Yes, there was sex in the USSR In a new book, historian Rustam Alexander expands his research on intimate life in the Soviet Union
The publishing house Individuum has released a book by historian Rustam Alexander titled “Yes, There Was Sex: Intimate Life in the Soviet Union.” Three years ago, the author published “The Closeted,” which focused on the lives of LGBTQ people during the Soviet era. With this new work, Alexander broadens the scope of his research to include the experiences of all Soviet citizens, introducing fictionalized elements while exploring the state’s resistance to sexuality and the ways in which scientific inquiry tried to overcome ideological constraints. Meduza examines the book’s surprises and explores why some of the author’s choices have raised questions.
In The Closeted: The Life of Homosexuals in the Soviet Union, historian Rustam Alexander tried to map the history of the state’s relationship with the LGBTQ community — from criminalization under Stalin to liberalization in the 1990s. Readers responded positively: the book became a bestseller and quickly sold out on online marketplaces — both after its original release in 2022 and again in 2025 when it was reissued.
With his latest work, Alexander expands the scope of his research. Yes, There Was Sex: Intimate Life in the Soviet Union explores how Soviet citizens felt about the idea of sex, covering the period from 1920 — when abortion was legalized — through the sexual revolution of the Perestroika era.
Alexander reaches the obvious conclusion that the only relatively liberal periods in Soviet history regarding sexual freedom were the 1920s and the late 1980s. In Soviet Russia’s New Economic Policy era, journalists could write things like “Masturbation is fascinating and beneficial (I speak from personal experience),” and nude demonstrators could parade down Moscow’s Garden Ring. But everything changed abruptly by 1929. Books about sex were banned, the subject vanished from public discourse, and soon after, the state outlawed abortion and severely restricted people’s right to divorce. Sex, of course, didn’t disappear, but Soviet citizens were no longer encouraged to speak about this “indecent foolishness.”
One of the first revelations in Alexander’s book is that opposition to sex education and support for abortion bans largely came from Soviet-trained bureaucrats and medical professionals (including women), whereas police officials paradoxically tended to treat the topic of sexuality — at least in the context of heteronormative relations — with surprising leniency. Soviet law enforcement was reluctant to prosecute doctors performing illegal abortions and their patients, much to the Health Ministry’s irritation.
The book’s second surprise is the sheer number of specialists who tried to push back against the aura of taboo. There were many. Inspired by Alfred Kinsey’s studies in the U.S., Soviet sexologists in the 1960s tried to challenge the prevailing norm of silence surrounding the topic.
Notable figures among the relatively liberal-minded experts included famed sexologist Igor Kon and his student Sergey Golod, who carried out a study in 1968 on youth sexual behavior (Soviet censors made sure the study never saw the light of day). Around the same time, sexologist Ilya Popov from the Kazakh city of Temirtau examined the sexual preferences of local workers and found a lively interest in topics like petting and oral sex, along with confusion about why these subjects were never discussed in the Soviet press. Unsurprisingly, Popov’s findings never made it to print, either.
One rare exception came in 1962 when journalist Yevgeniya Rozanova managed to get an article published in the popular newspaper Young Communist. She described cases of child molestation in Kuybyshev and concluded that a lack of sex education was partly to blame. In the end, however, Rozanova’s revelations failed to spark a wider public debate.
Readers won’t be surprised to learn that the culture of silence surrounding “the sex problem” and the USSR’s restrictive laws had catastrophic consequences. The book describes an epidemic of sexually transmitted infections among Soviet youth — years before HIV entered the picture.
Alexander also addresses cases where Soviet women died from complications in underground abortions, and he writes about sexual violence at a time in the USSR when there was no concept of affirmative sexual consent, which meant such violence often went unrecognized. Khrushchev’s Thaw later softened Stalin’s brutal laws, but it didn’t fundamentally change attitudes toward women’s bodily autonomy or reproductive rights.
Though the subject is broad, Alexander makes space for each topic: how sex work operated, how Soviet women hid relationships with foreigners, how tourism during the 1957 World Festival of Youth shaped attitudes about sex, how Glasnost broke the silence surrounding relationships — and how the country ultimately returned to a Soviet-style conservatism.
Gender is a running theme throughout the book, though Alexander only alludes to it without making it explicit. Women suffered most from strict sexual prohibitions, while men disproportionately benefited from the few liberties that did exist. In the 1920s, for example, casual sex without consequences was the norm for men, but women could be accused of promiscuity, fired from their jobs, or expelled from universities for the same behavior. Despite all the talk about sex being “as simple as a glass of water,” public judgment and double standards dictated who could exercise sexual freedom — and how.
Alexander builds his narrative using a wide array of sources: memoirs, government meeting transcripts, interrogation records, propaganda pamphlets, and unpublished studies. It’s a layered and compelling read — precisely because it intertwines sanitized official rhetoric with the raw evidence of personal experience, grounded in rich detail and political context. The approach doesn’t just reconstruct events but also reveals how ideas of guilt, freedom, and what was considered normal were shaped under conditions of ideological pressure.
At the same time, Alexander borrows techniques from literary fiction, attributing thoughts and dialogue to historical figures and transforming government records into dramatic scenes. It’s a defining aspect of the book — and a narrative choice that’s just as likely to draw in readers as turn them off. Alexander makes it clear that he is transforming dry official reports and personal recollections into “lively” scenes to improve clarity. Though every instance is footnoted, these literary inventions nevertheless raise questions. Drawing on archival materials and other sources, Alexander occasionally veers into something like documentary fiction, and the book begins to straddle the line between pop scholarship and the stylized docufiction of Benjamin Labatut.
This technique already appeared in The Closeted, where Alexander used it to heighten the sense of anxiety experienced by LGBTQ people. In this new book, the fictionalized passages seemingly serve the same purpose: to engage readers emotionally and to speak for those who were denied a voice. There are moments, however, where the tone borders on melodramatic. The legitimacy of ascribing thoughts and dialogue to real people in a genre that claims academic rigor remains an open question and a burden that rests, in the end, with the author.
Alexander begins his exploration of Soviet-era sexuality with the now-iconic line from Lyudmila Ivanova, who said during the 1986 live broadcast linkup between Leningrad and Boston: “There is no sex in the USSR — we have only love.” The book also ends with Ivanova’s quote. The first half of her phrase, which became a popular meme, perfectly captures the outcome of the Soviet state’s campaign to suppress public discussion of sex. The consequences of that campaign are still palpable in Russia today, even if you set aside the modern state’s efforts to crawl back into people’s bedrooms.
Stories of sexual violence, widely covered in the media, reveal a troubling pattern: Without formal sex education, men often learn about the concept of affirmative consent too late — if at all — and struggle to understand fundamentals as basic as why adults should not have sex with teenagers. It would be wrong to blame this entirely on the Soviet system, but it’s hard to overlook the connection.
Yes, There Was Sex: Intimate Life in the Soviet Union is an uneven book that takes risks, but its subject matter is undeniably important. It’s not only a story of repression and silence but also an attempt to document how easily a society can be stripped of its rights to knowledge and bodily autonomy — and how costly that ignorance can be. That alone makes it a worthwhile conversation — even if we have to whisper.
Review by Semyon Vladimirov
Translation by Kevin Rothrock