because that would admit that we've failed because they promised that they would end this. Exploit what they viewed, you know, officially as exploitation.
24:35 Kate Lister? So how are they talking about, because you said there that women are being rounded up and sent to re-education camps, maybe they don't come back. How is that happening if they're still officially pretending that there's nothing to see here at all?
24:46 Speaker 02 Well, it just, I mean, that happens on the ground. It happens again through laws that aren't explicitly about sex work. So you might not see that in the archive. Women might be arrested again for like hooliganism or violating the internal passport laws of being found in a city where they don't have a legal right to live in. So there's other ways that they deal with this that are, you know, outside of the, the actual kind of legal charge of selling sex.
25:16 Kate Lister? I see. I suppose, and they're just viewed as, I suppose, just general enemies of the state.
25:21 Speaker 02 Yes.
25:22 Kate Lister? And I suppose, like, maybe, maybe there was, I don't, you correct me if I'm wrong, but there's, I did like, you can arrest one woman for prostitution. And then it's like, oh, she's the enemy of the state. She's terrible. But you can still kind of pretend that nobody else is doing it.
25:33 Speaker 02 Right, exactly.
25:34 Kate Lister? Because we've just got this, this, just a few here.
25:36 Speaker 02 It's just an isolated thing, yeah.
25:38 Kate Lister? Right?
25:38 Speaker 02 Exactly.
25:39 Kate Lister? Oh, so this being the case, and if people, they're talking very carefully about it in the records. How do we, as historians, understand what's going on if there's this sort of blanket silence?
25:52 Speaker 02 There isn't a lot of understanding of what happens in that period from really the 1930s to the 1980s. Because all conversation about sex, all representations of sex work, it's all banned from the cultural sphere.
26:07 Kate Lister? Wow, okay.
26:08 Speaker 02 People can't write about it. Journalists can't report about it. It's, it's all, it's all under censorship. So we know it exists because some historians have found evidence in the archives. But largely, we don't know a lot about that period because it essentially disappears from any sort of public discourse until we get to Perestroika in the 1980s. And then it all comes flooding out and we, we sort of learn a lot.
26:32 Kate Lister? What about the Second World War? Because, I mean, every nation, every single nation had to grapple with sex and then, you know, the frontline and the resulting syphilis. They didn't want to talk about it, but they knew very well that their soldiers, that they, you know, they're going to be facing a machine gun the next day. They might nip out to a brothel the night before. How did that? What did they do in Russia? Are they still pretending that this isn't happening?
26:57 Speaker 02 I think they kind of turned the other way. They know what's happening. There is a kind of a relaxation of a lot of the authoritarianism during the war because everybody's trying to survive. I mean, Soviet Russia is and the Soviet Union, you know, Ukraine, all these countries are just overrun and there's a lot of leeway for things that are happening during that time. So there's not a lot kind of researched or studied about sex work during that era as much.
27:26 Kate Lister? Wow. It's just, that's just crazy. They can just like, and what, but there weren't laws passed saying you can't talk about it. It was just a culture of silence and denial.
27:37 Speaker 02 Yeah, there was a real culture of silence and denial around sex in general, not even illicit sex. And then
27:44 Kate Lister? I'm with you.
27:45 Speaker 02 There was all, and then in official, in official publications, there were censors.
27:50 Kate Lister? This sounds like it was a really dangerous time for somebody to be selling sex.
27:54 Speaker 02 Um, yeah, for sure. You were, you know, this, so it is and it isn't that because there's no law against it, that you could often kind of get away with it. You could, as we find out in the eighties, when it, you, the censorship is removed and you can't talk about, there's a lot of bribery. There's, there's a whole black market that's developing in, especially after World War Two, as people are in economic need, as the country is rebuilding. So a huge black market develops and, and it operates in that sphere.
28:25 Kate Lister? Tell me about the In-Tourist girls. Who are they?
28:28 Speaker 02 Yeah, so the Soviet Union has basically a sort of a travel agency that's run by the government called the In-Tourist and they plan all of the foreigner travel that's coming to the Soviet Union. And there's hotels that are called Intourist Hotels and those foreigners pay in hard currency. And this was a very important financial stream for a government that really needed foreign money, but didn't have other ways to necessarily get it. So at these Intourist Hotels, you had foreigners that would be coming to the Soviet Union and you had women who would go into these hotels and sell sex. And they were in demand.
29:11 Speaker 02 And there's a very famous movie that comes out in nineteen eighty-nine called Inter Girl, Inter Divska, that's based on a novel that was written by Vladimir Kunin in nineteen eighty-eight. That becomes, it's the most popular movie in the Soviet Union in nineteen eighty-nine. And it tells the story of a woman who by day is working as a nurse. She's a good Soviet citizen, working as a nurse. Her mom is a teacher. And, and then by night, she goes and serves foreign clients in the Intourist Hotel in Saint Petersburg. And the film is supposed to be this very didactic message because she, she ends up marrying a man from Sweden, goes to Sweden, she's totally miserable.
29:52 Speaker 02 Her mom doesn't know she's working as a prostitute, but she eventually finds out and kills herself. Then, then. Oh, wow, okay. And then Tanya is the main character. She's in Sweden, she has a sort of premonition about her mom. And so she drives, she's driving back to Saint Petersburg to see her, her mother. And she dies in, in a car accident on like a rain slicked road. Bleak. It's very bleak, but this is common in, in literary and filmmaking narratives about sex work. So this is supposed to be the message, like, look at this woman. She gave up her Soviet ideals, she left the country and now she's dead and so is her good mother.
30:30 Speaker 02 And the problem was, was that these women in the film that they portray have the best clothing and they're super fashionable and they have the, you know, I mean, it's the eighties. So big hair and great makeup and lame dresses and, you know, they all are the height of fashion. And so people are watching this and the message they get, this is how we get back to that survey of like a third of teenagers wanting to do this because. They could have all the things that people were, especially by the nineteen eighties, really, really wanting. A lot of these just basic kinda uh uh things that were available in the West and being desired by a Westerner elevated these women also because at the
31:15 Speaker 02 time, anything from the West was considered as just, you know, like really, really desirable. And these women were making really good money. And uh in nineteen eighty seven, they do finally pass a law against prostitution, but it's an it's um called an administrative offense. So it's basically just a fine and it's a hundred rubles, but a a sex worker could charge a hundred rubles per client. So the fee becomes sort of nominal. It doesn't really do much to deter sex work. And of course, they could bribe police officers and all these things that were tasked even with enforcing that. So you see a decline even in trying
31:55 Speaker 02 to enforce that law because everybody by the late nineteen eighties is really struggling economically. Female unemployment has spiked as peristriaea moves on, something like eighty five percent of the jobs lost are female jobs, are women in the workforce. Yeah, there's again, a kind of resurgence of like, the economy's not good, people have to be laid off, women can be taken care of, so they'll be the first to go. And men were prioritized for keeping their jobs.
32:25 Kate Lister? But if you go to a hotel and if you meet with one of these terrorists, you can get a fur coat.
32:32 Speaker 02 Exactly, exactly. And that's exactly what the the intergirl movie shows. She buys a she buys her mom a fur coat. She says like her Swedish fiance bought it, but she bought it with her money that she earns and she has. And and they show her job as a nurse is just like total monotony and she she doesn't have really access to anything that she she can't really afford any luxuries. And when she's working as a sex worker, she's in the nicest restaurants and the beautiful hotels and nice clothes. And so the didactic message didn't really work.
33:03 Kate Lister? No, that did not. That whatever whatever meeting was was that.
33:08 Speaker 02 Did not work.
33:09 Kate Lister? To to get them did not work. They did not think that one through. You you mentioned hard currency there a couple of times. What do you mean by hard currency? And why was that important?
33:19 Speaker 02 Yeah, so foreign currency was basically called hard currency, dollars, you know, anything coming from from the West. And the ruble is is not worth as much. And so the federal government in the Soviet Union is really needing this hard currency. They use it to fund the government operations, to fund the social safety net, you know, all this sort of stuff. And they need this money and the In tourists Hotels are a big source of that.
33:49 Kate Lister? I'll be back with Emily after this short break.
34:01 Kate Lister? Hello, Betwixters. I am jumping in here because I have some very exciting news. Betwixt the Sheets has set up camp on YouTube. That's right, it took us a while, but we are there now. So if you are the kind of person who likes to see your podcasts as well as hear your podcasts, you can now go and find us right there. And the link is in the show notes. And please remember to like and subscribe because the people in charge of the money really do like that. Right, let's get on with it.
34:42 Kate Lister? I mean, the government can't have been thrilled about this. Were these were these women being monitored doing this? Or was it, again, we're turning a blind eye?
34:51 Speaker 02 Uh, sort of both. They they knew about it, but they turned a blind eye. It, you know, sort of served their interests. There's a very cynical short story that's written by an author named Mikhail Uspensky called The Ministry of Easy Behavior. And it's this skewering of the Soviet bureaucracy. And it's a short story that describes the Soviet bureaucracy sort of taking over the prostitution industry. And it's satirizing the fact that in some ways, the government, which is running these In tourists Hotels, which they know are filled with prostitutes, is already sort of, in a way, funding sort of state run prostitution.
35:33 Kate Lister? Yeah. Oh, I'm getting it. Alright, so we're kind of in, in the 1980s by now. When did you say that survey was done of school kids? That's wild.
35:44 Speaker 02 Yeah, in 1990, so just before the collapse of the Soviet Union. You have people that are, you know, really in desperate need economically. There's worries about what their futures look like. There's a lot of cynicism at this point about the Soviet system. The promise of the revolution is, it's like, obviously not happening at this point, right? We're well in decades beyond that. And it's no longer working, especially with the younger generation, to say like, you know, keep working in these really difficult jobs, keep having sort of poor housing conditions, and we're gonna get there, we're gonna get to the paradise. Because people by that time are so cynical. And there's a lot of, again, like that satirist I mentioned,
36:29 Speaker 02 but there's other literature that's coming out that kind of describes the Soviet life in general as like, almost everybody is sort of a prostitute in some way, because you have to make all these compromises by purchasing things on the black market, by sort of pretending to believe in the, in the cause still. And so this becomes a metaphor for this period of volatility.
36:50 Kate Lister? And these are the ideal breeding grounds for people turning to sex work, turning to other ways to make money. Because it's, this is, it's the number one motivator for sex work, isn't it? Is poverty, basically.
37:04 Speaker 02 Yeah.
37:05 Kate Lister? So it doesn't, it doesn't go anywhere. This isn't a success. What, but are people talking about it in this kind of stage of like, sort of the late Soviet decline? Do we still have this clampdown of like, we're just not gonna talk about it anymore?
37:17 Speaker 02 Yeah, so you have the policies of Glasnost and Perestroika that Gorbachev brings in that, remove all the censorship. His ideal is like, we're just gonna let it all come out, and people are gonna realize that if we now can talk about all this stuff, that communism is the real solution, and they're gonna recommit to the cause. And that doesn't really happen. People start learning like, oh, wait, we do have like, all these problems with alcoholism and domestic violence and... Sex work and economic issues and people had been shielded from that by all the censorship. And so all of this terrible stuff comes out and it's a very hard period for people. There's a genre of art at the time, especially film called Chernucha movement, which means the the the blackening is how it's literally translated.
38:03 Speaker 02 But movies and books at this time are all steeped in just the trauma of the period, the trauma of Soviet life. And of course, the prostitute fits in very well there as a as a protagonist because she allows authors to really explore this. Journalists are fascinated by this. They especially profile the intergirls, the women working in tourist hotels in the it's sort of like they're sort of meant to be morally condemning, but they're also very voyeuristic and very sort of like, oh, but now we get to go into these hotels that regular Soviet citizens can't go into. They're not even allowed to really go into them. And so it's very voyeuristic. So it's talked about a lot. It's very prevalent in kind of all spheres of culture at this point.
38:48 Kate Lister? How is the figure of the sex worker generally spoken about then? So if you like, look at like the 19th century across a lot of Europe, you get this obsession with this fallen woman, which is equally as voyeuristic in its own way of like, we're gonna obsess about it, but like, we feel so sorry for her. It's really sad.
39:02 Speaker 02 Yeah.
39:03 Kate Lister? And then like, it sounds like what you're saying, like in the early forms of Bolshevism, again, it's this like, she's a victim and we're gonna help you. We're gonna pull you up by your bootstraps. Now, what's happening in late stage? Is she a good time girl? Is like, what's going on?
39:16 Speaker 02 You know, I like to say she's kind of revered and reviled, so.
39:20 Kate Lister? That sounds about right.
39:21 Speaker 02 Yeah, so in the 20s, right? You have the same fallen woman trope, whereas in the 19th century, it's this sort of man that comes and saves her. In the 20s, it's supposed to be the state. The Bolsheviks are coming to save you. Communism will save you. By the time we get to like Tanya, the intergirl, there's no state to save her. She's very much like, nobody is gonna save her. And so people morally, it's totally condemned. It's not considered okay by people to do this. But at the same time, people are sympathetic. They understand the challenges that everybody is facing, which are.
39:55 Speaker 02 Driving these choices and even if people aren't selling sex, a lot of them are, you know, buying stuff on the black market or other things that might be morally questionable. And so there's on some level, a lot of sympathy also for what's going on. And as I mentioned, just a little bit of sort of jealousy, like, oh, wait, hold on. Like, they get all the stuff, you know, that we see now that the West has become more open. People start seeing all the stuff that's available to them under capitalism and, and, you know, understandably so, they, they would like some of those, those luxuries.
40:30 Kate Lister? And what about when communism finally fell in Russia, then, then what happened?
40:36 Speaker 02 Things get pretty, pretty bad in the nineteen nineties and you have a lot of economic despair. And so prostitution, sex work really is, is thriving during that time largely out of need to survive. There's high unemployment, all kinds of problems. And you also get this reassertion of the patriarchy. And this is kind of, the nineties sort of culminate with the election of, of Putin. And he's sort of the ultimate symbol of that reassertion of the patriarchy. And so there's a lot of films during this time that portray the mafia. That Chernucha movement is very vibrant of just showing how difficult life is.
41:15 Speaker 02 Women working in the sex industry are kind of ubiquitous and they're shown in film really as kind of accessories to men. There are a little less, there's less sort of sympathy towards them a little bit at this time. If in the eighties, it was the Western men who desired these women that made them desirable. There's this effort in the nineteen nineties, at least in, in film, to show that it's now Russian men who can afford to buy them and can afford to purchase nice clothing for them. So you get this rise of sort of the nouveau riche and, and these mafia men. And, and it's a nationalistic kind of portrayal of now Russian men are occupying the, the patriarchal spot
41:58 Speaker 02 of being able to, to hire, you know, desirable Russian women and pay for sex. So as a final question then.
42:05 Kate Lister? Just to bring it right up to modern day, what is the state of sex work and sexual labour in Russia? So that's a huge question. But what I'm asking is, is it legal? Is it regulated? Is it still ignored? What's going on today?
42:18 Speaker 02 It is still just an administrative offence. So again, a fine.
42:22 Kate Lister? Administrative offence.
42:23 Speaker 02 It's still just a fine. So there is a pretty vibrant sex industry in Russia today. It really is in many ways, again, it's not officially condoned. It's seen as morally not acceptable, but it's pretty available to find. And the government kind of turns the other cheek to it.
42:45 Kate Lister? Emily, you have been wonderful to talk to. Thank you so much for joining us. If people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you?
42:52 Speaker 02 Yes, I'm a professor at San Diego State University, so you can find me there.
42:56 Kate Lister? Thank you so much. You've just been magnificent.
42:59 Speaker 02 Thank you, Kate. It's really a pleasure to talk with you.
43:04 Kate Lister? Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Emily for joining us. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to like, review and follow along wherever it is you get your podcasts. Coming up, we have got episodes on the truth about Pablo Picasso, spoiler, he was a prick, and another about the scandalous Queen Caroline of Brunswick, all coming your way. And if you would like us to explore a subject, or if you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us at [email protected] . This podcast was edited by Tim Arstall and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Freddy Chick. Join me again, Betwixt the Sheet, The History of Sex, Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.
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