The United States is famous for its puritan views on sex. But the United States government has been smart enough, for the most part, to leave people’s porn alone. That wasn’t the case in the Soviet Union. Thanks to confiscation the Soviet government managed to create what is possibly one of the largest porn collections predating cheap high capacity digital storage devices:
It was the kinkiest secret in the Soviet Union: Across from the Kremlin, the country’s main library held a pornographic treasure trove. Founded by the Bolsheviks as a repository for aristocrats’ erotica, the collection eventually grew to house 12,000 items from around the world, ranging from 18th-century Japanese engravings to Nixon-era romance novels.
Of course privilege has its benefits. While the porn collection was off limits to the petty proletariat it was always available to the dictatorship of the proletariat (who were totally not bourgeois):
Off limits to the general public, the collection was always open to top party brass, some of whom are said to have enjoyed visiting. Today, the spetskhran is no more, but the collection is still something of a secret: There is no complete compendium of its contents, and many of them are still unlisted in the catalogue.
I’m sure that section of the library had to be steam cleaned multiple times a day.
The Soviet Union is a fascinating society to study. It was a society built upon the ideals of Karl Marx, which were supposed to usher in a new era of prosperity for the working class. Instead it ended up as one of the most oppressive states in the world. The so-called dictatorship of the proletariat attempted to control every aspect of its peoples’ lives. Everything from the houses they lived in to the jobs they worked to the porn they consumed had to receive an official stamp from a Soviet bureaucrat to ensure it wasn’t anti-revolutionary, bourgeois, or whatever other imaginary threat the heads of the union came up with.
On the (former) Soviet Union. “Everything from the houses they lived in to the jobs they worked to the porn they consumed had to receive an official stamp from a Soviet bureaucrat to ensure it wasn’t anti-revolutionary, bourgeois, or whatever other imaginary threat the heads of the union came up with.” Sound strangely (and recently) familiar? It should. Though it goes by another name here and now, those who claim to have the “greater good” in mind still try to tell us what to think and how to live; “to make us better”, and it’s still bullshit. Resist. Learn to think for yourself.