Quote from Timothy Fitzpatrick on February 7, 2025, 23:54

"Clients clearly gravitated towards sadism" Prostitutes in the USSR earned tens of times more than workers. What did it cost them?

Januar 28, 2025

Contrary to the common phrase "there is no sex in the USSR", prostitution flourished throughout the country. Paid love was especially in demand in the first decade of the existence of the new state. Natalia Lebina, a well-known historian and culturologist, writes about the incredible popularity of such services in her book. Her research is entirely devoted to the formation of Soviet everyday life. The author analyzes in detail social norms in a wide variety of areas - nutrition and housing, fashion and leisure, religiosity and sexuality. Lebina also scrupulously studies people's attitude to drunkenness, violence and prostitution. "Lenta.ru" with the permission of the publishing house "New Literary Review" publishes a fragment of the book "Soviet everyday life. Norms and anomalies. From military communism to a big style."

As in tsarist Russia, many prostitutes were looking for customers in newly opened restaurants. The most chic place of "work" for St. Petersburg prostitutes was considered to be the "Bar" on Lassalle Square and the restaurant "Roof" in the hotel "European", in Moscow - "Prague" and "Yar". The ladies who fished there during the years of the NEP served mainly foreigners and earned 40-50 rubles per night, or about a thousand per month.

The worker at the factory during these years received 18-24 rubles a month. However, the layer of highly paid prostitutes was small. As the employees of the Leningrad Labor Dispensary for Fallen Women found out in 1928, 80 percent of Leningrad prostitutes could earn no more than 30 rubles a month - they managed to receive no more than 3 rubles from the client for their one-time services.

"Girls for Joy" offered themselves in more modest institutions, using not only the private, but also the public catering sector. In mid-1922, the head of one of the district police departments of Petrograd noted in his report to the district authorities that in the restaurant "Stroitel", owned by the Petrograd Consumer Society (PEPO), reigns

"complete debauchery, a crowd of prostitutes, dark personalities, robbery of citizens in a drunken form, the arrangement of various orgies"

The situation did not change even after the appearance of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR in the fall of 1922. In the spring of 1923, St. Petersburg policemen reported on another "malinnik with girls" - this time in a cafe with the iconic name "Twelve", which was also under the jurisdiction of PEPO. The district inspector wrote indignation:

"There was a cafe like a cafe, but it became a hotbed of prostitution... Prostitutes gather around 11 p.m. Full burst of time around 1-2 o'clock in the morning. A woman comes like a woman, sits down at the table, orders black coffee and sits with one glass and looks around the hall. A man chooses to taste, invites Marusya or Lily to his table, treats, talks, conspires and, having paid the bill, leaves with the lady..."

Restaurant Soviet prostitutes, so similar to pre-revolutionary "girls for pleasure", were immediately identified by the white emigrant V.V., who secretly arrived in the USSR in 1925. Shulgin.

Later he wrote about his visit to one of the private catering establishments:

"I was immediately stunned by the orchestra, which is worth the most desperate foreign jats gang. The taver was here in full form. A thousand and one tables, behind which there are incredible personalities, sometimes idiotic burnting, sometimes gloomy-pro-pro-type type...

"...Between the tables there are all kinds of young ladies who sell pies or themselves at will"

Despite the fact that the Criminal Code of the RSFSR of 1922 published articles defining the punishment for prostitution and for forced prostitution, in the cities of Russia during the years of the NEP there were people who tried to revive even the almost forgotten brothel trade in love. Some dens for the "chic audience" were located in the back rooms of fashion stores. Information about Soviet dating houses is sometimes found in the art and documentary narrative.

The description of one such institution was given by V.K. Ketlinskaya in her memoirs "Hello, youth!". The owner of the fur shop on Nevsky obliged his saleswomen "to be nice housewives in the back rooms, where suppliers and other business people go - to serve tea, brew coffee, make sandwiches, treat with cognac or wines".

Other services were also assumed.

At the same time, a secret salon for the chosen ones was kept in her apartment on Nevsky and a certain T., the wife of an actor of one of the Leningrad theaters. In 1924, the provincial court heard the noisy case of this tainer.

The clients who visited her salon were clearly drawn to sadism, and T. tried to satisfy their desires

The police found a specific toolkit for sadomasochistic entertainment in the apartment. G.V. writes about Moscow "deners of debauchery" Andreevsky. According to him, "in 1926, the employees of the MUR "covered" a lair in the apartment of General Obukhova... The noble hostess, good furniture, cultural atmosphere made this place attractive. The den "worked" from eleven in the evening to five in the morning, and during this time up to thirty guests managed to visit it. There was a scarf on the window a sign that there were no free seats. After knocking, the people came said the password: "hierarch's nose" or "cup of coffee". In case of any unforeseen circumstances, the institution was left through the neighboring apartment, which was occupied by the deacon, so that, having sinned, it was possible to immediately repent."

But most of the "dating houses" - improvised brothels - had a very down-to-earth look during the NEP years. People just let a prostitute and a client into their room or apartment for a little bit. Woodsheds, which were then located in almost all city courtyards, were often used for this purpose. Andreevsky's book contains information about an "institution" that functioned in the housing of the Moscow janitor in 1925-1926, the services of which were used by merchants who came to the Moscow markets with goods.

"In April 1926," Andreevsky writes, "MUR employees covered the den of debauchery in the Pyatnitsky cemetery. There was a small house rented by a certain Akimov. He sold alcohol and let couples into the house, from which he took 5 rubles each. When the police officers came to his cemetery lighthouse, they found seven such couples there"

The organization of secret denurs brought an average of about 30 rubles per month to the people who were engaged in it.

And yet the leading form of sex commerce in the 1920s, as well as shortly before the revolution, was the street love trade, which flourished everywhere. In Simbirsk in 1922, according to the local police,

"they (saleswomen. - N.L.) are everywhere: on the street, on the boulevard, in the bazaar, in the crowd, at the station, in the evening in the gardens... The usual picture is the beer "Volga": a crowd of hungry, ragged prostitutes emerges from the darkness of the room... They're tearing up don men..."

St. Petersburg policemen reported the same to higher authorities in 1922: "All the more or less busy streets of the city in the evening and at night are teeming with... women who openly sell themselves and draw attention to themselves with their defiant behavior..."

Prostitutes fished both on the central streets of cities and in working quarters

A typical scene of the life of the Narva outpost of Leningrad in the late 1920s is described by the authors of the book "Trifles of Life": "On pre-holiday days, especially on payday days, all nearby intersections are teeming with prostitutes... Feeling the prey, they gather in whole flocks at beer halls, "family baths", restaurants... not giving passage to workers, especially young people... As a result, often only a severe headache, a broken face and torn clothes remain from the pay."

The traditional form of street prostitution was also revived during the years of the NEP: children who offered themselves for money appeared on the panel.

In January 1924, "Rabochaya Gazeta" wrote about the situation in Leningrad:

"A half-child walks along Nevsky. A hat, a coat, high boots - everything is like a "real girl". And even the powder, soaked in the rain, just as pathetically slides down on the chin... "How old are you? Twelve? Aren't you lying?.. Let's go." It is bought just like a box of cigarettes. On one corner of Pushkinskaya - cigarettes, on the other - "they". This is their exchange. Their children's souls are listed here and their children's bodies are bought"

They traded themselves mainly in homeless girls involved in the sphere of the criminal world. But, as in pre-revolutionary times, parents themselves often sent their daughters to "work extra money" on the street. A young prostitute during the years of the NEP could earn from one to five rubles a day. The path to the panel usually began with violence on the part of the stepfather or acquaintances of the mother. The situation changed little in the 1930s, when the authorities moved away from a liberal attitude to the institution of prostitution existing in the space of legal silence.

In the cultural and domestic space of Soviet cities, the life of women who earn money by trading their own bodies, as before the revolution, was connected with drunkenness, drug addiction, and the criminal world. Many of them were pushed to sex commerce by the manifestation of desomatization and to some extent the position of the Soviet authorities.

"Down with the ugly people on the female line"

Not daring to recognize prostitution as a specific profession, as it was in tsarist Russia, the Bolsheviks did not impose criminal punishment for it. The attitude of the new social system to the demand side for sexual services was tougher. This situation in Soviet reality was also aggravated by the fact that the first to demand affordable women were presented by representatives of the revived layer of the urban bourgeoisie - various kinds of entrepreneurs, intermediaries, resellers. He vividly characterized the mood among the nepmans K.I. Chukovsky in the diary entry of November 27, 1922:

"Men are happy that there are cards, running, wine, women in the world... Everyone lives by zoology and physiology"

Korney Chukovsky

In the conditions of the NEP, the institute of kept women was revived. V.K. Ketlinskaya described the fate of her peer, a student of the School Institute. She told her friends without much embarrassment about her luck, that "one furry made her very rich businessman fell in love with her, he comes to her three times a week for two or three hours...". Dating houses were in demand among the new bourgeoisie. The above-mentioned "salon of citizen T." was visited by many well-known people in the commercial world of Leningrad, as well as representatives of the intelligentsia. A curious story happened with the famous party journalist Aldor (I.L. Orsher), who, apparently, also visited citizen T. Cassed in connection with prostitutes, he went to seek protection from M.I. Ulyanova. The one, as K.I. writes. Chukovsky,

"I was horrified... Tov. Orsher, we trusted you, and you go on dates with Socialist-Evolutionaries and Mensheviks! Be shame on you! So I didn't fully understand what a dating house is"

In the 1920s, Soviet "farmers" also began to use the services of restaurant and hotel sales love. In 1926, a noisy trial took place in Leningrad in the case of the Card Factory. The enterprise was headed by young people nominated for their posts by the Bolshevik Party. However, the temptation to squander state funds turned out to be stronger than convictions. The money spent on the expansion of production was spent on parties in restaurants with public women163. Information about this category of clients was reflected in the folklore of women selling themselves. In the popular song "Prostitute from the bar", popular during the NEP years, there were the following words:

A rich spendthrift will buy me,

And I'll go to the Island with him.

In the early 1920s, the Soviet press supported the illusion of "high morality" of the working class. A well-known journalist at that time I. Lin, who specialized in youth topics, wrote in 1923: "Licked young people in pens, monoclas, in tightly ironed trousers are bargaining with prostitutes, and you won't find a working guy there..." The desired in this situation was given as true. Before the revolution, a significant part of workers considered contacts with corrupt women as the norm of leisure. The material difficulties of the first years of the revolution have somewhat changed the situation. The stabilization of the economic situation in the mid-1920s brought many back to traditional everyday practices, including sexual life.

Indeed, if in 1920, according to polls, about 43 percent of workers and 41.5 percent of representatives of other segments of the urban population used the services of prostitutes, in 1923, 61 percent of men working in factories and plants, and 50 percent of those employed in other sectors of the economy, trade, etc., enjoyed venal love.

Many workers, according to doctors and sociologists, believed that "going to prostitutes" and suffering from sexually transmitted diseases was quite common, proof of "youth".

An anonymous questionnaire survey conducted in 1925 among Moscow workers showed that the services of street women are used by:

• 27% of textile workers;
• 31.6% of seamstresses;
• 42.3% metalworkers;
• 78% of printers (the latter were the most wealthy category of workers).

The same picture was observed in Leningrad. There, in the proletarian regions in the late 1920s, there was a contingent of regular consumers of corrupt love. Among them, as noted by the authors of the book "Trifles of Life", written on the materials of the survey of the life of the Leningrad suburbs, it was possible to meet "and masters from the Triangle", and a mustacheless teenager from "Putilovsky", and a laborer from "Spindle"...".

Another evidence of strong contacts of the "proletarian mass" with the institute of corrupt love is the level of spread of venereal diseases. A survey of 5,600 men with syphilis, conducted in Leningrad in April 1927, showed that half of them were workers, 19 percent were unemployed, 11 percent were employees, about 3 percent were peasants and 18 percent belonged to other social strata. 31 percent of respondents started sexual life with prostitutes, and the vast majority of respondents had intercourse with them in the future - 74 percent.

Data on places of infection with syphilis and gonorrhea can also serve as a kind of indicator of further "democratization" of prostitution consumers. In the 1920s, these diseases were infected primarily by those who had sexual intercourse with corrupt women right on the street, on a park bench. Of course, Soviet officials and nepmans did not appear in these places. Consumers of cheap love, who did not have large means, did not disdain such a situation.

Source: https://lenta.ru/articles/2025/01/28/lebina/