Dirt Fetish and Commodity Racism Soviet Way

Abstract

By the time the Soviet modernizing efforts became intensified in Caucasus and Central Asia, the Soviet ideology with respect to sexual question had already changed from a scandalously famous glass of water theory1 to a much more traditionalist patriarchal interpretation of sexual relations that allowed the Soviet state to control the subjectivity of builders of communism, including the sexual sphere. Vladimir Lenin criticized the early Soviet “feminists” and the supervisors of the zhenotdels Inez Armand and Alexandra Kollontai, stressing that free love that both women defended in various ways, was a manifestation of bourgeois immorality. The Bolsheviks fear in this case was a lack of discipline in sexual relations and the insufficient control of this sphere of human life on the part of the Soviet state. As F. Navailh points out, in Lenin’s metaphor of the filthy puddle out of which it is not recommended to quench your thirst as out of a glass that was used by others, we can detect his tendency to restore and maintain purity (in various senses of the word) as an absolute value (Navailh 1994, 234). The Soviet wish to prescribe the strict roles and models of behavior in sexual and gender sphere would flourish later in patriarchal Stalin’s gender politics.