Sex Work in Soviet Russia

What you'll learn

• 1 (05:25) **The Bolshevik Theory: Sex Work as a Capitalist Symptom** - The Soviet Union was founded on the belief that sex work would vanish under communism because it was purely a product of poverty and exploitation.
• 2 (08:55) **The Failed Promise: From Revolutionary Ideal to 1990s Reality** - A stark survey from 1990 reveals the collapse of the revolution's promise: a third of Soviet high school students would consider selling sex for hard currency.
• 3 (10:09) **The NEP Era: Quasi-Capitalism and the "Nepmen"** - During the 1920s New Economic Policy, a quasi-capitalist environment allowed sex work to flourish, creating new cultural villains.
• 4 (14:13) **Why They Hated It: The Ideological Attack on Exploitation** - The Bolsheviks attacked sex work not just as a moral failing, but as a fundamental symbol of capitalist exploitation that had no place in a communist society.
• 5 (16:06) **The Legal Workaround: How the State Policed Without Admitting It** - Instead of direct laws, the Soviet regime used a web of other legal mechanisms to control sex workers, such as laws against vagrancy, parasitism, and infecting others with venereal disease.
• 6 (17:44) **Finding the Hidden History: Literature and Film as Evidence** - Because official records are sparse, historians rely on didactic literature and films from the 1920s to understand how sex work was viewed and experienced.
• 7 (20:58) **Stalin's Turn: The Sex Worker Becomes an Enemy of the State** - Under Stalin, the progressive view of the sex worker as a victim of capitalism vanished, replaced by a view of her as a dangerous dissident and a threat to the state.

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app