Prostitution in the Soviet Union
In the work of criminologists Andrejs Vilks and Leonīds Tess, it was noted: In the textbooks on Soviet criminology, it was argued that social sores such as prostitution, drug addiction, etc.
In the Soviet Encyclopedic Dictionary, published in 1980, it was stated that prostitution arose in a class of antisocialist society and is widespread under capitalism.
[citation needed] Prior to Nicholas I, prostitution was banned by law, starting in 1649 when Alexei Mikhailovich ordered city burghers to watch "that there should not be harlots on the streets and lanes".
On one occasion in 1918, in order to maximize vigilance ahead of an expected White Guard insurrection in Nizhny Novgorod, Lenin ordered a local Soviet official to, among other measures, organize deportations and shootings of prostitutes whom Lenin believed to be harming the discipline of the Red Army troops in that city.
Prostitution had initially declined under the Bolsheviks, but high unemployment among women, even white-collar workers, had distressing effects in the mid-1920s.
In spite of the lack of a legal basis for such measures,[4] a system was introduced according to which prostitutes were sent to the system of "special institutions of forced labour re-education" supervised by the NKVD[7] - open-type workshops, semi-closed laboratories and suburban colonies of special treatment; in the case of relapse after release from the colony, women were sometimes sent to the camps of the NKVD.
[7] With the deployment of the Great Terror they were sentenced to imprisonment or re-education on the basis that prostitution constituted a remain of the "legacy of the capitalist system".
Even among sociologists, the topic was taboo: Since prostitution as a social phenomenon in the country of victorious socialism was "eliminated," some "behaviour of women leading an immoral way of life" or "purely legal problems of the composition of crimes preserved in the criminal code of the republic" were investigated "for official use only" by Yu.
Sociological studies of prostitution (under its various pseudonyms) in the 1970s were conducted under the leadership of M. I. Arsenyeva, as well as by a group of employees of the All-Soviet Research Institute of the Ministry of the Interior including K. K. Goryainov, A.
In 1959, after the publication in the British News of the World of an article on hotel prostitution, the Moscow City Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union adopted a resolution on additional measures to combat prostitution (in particular, the hotels were banned from allowing "strangers" in after 23:00), but for Soviet journalists the theme remained forbidden.
These sensational essays brought Moskovskij Komsomolets to the attention of all unions and raised circulation to a record level.
As a consequence, on May 29, 1987, the Code of Administrative Offences of the RSFSR was amended with Article 164-2, which punishes prostitution with a fine of 100 rubles (at that time the monthly salary of a low-skilled worker).
[18] One of the notable events of the perestroika life of the USSR was the publication of the novel by Vladimir Kunin Interdevochka in the magazine Aurora in 1988.
[20] The story aroused a violent reaction among the reading audience and the editorial board received a large number of responses.
