The 21st century, with its sexual revolution, is an era that seems even more intimate against the backdrop of what was considered the norm more than half a century ago. The twenties of the last century, the post-revolutionary years, were distinguished by great sexual freedom: agitation games actively discussed sex, foreign sexologists came to Soviet Russia, books and pamphlets were printed, and they had a sexual life together in Komsomol communes. But as the middle of the 20th century approached, Soviet authorities made more commitments to abolish promiscuity: in the “Twelve Sexual Commands of the Revolutionary Proletariat,” abstinence was declared before marriage and sexual intercourse as a product of love. “naked” was banned (you could get jail time for a photo without clothes), sexologists were expelled from the country, youth sex education was suspended.
It seemed that there was sex, but it was not, and from posters about sex education, Soviet society has reached a complete taboo on the subject in just a few decades. Condemned by all moral norms and prohibited at the highest levels of power, sex in public has become something of a “forbidden fruit” – like Western music or “boiled” jeans from abroad. All Soviet culture was built on the same principle, and the cinema avoided even scenes with the slightest indication of “immoral” processes – this was the era of films, when children appeared after a long and lazy look at each of the main characters. the eyes of others and flirting are reduced to talking about the achievements of the motherland.

By the 1960s, however, the implicit ban on sex, at least in cinema, was beginning to wane. For example, not without scandals, Yuri Raizman’s tape “What if this is love?” about the relationship between ninth graders and the younger sex, and in the movie “Amphibian Man” (also 1961), it was allowed to leave the scene where the heroine of Anastasia Vertinskaya appears in the frame in a swimsuit made of the thinnest fabric. The film crew had to explain later: They say the budget wasn’t enough for the denser material.
But one of the first erotic episodes in Soviet cinema is, of course, the seduction scene in Diamond Arm (1968). And although swimsuit-wearing girls have appeared on screen before (remember, at least remember other films of Leonid Gaidai’s “Operation Y” or “Prisoner of the Caucasus”), they were “Komsomol members, athletes and just beauties” and heroes. Svetlana Svetlichnaya personified what the Soviet government was fighting so desperately for. A swindler and a girl of easy virtue remained half-naked in the frame, and the actress later said: “I was so afraid of this shoot, I thought that now all Mosfilm would run. There was a rumor that I would go naked and it was almost pornography back then.
“Almost pornography” were scenes from the movie “… Dawns Are Quiet Here” (1972). Film Studio editor Gorky, Semyon Klebanov later wrote to director Stanislav Rostotsky: “In the episode “Bathroom”, the emphasis on the beauty of the female body causes this beauty to begin to play an independent role, which goes beyond the scope of the episode. This is unduly accentuated in the scene where the women lie in a circle on the floor basking in the sun. My thoughts on playing with “bottom-up” humor caused no understanding either by the director or the editor.
As a result, the picture lost the part where the heroes were sunbathing naked on the lake, and the part in the bathhouse, after long arguments and bickering (Stanislav Rostotsky threatened to remove his surname from the credits if the scene was removed anyway). ) should be reduced from two minutes to about fifty seconds. Success with the censorship authorities later gained a moment in the film “Armed and Very Dangerous” (1977), where the heroine Lyudmila Senchina accidentally exposed her breasts.
The actress eventually became a sex symbol, but Soviet women were outraged by her behavior and in condemnations she wrote: “While children starve in Honduras, Senchina seduces our husbands and sons! We believed in him too!” And I thought I was being reckless. Because for the people I am Cinderella (the song that gave Lyudmila Senchina popularity – Note. ed.)”.
In the late 70s, the first bed scene appeared in Soviet films. It was Alexander Mitt’s The Crew (1979), an erotic episode that had to be filmed at night and without the management’s knowledge due to censorship. “He organizes and shoots orgies at night,” the lab staff who developed the film later complained. The fate of a pivotal moment for Soviet cinema hung in the balance, and as a result, only a fifth of the images remained in the final version, and the picture itself received an age limit of “16+”. The movie Moscow Doesn’t Believe in Tears (1979) also had to be “cut”: for example, the scene in which Katya Tikhomirova says “Well, don’t do it,” performed by Vera Alentova, was supposed to be erotic first. the episode in the movie remained the same copy only after the censorship. The scene with the participation of Oleg Tabakov turned out a little bolder, where Mosfilm allowed harassment, kisses, hugs.
Nikolai Sizov, director of the film studio, said: “You would be horrified if you showed it in its original form! It’s just obscene. From Menshov (Vladimir – Note. ed.) A good master must be trained. But in terms of artistic taste, he needs to be helped to get rid of some of the thoughts that push the painting aside.
And then came the era of perestroika, which determined the rules of the game itself. The policy of Glasnost gave sudden and hitherto unknown freedom to everyone, especially cultural figures. Previously banned literature flowed into Soviet Russia like a river, and in the cinema they showed Pyotr Todorovsky’s Intergirl (1989) based on Vladimir Kunin’s story about prostitutes and Vasily Pichul’s Little Vera (1988) – in fact, the first Soviet film in which it was . explicit sex. The most daring scene for Soviet cinema, as the actress Natalya Negoda later admitted, was shot “in a semi-conscious state” and the director hiding in a closet – so that “he did not dwell on his soul, but directed the process. There.” And if you tell the “Little Vera” team that in a few decades the coordinators of intimate scenes will work on the sites, they will not only laugh, but also the audience, who once left the premiere of the tape Cinema House with the words “Shame”.

And abroad (12 countries bought the picture for the show), by the way, they joked that they had no idea that a Soviet woman had breasts before. To promote “Little Vera” at the foreign box office, Natalya Negoda, by the way, even agreed to pose for Playboy, becoming the first girl from Soviet Russia on the cover of the magazine.
Along with the number, “From Russia – with love!” T-shirts with inscriptions. (with love from Russia) – this slogan will later become the personification of the new Soviet cinema. Where sex is no longer taboo and the body is a work of art, not a weapon of vice.
Source: People Talk

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