Hotel rooms only to married people in prison in porn consumption: For decades, there was iron prudery behind the Iron Curtain. However, after the collapse of the Soviet Union rolled out a sexual revolution through Russia.(Photos)

Mid-eighties, the Iron Curtain still divides Europe and the world, the television exerts in détente. In a joint mission of U.S. and Soviet stations citizens speak from hostile blocks together. “Tele bridge – women talk to women” is the program. It’s about everyday things.

An American woman wants to know whether, in case the Soviets in Advertising “also all about sex.” A quarter of a century and the Soviet Union have passed since the broadcast. The answer of Ludmila Nikolaevna Ivanova, employees of the Moscow hotels “Leningrad” and head of the “Committee of Soviet Women,” but still knows every Russian. She says: “For us in the Soviet Union there is no sex.”

Of course, the Communists had sex. But they call it something coyly “make love”. When the Soviet Union breaks up a little later, the sexual freedom in Russia breaks the web. Everywhere open strip clubs in just yet prudish Moscow, prostitutes advertise before the secret service headquarters at Lubyanka customers. The photographer Yevgeny Kondakov, worked for “Paris Match”, “Time” and the MIRROR, has documented Russia’s sexual revolution with the camera.

– “No Sex in the Soviet Union”, which is a household word in Russia. War Communism really so prudish?

Kondakov: Well, people have increasingly course, always, but it not lawful to speak about it. Many things were banned. The “Playboy” could buy, who looked a erotic film director Tinto Brass is nowhere could go to jail. A man and a woman could take a hotel room if they did not demonstrate that they are married. Recently, I was in Iran, because that’s just today. And in your own home it was usually too tight for a wild sex life.

-How so ?

Kondakov: There was the Kommunalkas, Soviet communal apartments, where many Russians living in the big cities. Several families shared an apartment, each inhabited only one room. A mother who lived with her ​​son, once told me that she always went to the kitchen when his girlfriend came. There she was doing laundry. This went well until the neighbors from the other rooms began to make jokes about her compulsive washing.

-How did you get the theme? How and when are the first photos were taken ?

Kondakov: I worked perestroika for the newspaper “Moscow News” during Gorbachev, a reform sheet. The editorial was on the central Pushkin Square. 1990 emerged as the first people who were selling erotic literature on the roadside. The booklets were dingy on cheap paper. But the sold like hot cakes. Something they knew that beforehand not: guide about sex techniques! The title of the book was “made ​​available to the forbidden”.

Then appeared the first Russian men’s magazine, named “Andrei”. The chief ran through the city, asked young women whether they wanted to undress in front of the camera and took her breasts still on the road inspected.

-A photo shows a “Andrei” presentation in 1995, the output is presented by a half-naked model. Most viewers are adolescent boys.

Kondakov: Adults had no time for such things. You have other concerns, because they did not know how to feed their families. That’s the big difference between the West and Russia. The sexual revolution in Europe was indeed along with a steady increase in living standards. With us, the opposite was the case, the company drifted apart. The masses lost their savings, a few were very rich. This led to the commercialization of sex. Prostitution, it has certainly given the Soviet era, the party elite, perhaps, hidden. But then she was on a blow anywhere: prostitutes stood in front of the Parliament, before the building of our editorial staff, even before the Lubyanka, the intelligence headquarters.

-How did you come to the pool bash the Alpha Bank of oligarch Mikhail Fridman ?

Kondakov: That was not hard, it was a time consistent product presentation, it was about a new credit card. Moscow On every corner there were strip shows. Even in the elegant Hotel Metropol – no longer want me to believe – and jumped about half-naked girls, between buns in shape of a penis.

-How did people react to this development ?

Kondakov: When the first strip club opened – the “Dolls” – are there men with their wives there together, and have made so fine as it would be a premiere at the Bolshoi Theatre.

-The roles seem to have been rather one-sided: your images almost always bared women and men in suits enjoying themselves.

Kondakov: In the West, the sexual revolution was probably female, also marked by the struggle for women’s rights. In Russia it was a man’s revolution. Is changing now: In no metropolis have in recent years as many clubs for men striptease opened as in Moscow.

-Who is looking at your exhibition ?

Kondakov: Interestingly, many young people who have not experienced consciously. Those who were there at the time, are seen only rarely. On many things they do not want to be reminded. It is unpleasant to them.

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