Restructuring the ‘Woman Question’: Perestroika and Prostitution

Abstract

A Soviet historian writing in 1979 could confidently declare that the USSR was the first country in the world to have eradicated prostitution. 'The experience of the USSR has proved that prostitution is explained by social reasons and exists only where there is private property' (Chirkov, 1979: 214). The link between private property and prostitution had first been made by nineteenth-century socialists who argued that once economic exploitation and oppression were eliminated, relations between men and women would be transformed and sex cease to be a commodity. The Bolsheviks who came to power in Russia in October 1917 initially believed that their victory put this bright future on the immediate agenda, but the social upheavals of revolution and civil war brought instead a lowering of living standards and the return of prostitution. Paradise was postponed. In the meantime revolutionaries saw it as their duty to provide sheltered workshops and hostels for women forced by circumstances to sell themselves. A decade later with Stalin at the helm, paradise was introduced by fiat: 'recalcitrant prostitutes' were sent to terms in special camps or on the construction sites of the first five-year plans; by the mid thirties the Soviet government insisted that prostitution had been 'liquidated' and that its re-emergence in the USSR was a theoretical impossibility since the social and economic relations which gave rise to it had been buried for ever. Propaganda compared the unhappy women of the west, frequently driven by economic need onto the streets, with Soviet women who enjoyed every right and equality. Silence on the subject of Soviet prostitution continued for half a century, to be broken only at the beginning of 1986, less than a year after Mikhail Gorbachev had taken over as General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party. Initial references to the subject were indirect and