Sex and revolution: an examination of literary and statistical data on the mores of Soviet students in the 1920s.

Abstract

Soviet students in the 1920s were a pioneering generation, the first to go through university since the revolution. Like that of most pioneers, their life was uncomfortable. Dormitories were overcrowded, and no major maintenance had been done on university buildings since before the war. The newest acquisitions of equipment, library books, and foreign journals were usually pre-1914. The students waited in line to consult textbooks in university reading rooms; and in the social sciences, where Soviet textbooks had yet to be written, they worked from lecture notes supplemented by any prerevolutionary text that came to hand.1 A very few institutions, like the Sverdlov Communist University in Moscow, had been set up since the revolution specifically to train Communists for leadership positions and had a mainly Communist, or at least Marxist, faculty. The rest were prerevolutionary foundations-universities and former teachers' and technical colleges upgraded to university status2 since 1917-with their prerevolutionary faculty and an appointed Communist rector. Often the university administration was effectively in the hands not of the rector but of the Communist students, who made up about a third of the whole student body.3 Soviet universities in the latter part of the 1920s had a male/female ratio of not quite three to one,4 with a greater predominance of men in the Communist third of the students. About half the students came from peasant and working-class families and half from urban