Discovering the Birds and Bees

Soviet schools will launch a program of sex education

The announcement was buried on page 4 of Moscow Pravda (circ. 230,000), in the last paragraph of a sleepy article headlined DIFFERENT POINTS OF VIEW. "In the shortest possible time," the text read, "the courses Hygiene and Sex Education and Ethics and Psychology of Family Life must be taught in all the nation's schools." Translation: after a long and bitter debate pitting parents against bureaucrats, compulsory sex education is coming to the Soviet Union.

Traditionally, sex rears its head at only one point in the Soviet curriculum, in an eighth-grade course on the mechanics of biology, telling girls about menstruation and both sexes about reproduction.

Moscow Pravda's toneless revelation amounts to an official concession that the U.S.S.R. faces enormous problems of sex and family, particularly among the young. Nearly one-third of all Soviet marriages end in divorce, and in such major cities as Moscow, Leningrad and Kiev, the rate is approaching 50%. Two-thirds of the 1 million annual divorces are initiated by women, and one-third occur within the first year of marriage. Studies suggest that sexual dissatisfaction is an important factor in a majority of divorces. Complains Sociologist Yuri Ryurikov: "Almost no serious, scientifically based sex education takes place in our country, in the home or the school. As a result, millions of youngsters grow up with false notions about sex, become sexually selfish and have premature sexual experiences."

One problem is a lack of privacy. Because of the U.S.S.R.'s chronic housing shortage, young married couples are often forced to crowd into the tiny apartments of members of their families. If sexual problems arise, the prudish older generation is usually no help, and there are no frank, Western-style sex manuals to consult. Soviet officials have banned portrayals of lovemaking in film, books and television. In the Soviet press, the word sex is rarely found, and then usually only in conjunction with adjectives like bourgeois and drunken.

Soviet women traditionally cite male drunkenness as the prime problem in unhappy marriages. Though women are reluctant to speak about sex, many now complain that the male approach to intercourse all too often consists of much vodka and little foreplay. Despite the rigid public morality of the U.S.S.R., Soviet youngsters apparently fall into bed almost as readily as Western youths. Seventeen is often cited as the median age when girls lose their virginity. Says one American exchange student in Leningrad: "I found a more open and businesslike attitude toward sex than I've seen in the U.S."

The government, however, is less concerned with the quality of lovemaking than with marital breakups and a declining birth rate. That rate has dropped to 18.5 per thousand, down from 31.2 per thousand in 1940. One reason is the increasing popularity of abortion, available on demand for less than $10.

The Baltic republics have had sex-education courses for years. In the rest of the Soviet Union, despite fears that sex classes would encourage "bourgeois licentiousness," the worried government permitted 189 schools in Moscow, Leningrad and a number of smaller cities to experiment with sex instruction over the past 18 months. Now the same program will go nationwide: 17 class hours a year in sex education for the eighth, ninth and tenth grades. That will give Soviet youngsters a total of 51 hours of sex instruction to prepare them for family life. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.