Sex in the Kremlin's Shadow

The Revolution has not yet reached as far as the bedroom

A despondent husband wonders why his wife fails to respond to him during lovemaking. To his genuine astonishment, he learns from a physician that he was not accomplishing much of anything by stimulating his wife's navel. The naive husband may sound like a caricature concocted at a sex therapists' meeting, but for Mikhail Stern, a dissident Soviet physician now living in France, the story is poignantly symptomatic of the woeful sexual lives of most Soviet citizens.

Though the Kremlin is energetic about publishing statistics on many aspects of Soviet life, one vital area remains terra incognita. The Communist leadership regards sex as virtually nonexistent, except to raise the birth rate; whatever figures exist are guarded as closely as the real statistics on defense spending. Stern, who left the U.S.S.R. in 1977, has now lifted that curtain slightly. In a book published in France, La vie sexuelle en U.R.S.S. (Sex in the Soviet Union), which is to be brought out in the U.S. next spring by Times Books, he offers the most comprehensive description yet of sexual mores in the U.S.S.R.

It is not a picture that one would think of titling The Joy of Sex. Deprived of opportunities for intimacy because of overcrowded housing, overwhelmed by long entrenched sexual myths, and ruled by a government that seems to deny the very idea of a sex life, most Soviet citizens, says Stern, lead lives of "sexual misery." For more than 30 years this Soviet Kinsey was a practicing endocrinologist at a clinic in Vinnitsa, near the Ukrainian city of Kiev, where his patients called upon him for advice on sexual problems.

Such counseling was badly needed.

Repression and prudishness have long been a sad fact of Russian life. Long before the Communists, songs and folklore told of heroines suffering at the hands of men, and mothers have traditionally told their daughters, "If he doesn't beat you, he doesn't love you." Indeed, says Stern, sadomasochism and drink often rule the male-female relationship. He writes: "Violence, alcoholism, and sex form an explosive cocktail, making the line between 'normal life' and criminal pathology extremely fine."

Many women are so physically scarred that they lose interest in sex. While official Soviet statistics say that only 18% of Russian women are frigid, Stern is convinced by his researches that the figure is closer to 45%. Nor is much help available for these women; sex therapy clinics are nonexistent. Women must turn to sympathetic doctors like Stern or to one or two available government manuals that are about as informative as the hygiene texts once used in U.S. junior high schools. One 1974 Soviet sex guide, for example, recommends mineral water douches and vacations in warm climes as cures for frigidity.

The party line on male sexuality is no more convincing. The 1974 sex hand book boasts that 100% of Soviet men reach orgasm. In fact, says Stern, the men he treated were preoccupied with their manhood. Some complained to him of shrinking or insufficiently large penises.

To ease these fears, he often prescribed vitamins--a placebo that some patients believed enhanced size.

When Soviet couples do make love, says Stern, the union too often is quick, mechanical, riddled with shame and obviously unsatisfying. He writes: "The typical sex act is best done in the dark of night, under the bedclothes, and with the eyes closed." Foreplay, he says, is virtually unheard of. Typically, the female assumes what the Russians call the crayfish position with head and knees touching the bed. Her partner penetrates from the rear, and usually dismounts quickly.

To Soviet men, holding back an ejaculation to satisfy the woman is considered an immoral act with grave physical and psychological consequences. As a result, says Stern, orgasm is "an almost exclusively masculine privilege." Says Stern, "Unaware that the woman possesses any erogenous zones, the man usually imagines that as soon as his penis penetrates her vagina, the woman will be overcome with joy."

Except for prostitution, which continues to flourish in spite of official efforts to wipe it out, the Soviets have no stomach for "deviant" behavior. Pornography is rare. Oral sex is usually performed only with prostitutes (out of male fears of venereal disease). Popular scorn of homosexuality is so intense that it is "simply passed over in silence."

Amid all the restraint, exhibitionism seems a common phenomenon. Stern tells of a group of Muscovite women who regularly compare how many flashers they have encountered in a day; one reported eight. More startling is the Soviet predilection for anonymous sex in such public places as crowded subways and buses. As Stern points out, this requires some gymnastic ability and an adherence to certain unwritten rules: when one man tried to strike up a postcoital acquaintance, the woman turned on him in fury and accused him of "gross immorality."

Some efforts seem to be under way to break away from the stifling past. There is, for instance, a fledgling underground pornographic press called sexizdat (after the samizdat underground literary movement). Stern also reveals that daring protesters have been dropping pornographic doodles into ballot boxes. Yet in spite of such pathetic signs of rebellion, Stern does not see enlightenment any time soon. Indeed, he fears that sex may become increasingly cold, cynical and impersonal in the U.S.S.R. All of which underscores his basic message: that the Revolution stopped at the bedroom door.

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