Exploring Russia's Sexual Revolution

“It’s pornukha* all over the place,” snaps a sixtyish babushka near Moscow’s Sokol metro. “You can’t even take a walk with your grandson.”

She is talking about the sex-laden ads emblazoned on Moscow billboards. Half-naked women sell everything from cell phones to faxes, from latex paint to shoes. This in a country where, 10 years ago, billboards rarely experimented beyond communist slogans or uplifting images of healthy proletarians.

Make no mistake about it: Russia is in the throes of a Sexual Revolution.

To Igor Kon, Russia’s leading sexologist, the tastelessness seen regarding sexuality, which such billboards represent, is an inevitable cost of this social revolution, that, he said, “is just a continuation of the hidden processes of the 1960s and 1970s ... The only thing we know is that simply imposing bans is not efficient. One needs to look for something else. As to the negative costs, we all see them.”

Valery Kommissarov, host of the popular TV talk show Moya Semya (“My Family”), sees a hidden danger: Russians are very prone to believe whatever they see or hear. “It is important to take into account cultural traditions,” he said. “Go and tell the electorate that, to revive our economy, you need to make coconut combine harvesters and grow coconuts on the moon. They would believe it ... It’s the same thing with these posters and billboards. The main thing is to develop the culture of family and interpersonal relations. Then these exaggerations we see in commercials and billboards will be taken calmly as just another fact of life, just another poster.”

Of course, there is also the traffic danger. The GAI [Russian traffic police], has said it sees increases in auto accidents when risqué billboards pop up. So the GAI have taken to setting up permanent posts near the most “notorious” billboard sites. Who could blame them?

But who will draw the line between tasteful and vulgar? And how can it be regulated? For now, there is no legislation covering cleavage in advertising. There is only a toothless law on pornography passed by the Duma last year which does not regulate advertising.

On television, there are at least some restrictions. Helena Hanga must air her show Pro Eto (“About It”) after midnight on the NTV channel. NTV advertises Hanga as “the only person who doesn’t flush when she speaks about It.” But, in fact, even Hanga has often looked embarrassed at her guests’ outspoken discussions.

What is behind this new boldness? Sergei Yevteev, a Moscow sexologist, perhaps summed it up best. “For many of those of the younger and even middle-aged generation in Russia, it is a sort of national self-assertion – a belated replacement for the Bolshoi ballet or the first Soviet man in space if you will. They are simply proud to show off the fact that sex in Russia is no longer a taboo. In terms of sexual maturity, Russia can now be compared to the teen who is desperate to show that he is a big guy, that he knows it all. And to show this off, he often indulges in cynicism about sex as a means to prove himself.”

Hence, said St. Petersburg sexologist Lev Scheglov in Komsomolskaya Pravda, the overwhelmingly violent nature of Russian sex, particularly as it is portrayed in Russian movies. “It’s hard for a German or an Italian to fathom the Russian proverb, ‘he beats, then he loves,’” Scheglov said. But such masochistic trends, he said, are typical of Russian sex culture.

Love knows no age

This Revolution is not just for the young, however. Economic and political changes in recent years have eased housing conditions for many. Those who came of age in kommunalkas are eager to make up for lost time. Not long ago, sex after 50 was frowned upon; sex was only acceptable for procreation, not recreation. Now, private men’s health clinics have been sprouting up like mushrooms after a rainstorm, and they are seeing huge influxes of over-50 clients.

“Rank and file elderly patients think there is no honor in quitting so early,” said one urologist at the popular Guskov Clinic in Moscow. Maria Nikolaeva, marketing manager for ON-Clinic concurred. “In the past,” she said, “the first thing which came to mind when you saw a sexually active elderly man chasing women was, ‘Shame on you, it’s time to think about your soul.’” But now retired men are being told by doctors that a passive sex life may be a contributing factor in Russian males’ low life expectancy and are urging patients to adopt a new approach. Food supplements and new drugs, including Viagra, are gaining in popularity.

These changing attitudes, by the way, help explain why the sexual proclivities of the fifty-something President Clinton have garnered such huge support among Russian women. There are two factors at work, said Igor Kon. On the one hand, Russians don’t respect interference in one’s private life and therefore regard Clinton as “a young, attractive president being harassed by the press and legislators.” Second, and most importantly, Kon said, Russian women stand by Clinton because “they are simply tired of their drunken, impotent husbands.” Indeed. Comedienne Yelena Stepanenko recently quipped, “If only our Boris Nikolaevich [Yeltsin] could come up with a similar liaison, we would all gladly vote him into a third term.”

So it is that the virility of Russian leaders is becoming a factor in politics. Take Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, a well-known teetotaler and frontrunner for the 2000 presidential race. He plays in public soccer matches and dives into ice holes in sub-zero weather as if to emphasize his good health. But his or other leaders’ sexual health is not spoken of publicly. But presumptions are made. “When he is sitting next to his young wife and two little kids, while people know his eldest son is forty-something,” said Inna Alesina, of the Russian Association Family Planning, “of course, this is understood. And people like it. Nobody has any problems or irritation with this side of Luzhkov.”

Valery Kommissarov agrees. “After all,” he said. “The state is just a big family which also has its head – the president. So it’s obvious that, if the family head can’t do anything, it’s hard for the wife to bring up children in such a situation. I am not talking just about sexual potential, but also about financial possibilities, for it is all interconnected ... Since women account for the majority of our electorate, [it is an important factor that] they vote for the most sexually attractive man. By the way, Yeltsin also once had this attractive, macho side when, still robust, he uttered his famous thunderous ‘ponimayesh’ (‘you know’).”

“Oh, those Russians ...”

Interestingly, Russia’s allegedly “new” sexual freedom is really a return to a well-forgotten past. According to Natalya Pushkareva, leading research fellow at the Russian Academy of Ethnology and Anthropology and author of Women in Russian History, Russia’s liberal views on sexuality should be traced back to pagan times. “Regulation of sexual life only began after the baptism of Russia [in the year 988],” Pushkareva said. “Prior to that, it was all sort of played by ear. People were guided by their common sense regarding what is healthy, what is allowed and what is not.”

For instance, the pagan holiday Ivan Kupala (“Day of John the Baptist,” celebrated June 24, and which replaced the ritual of the Summer Solstice, tied to the water god Kupala) was full of erotic rituals. Russians would engage in so-called marriages and weddings near water reservoirs, rivers or lakes. In May and June Russians would bathe and swim and, in the process, choose their future marital partner. It was all very open and consensual. Men and women chose one another if they felt a mutual attraction; then relatives would give them what they needed to start a new life on their own.

After Kievan Rus was baptized, the Orthodox Church stepped in to regulate the sexual life of parishioners, from peasants to princes. Penitential books were used to mete out religious punishments for sexually-related sins.

“That sexual life was very active,” said Pushkareva, “is plain to see from the singular fact that the pages in the Penitentials that dealt with sexual sins are all rubbed out. So it is clear that priests looked those sins up quite often.” But the Church went overboard. “It was forbidden to have sexual relations on Wednesday night, on Thursday and Friday,” Pushkareva said. “Or Saturday night for that matter. Or on any religious holidays … At the end of the day, people had virtually no opportunity left to even maintain normal, conjugal relations … Of course, nobody obeyed all these rules … they sinned and then would repent to the priests in confession, and the priest would give them their penance (like intense praying and bowing, fasting plus some other, self-imposed restrictions).”

In old Rus, sexual life also began at a very early age. Foreign visitors made a point to mention this fact. The Church allowed marriage as early as age 12. But, in fact, sexual awareness began much earlier, given the close, communal quarters of peasant society.

Russian traditions of hygiene were also a factor. Public baths have been a popular Russian institution since at least the 10th century. And there were no separate baths for men and women – after the steambath (banya), bathers would run out naked and throw themselves into the cold snow. Such practices were true only of lower classes of society, however. “Amongst the princes, the boyars and the tsars,” Pushkareva said, “it was all different, mores were very rigid. Each house had a special men’s and women’s section and men were not allowed into the women’s section.” Indeed, prudishness in the upper classes disallowed the representation of naked human bodies in any form whatsoever.

The reforms of Peter the Great brought some relaxation of social and sexual mores among the nobility. Some attitudes toward the human body changed. Faces were shaved, cleavage became acceptable and, even more daring for Russia, women could show all the hair on their heads. In fact, by the mid- to late-18th century, it became frowned upon in society circles to not have a lover. “Promiscuity,” said Pushkareva, “was the norm for the male noble. Hence Pushkin’s numerous love affairs..” But this promiscuity was still paired with a prudishness when it came to education. “Even mothers didn’t teach their daughters anything.” Pushkareva noted. “This was considered to be base, filthy, worthy only of animals.”

Meanwhile, the more simple, straightforward practices of peasants and lower classes remained little changed. Folk wisdom and practices passed on information about sexual techniques, natural contraception, menstrual cycles and midwife-induced miscarriages. The lower classes were also more “liberated” sexually. Special wedding wishes found in folklore mention the need to guarantee not just the man’s, but also the woman’s sexual satisfaction.

First: join the komsomol!

Come the Bolshevik revolution, sexual attitudes changed radically. At first, there was an attempt to romanticize the erotic side of love. The famous Bolshevik diplomat Alexandra Kollontai (who had many affairs with her Bolshevik comrades-in-arms) touted “free love” and her now-famous “glass of water” theory. Satisfying one’s sexual desire, Kollontai said, should be “as easy as drinking a glass of water.” In her book Road to Winged Eros, Kollontai claimed that women, who had been humiliated for centuries, need three men in their lives: one for the mind, one for the heart, and one for the body. In 1926, Panteleymon Romanov’s book “Without Cheryomukha” (a romantic name for a Russian cherry, meaning emotional love) emphasized the physiological side of love. Meanwhile, a Family Code adopted in 1918 allowed free dissolution of marriages (and no longer required that they be registered to be valid), proclaimed total equality of men and women, and led the way, in 1920, to the legalization (and free provision of) abortion.

But this window of liberalism was soon shut. The Bolsheviks, who had first based many of their social policies on a reaction to Church conservatism, gradually became more conservative. As Pushkareva writes in her book, “the revolutionary ‘socialist experiment’ became mired in a rigid, conservative ideology, and the radical, self-denying party leadership of the pre-revolutionary period transmuted itself into a conformist, self-indulgent bureaucracy.” The State’s goal of total control of all aspects of individuals’ lives was felt even in this most private of areas. Starting in the mid-1930s, new laws made divorce more difficult, outlawed abortion (and even gave doctors performing abortion labor camp sentences). Marriages now had to be registered to be legal, a tax was imposed on childlessness and the government outlawed any discussion of sexuality in the press. Needless to say, contraceptives were nonexistent and midwives, with what valued folk knowledge they had, were regarded as members of “retarded sects.”

In pre-revolutionary times, the Church had prescribed chastity before marriage. Now the komsomol and schools picked up the baton, advocating abstinence, but with the power of the State behind the policy. If a teenage girl became pregnant, it was not uncommon for a school to call in a gynecologist to verify the virginity of the other female students. As a reflection of these mores, a Soviet joke asked, “What is the similarity between a Zaporozhets (a cheap car made in Ukraine) and a pregnant graduate student? Both are the shame of the family.” But, as in pre-revolutionary times, these conservative policies were not paired with education. In the late 1920s and 1930s, sexuality was not discussed publicly, or even much privately.

Sexuality was to be sublimated to the interests of society, to the building of communism. An idealized view of marriage was constructed. As Vadim Rozin writes in his new book, Love and Sexuality, “In the communist model of marriage, economic and legal relations were replaced by cooperation and high moral standards. The family life of Karl Marx was the unattainable ideal: he carried his passionate, romantic love for Jenny von Westfallen his entire life, he had a family with numerous children, there was mutual help and cooperation between spouses and a unity of views and ideals.”

The literature of the era bolstered this romanticized view of love. In his poem Pro Eto (“About It,”  from which the TV program derives its name), Vladimir Mayakovsky (himself embroiled in a complicated love triangle) asked rhetorically, “So what, shall we replace love with tea and sock-patching?!”

Mayakovsky also wrote in his famous, staircase style:

Like parents

like children,

hey!

we can do it too

they’re boasting all,

And engage in

love-making

before even

joining the komsomol.

Loyal to the communist ideals of love, Mayakovsky proposed tying together men and women with one unifying word: “comrade,” burying this outdated social institution we call “family.”

Soviet poet Stepan Schipachev later set the mood for the Soviet generation of the 1950s and 1960s when he wrote his famous line: “Love is not about sighs on a bench or walks under the moon.” What he meant was that true love under socialism was not about sweet or sugary romanticism, but rather about self-immolation, abnegation and common work towards shared ideals. Any love failing to meet these high moral standards was merely meshchanstvo (“bourgeois shallowness”).

“No sex in the USSR!”

This idealized public attitude prevailed until the late 1980s. In fact, in a famous perestroika episode, a female participant in a USSR-USA TV Bridge, hosted by Vladimir Pozner, declared: “There is no sex in the USSR.”

“Of course we did have sex and engendered children,” Inna Alesina offered. “But it was not proper to speak about it officially. To say that someone fell in love with another because of his looks or sexual attractiveness was not the right thing to do. One could fall in love with a woman if, say, she exceeded her production norm many times over by working on 25 machines simultaneously ... Of course, I am exaggerating deliberately, but such was the trend.”

“Then perestroika and glasnost began,” Alesina continued, “and an avalanche of information poured out. Pioneer and komsomol organizations were quickly abolished. I am not saying they were great, but after they got rid of them, they didn’t offer anything in their stead. Kids were abandoned to the mercy of fate and shown sex and violence everywhere. So our adolescents embraced sex in a big way. This is not to say that pre-marital sex didn’t exist in the Soviet era, but now it has become more accessible. In the 1990s, all hell broke loose ...”

The social and medical effects have been as might be predicted. Sexually-transmitted diseases (STDs) are spreading at pandemic rates. Syphilis grew by a factor of 20 between 1992 and 1997, and by a factor of 60-70 among those under 19. It is estimated that 15-20% of couples are sterile  because of untreated or improperly treated STDs.

The government did take some action, however. In 1993, a federal family planning program was passed and financed through 1997. Over 200 family planning centers were opened nationwide. Staff at the centers required special training. This was because, Alesina said, “our health students never studied the issues of contraception and family planning. The only thing we knew about were IUDs or ‘coitus interruptus.’ Now our health workers at least know about hormonal contraceptives, etc.”

The centers provided informational support in the form of videos and brochures. “We also sold contraceptives at a discount in every Russian region,” Alesina said. “Some people received these contraceptives free of charge or at a huge discount – this included adolescents under 19, women with several children, women with handicapped children. The abortion rate declined by almost 30%.”

Enter the Duma

The family planning centers, according to the Russian Ministry of Health, were almost the only government health program offering tangible results in the mid-1990s. Nonetheless, an effort arose in the communist-dominated Duma to shut down the centers. Alesina said the movement was spurred by an anti-abortion faction and scapegoating when population figures started showing falling birth rates in 1997. The centers were portrayed by some, Alesina said, as part of a conspiracy financed by the US government to bring about the extinction of the Russian nation.

“To interpret our plummeting birthrate as a result of family planning is complete rubbish,” Alesina said. “Statistics show that in Denmark, Finland and Sweden, 77% of women use some form of birth control. And their birth rate is 1.7-1.8 [live births per thousand]. In Russia, after some progress, still just 24% of women use contraceptives, but our birth rate is lower [than in Scandinavia]. So, paradoxically, it turns out that, the more you use contraception, the higher your birth rate. The main reason for our declining birth rate is the unstable situation in Russia. People are scared to have babies.”

Nonetheless, hard-line deputies went on the offensive. Yekaterina Lyakhova, leader of the Women of Russia faction and a supporter of the family planning programs, was rudely accused of countless indiscretions. The media stepped into the fray. The communist-leaning Sovetskaya Rossiya published vitriolic letters like that signed by 1108 workers from Nizhny Tagil: “Do all you can to stop state financing of the activities of the Russian Association of Family Planning, the programs of birth control and perversion of children and our youth, the implementation of the project “Sex Education for Russian School Students!” Do all you can to stop perversion and murder of our children.”

The Duma did. Federal financing for the family planning centers was ended; in 1998 there was no special budget item for the centers. These sums were shifted to the “Safe Motherhood” program, administered by the Health Ministry. How this money can or will be used is as yet unknown. But for now, Alesina reported, all the family planning centers continue to operate.

Ignorance is bliss

School sex education programs have faired no better. A 1997 plan to put in place a program (the afore-mentioned Sex Education for Russian School Students) for Russian schools relied on collaboration between UNESCO and the Russian Ministry of Education. But, unfortunately, the decision makers relied too heavily on Dutch experience, which did not translate well in Russia. Some very indiscreet questionnaires were distributed to 11 and 12 year old students, providing critics with plenty of grist for their mill.

“People were, quite naturally, indignant,” Alesina noted. “I can say that if my kids received such a questionnaire at the age of 11, I would also make a fuss. The opposition took advantage of this and started making a stink. The Prosecutor’s Office looked into it and had some battles with the Ministry of Education, but found no grounds for criminal investigation. But on the heels of this, they banned everything! So the kids continue their sexual lives without any information.”

Add to this price increases (2-300%) on contraceptives as a result of the financial crisis, and, Alesina says, the abortion rate is bound to rise again. “If people have to choose between buying milk and bread or a condom, they are simply forced to use old, less-safe methods of contraception. Because you can’t cancel sex. It’s pointless.”

Alesina is also under no illusions about future legislative action. “Unfortunately,” she said, “many of our deputies, just like many of our citizens, have no clue about these issues. When you say to them ‘family planning,’ they think it’s about choosing between a girl or a boy; some think it is about performing or not performing abortions; some think it’s about sexual techniques.”

Pushkareva concurred. Many Duma deputies, she said “have obvious sexual problems and need an urgent consultation with a sexual pathologist.” Hence their aggressiveness towards sex education. “All revolutionaries have had sexual problems,” Pushkareva offered. “ The lives of revolutionaries and anarchists show they did not have a happy sexual life – Stalin, for instance. Revolutionary anarchist [Mikhail] Bakunin was impotent, as was Nikolai Chernyshevsky. Lenin, with his idea of making all people happy, didn’t find personal happiness for himself.”

Kon agreed. “Their sexual problems are their problems,” he said. “But what is worse is that, by prohibiting sex education, they engage in genocide of the Russian people. This has to do with AIDS. Our AIDS statistics are alarming. This is an epidemiological danger, hence the word ‘genocide.’ And the Duma tries to watch over the morality of the people. They qualified this all as an American imperialist plot. Some forces in America once qualified US sex education as a communist plot. Nobody copied from one another – it’s just the same type of mentality.”

Irina Medvedeva and Tatyana Shishova, of the Foundation for Socio-Psychological Health of the Family and the Child, said the Ministry of Education’s program “condoned” premarital sex. They offered an alternative: “Why not teach children, with the help of parents and school teachers or priests, that they should not engage in early sexual contact ...?”

Sex expert Kon dismissed the “just say no” strategy as unrealistic. “This is silly, the question is: who is the boss in the situation? It’s not like you can tell them and they will do it or not do it. It is a fact of life that today’s 16-year-old Russian girls are 5-6 times more sexually active than their mothers were and that 16-year-old boys are 2-3 times more active than their fathers ... To ask, ‘Is it good to have early sex’ is like asking, ‘Is it good to have winter?’ This is an objective reality. We have the same things here as in all other countries.”

The difference is, Kon said, that in other countries they have instilled the values of romantic love; they have a better quality of love, so to speak. “It is clear to everybody that to do It out of love is better than just for the sake of it. But then this takes time [to learn]. Sexual education doesn’t replace moral education, of course. But ours is a house in flames. We need to save the house, so we call the firefighters, but then we complain that the firefighters are not highly educated and they use swear words and they can’t preserve the architectural style of the house. But the house is burning!”

Alesina agrees. “One cannot separate sexual education from the general level of culture, moral education and a healthy lifestyle. All these issues should be interrelated. And then it will be a full-fledged, consistent program which needn’t be necessarily called ‘sex education’ – call it whatever you like. We must spread elementary knowledge of physiology and anatomy and explain how a boy differs from a girl, not only anatomically, but also psychologically ... one also needs to take into account national and regional specifics. Russia is a huge, multinational country. You can’t decree one universal program for all.”

“What’s love got to do with it?”

Certainly Russia’s Sexual Revolution has not declared a universal definition of love and how it relates to sex. But the definition is in flux. “It’s a weird thing,” Sexologist Shcheglov said, “in Soviet times nobody spoke about bed, it was believed that it didn’t mean anything. Now Russians have swung to the other extreme – that the fate of marriage is decided upon in bed. Both the former and the latter is wrong ... Today in Russia, love has a strong physical connotation, people simply don’t understand that, when two elderly people walk in the park picking up fallen red leaves, they still truly love each other. In Soviet times they enjoyed “sighs on a bench” and “sufferings under the moon.” Now it is the other way around – sex has become a merely mechanical problem ... There is no golden truth somewhere in the middle.”

Surely the debate over love and its physical and psychological components is an eternal one. But there are a few new variables. When art critic Lev Anninsky was asked whether sexology is a science enabling people to better make love, he replied: “... To make love ? .. There is something savage for me in the very notion ‘make love.’ Love is not a notion, it is a state [of the spirit], in which one sees everything in its true light ... This is what the notion of love is all about. As to Eros, this is something autonomous and independent, something outside the realm of health care ... To me, when Turgenev writes that his heroine was trembling all over [from love], this is your Eros. Trembling all over means not trembling with some parts of her body, meant for this kind of trembling. I suspect that in the West, whence this notion of ‘love-making’ came to us, the human side is hardly realized in this type of ‘making.’” Or, as Viktor Anpilov, leader of the conservative Working Russia movement put it, “Leave to us our love, and, over there, in the US or France, feel free to engage in sex.”

According to philosopher Vladimir Trostnikov, most of Russia’s ‘intellectual elite’ “would be unanimous and one way or another say that love is an ideal reflection of sexual attraction, i.e. the sublimation of sex.” But, he said, “the children of our century,” are not so sophisticated – they know nothing about love. They have “lost the habit ... of fighting with temptation, and find it hard to imagine that, for centuries and milleniums, Earth was populated by men and women who had no possibility to live a sexual life ... A modern young man, whose sensuality is being heated up by the pornography of ‘mass culture’ and who is brought up in the intransigent conviction that the main thing in life is pleasure, scorns those millions lost somewhere in human history who did not discover what his primitive mind considers to be the supreme pleasure on earth.”

Kon dismissed such ruminations. “I don’t read preachers,” he said. “Sure love and sex are two different things, ideally they coincide, but not always. It’s all simple – psychologists divide love into different types, or colors. People are different – there are as many personalities as there are types of love.”

Sex and toothpaste

Meanwhile, the popular culture continues to bombard youth and families with messages that offer no help in navigating the minefields of human sexuality “In the past,” Kommissarov noted, “we at least aspired to some ideals. Everyone wanted to be a cosmonaut; we had these sculptures featuring women with a milk paddle. Maybe there was some hypocrisy in it, but ... a man recently wrote me: ‘I want to bring up my son as a hit man.’ He was serious about it and explained that this is the most fashionable and prestigious profession. Also, it is the highest paid and not dangerous – he had never heard of any hit man every going to  trial ... I have also received letters from girls who wanted to become prostitutes.”

The younger generation, Kommissarov said, has fallen prey to a sort of ideological, cultural rape. Popular culture is teaching all the wrong lessons for the wrong reasons. “Someone is making money on this,” he said. “We have this beautiful TV commercial featuring young Russian 16- or 17-year-old girls and boys who declare: ‘I choose safe sex; it is as natural as putting on clothes or brushing one’s teeth.’ ... I am not a hypocrite, but when a 15-year-old girl hears a 16-year-old girl say, ‘big deal, having sex is just like brushing one’s teeth’ ... for this 15-year-old it becomes simple: why should I wait for the marriage, for my beloved one – if it is just as simple as brushing one’s teeth.”

It is this kind of flippant attitude toward sex, Kommissarov and others have noted, that leads to social ills like Russia’s 60% divorce rate (80% in Moscow) and abortions in 7 out of 10 pregnancies. “Why wonder about marital infidelity,” Kommissarov added sarcastically, “it is just all easily understood: she just brushed her teeth and then left for work.”

For one guest on Kommissarov’s show, 25-year-old Oleg Shvedov (who holds a Ph.D. in Physics), the way to deal with promiscuity is prison. Shvedov advocates amending the Russian Penal Code to punish those who engage in pre-marital or extra-marital affairs with prison terms. Why not, he said, prosecute “theft of somebody else’s wife or girl,” as theft or hold people accountable when extramarital affairs end up in suicide or attempted suicide? Instead, he said, the Family Code passed by the Duma is simply too vague and permissive. By not declaring infidelity on contradiction to family values, the Code, in effect, encourages it.

But one extreme is no better than another. As Kommissarov noted, “he [Shvedov] sees such amoral things around him. Deep down, I can understand his motivation. He wants the world to be more pure, but he proposes to achieve this with somewhat fascist methods, he wants to force humanity to happiness with an iron hand ... Once you impose a formal ban, someone will be tempted to give it too wide an interpretation. For example, one needs to recommend that commercials promote condoms as something contributing to safer love, as a way to express caring for your partner, but not as a way to promote sex like chewing gum. One needs to develop internal censorship with decision makers.”

Trial by romanticism

Still, for all the banal TV commercials and billboards, Russia’s youth mostly still seem to have their heads screwed on straight when it comes to romance. Recently, Pepsi-Cola sponsored a poll via two leading research groups to find out how romantic Russia’s “New Generation” is. The results may show that romance is alive and well in Russia. The poll showed that 20% of those polled “regularly indulge in vain dreams,” 33% of young girls said they regularly fall in love, and 15% felt that one can fall in love only once. In answer to the question, “Who is a romantic love role model for you?” nearly half of the respondents cited Romeo and Juliet. The other half cited Jack and Rose, from the film Titanic. Sociologists pronounced their result: Russia’s youth are, romantically speaking, “within international romantic standards.”

In a less sterile assessment, Pushkareva noted that, “upon learning more about relations between a man and a woman, [our youth] lose what we used to call in Soviet times an “unhealthy interest” in sex. They simply enter yet a new, qualitative stage of relations. They want more romanticism. In other words, “they want cheryomukha along with It.”