Why did every communist country ban porn?

So two things we would start off by answering this question. The first is simply that we don’t have knowledge or awareness of every Socialist country that has or currently exists, so make no claims that what we speak of for some applies to others, even if some of this reflects general trends. Second is that the premise is somewhat off, since, as we’ll cover below, there was not uniform, blanket prohibition, and what was and wasn’t allowed varied greatly.

That dispensed with, in the broadest sense, Communist critiques of pornography can be succinctly summed up as “bourgeois, decadent, and reactionary”. It was a gross perversion of proper morality, engendered an “unhealthy stimulation of sexual feelings”, and was a threat to stable, heteronormative, family-centered sexuality that would result in new generations of Young Pioneers.

Nominally feminist in outlook, it was also seen specifically as exploitive and degrading towards women, and the specifically communist twist of that critique in framing it around a profit-driven, Capitalist vice built on the back of victimized women. The rhetoric of critiques could even go further, such as an East German writer in the 1950s who drew on the name of the Nazi-era “Strength Through Joy” program to paint in tinges of Fascism as well.

But while we may see strong rhetoric steeped in the language of class struggle, if we rewind, the origins of Soviet anti-pornography laws are fairly mundane and is quite un-Soviet in genesis. Keep in mind that up through the mid-century, suppression of pornographic material was completely the norm, and while laws, of course, varied in specifics, the Soviets reflected a global norm, and more importantly, their laws exist in large part because of that.

The first decade or so of the USSR lacked specific laws aimed at pornography, even if the non-legislative guidelines given to publishers did explicitly prohibit it. Abroad, in 1923, the League of Nations, of which the USSR was not yet a member, held the International Conference for the Suppression of the Circulation of and Traffic in Obscene Publication.

The result was quite lackluster, the final product not defining pornography and leaving it to the member states, but it did provide some framework, and when the USSR joined the League in 1934, the dutifully passed legislation to meet the requirements the next year. But rather than doing anything particularly new or ‘Soviet’, they simply brushed off the 1910 Tsarist-era legislation, passed in conjunction with the earlier Paris Convention on the Suppression of the Traffic in Obscene Publications, which now became Article 228. No records of the internal meetings for the passage of the law even remain, unfortunately, leaving us little more than the law itself:

The production, circulation or advertising of pornographic works, printed publications, pictures or any other articles [of a pornographic character], and also the trading therein or the possession thereof with the goal of sale or dissemination shall carry with it deprivation of freedom for a term of up to five years with the mandatory confiscation of the pornographic articles and the means of their production.

Some revisions occurred over time, reducing the jail time and adding a fine, not to mention eventually adding a definition – “‘rudely naturalistic, obscene, cynical (tsinichnye) portrayals of sexual life that attempt as their goal the unhealthy stimulation of sexual feelings” – but the law would survive basically in that form past the Soviet collapse, inherited by the Russian Federation.

None of this is to say that pornography didn’t exist in the USSR. Illicit pornography of course existed on the black market, and plenty of evidence abounds to suggest that party bigwigs consumed it eagerly. Especially in the glasnost era, it was practically flooding in for a readership eager to see what the next interview in Playboy might be.

But, nevertheless, it was all quite illegal, not to mention socially decried. One good window into how pornography was viewed would be trials for expulsion from the Party, something not only based on illegal conduct but also moral failings, with interest in (black market, often smuggled in a pipeline from more liberal Eastern Bloc) pornography cited in similar ways to adultery, and abandoning ones’ family.

So while we can point to the fairly mundane origin of prohibitions centered more on state control than specific concerns about immorality, at the same time we also can see the rhetoric that arose around it put into action, and framed around a rather conservative view of family-centered morality and duty.

This was not the case everywhere though, and we’ll look at two interesting counterexamples. First, over in East Germany, nominally they followed quite closely to the Soviet line, with similar condemnations of the decadent filth that porn represented, and how “You should live cleanly and decently and respect your family”, yet they also recognized the reality of demand and the encouragement for smuggling it represented.

The result was Das Magazin, a state-authorized nudie-mag (although, as with American equivalents, it also had a lot of articles, often titillating, also taking a ‘Naturist’ angle) begun in the mid-50s, justified with the nominal argument that carried an appropriately managed message of sexual emancipation, and whether you believe that porn can be or not, it wasn’t wildly different than the American publications so decried such as Playboy, copies of which Das Magazin was provided and they quite consciously emulated at times!

In part, this was something of a requirement. Bordering West Germany and unable to completely stop ‘Westernized’ culture broadcast on TV and radio, authorities had to compromise in a way the Soviets didn’t, even when it came to erotica and nudes. Das Magazin was quite popular too, with nearly half a million subscribers by 1965.

Das Magazin did even briefly attempt to live up to the idea of gender equality – in a way – by including a nude male in a 1954 issue, but it was all but a one-off occurrence, the second man laid bare more than 20 years later. Nevertheless, it does speak to the more mixed audience that Das Magazin sought, and especially in the non-pictorial content, such as a recurring cooking column titled “Love, Fantasy and the Art of Cooking”.

So while to be sure, it shouldn’t be chalked up as a carbon-copy of Playboy or Penthouse, at the same time it also ought to be seen as a compromise between nominal Communist values, and demands for the exotic and erotic, and the billing of Das Magazin as ‘naturalist’ and thus a celebration of the human body, perhaps illustrated best by a letter to the editor in 1970 complementing a nude photo that the writer particularly liked:

This picture speaks directly to me […] it shows all the good things we expect from our young people: cleanness, self-confidence and a bit of real dreaminess […] Naturally I don’t deny that nude photography always has a more or less hefty dose of erotica […] But it all depends on how this is expressed. Perhaps this shows just how relevant the Marxist- Leninist insight of unity of content and form is for photography […] We shall combat the dirty influences of the sorry pornographic efforts of West German imperialism with humanistic and morally formed nude photographs.

Moving a bit south, and also outside the Soviet Bloc, Yugoslavia likewise offers an interesting take on pornography within a Socialist state. The press was considerably less restricted compared to the Communist regimes of the USSR and the Eastern Bloc, and the result was a slate of publications that included nudity, and content that would have been far too pornographic even for the pages of Das Magazin, such as Start, founded in 1969 and which mixed serious journalistic content on some pages with very sexual nude photos on others (as well as a fairly aggressive, toxically masculine humor, joking about domestic violence and gay-bashing), in contrast to the generally natural and subdued nudes of the East German publication, much more directly aping the American styles of Playboy or Penthouse, even reprinting articles found there.

Perhaps most interesting about Yugoslavia though was that the relatively open press meant there was real public debate on pornography, and this was even in the pages of Start itself, which includes content from feminist-identified contributors such as Slavenka Drakulic ́and Vesna Kesic, who brought the debate to the magazines’ pages, and generally argued that it wasn’t necessarily pornography that was harmful to women, but a specific lens, tying the degrading nature of pornography to a “bourgeois morality” which must be eliminated, but not necessarily sexual content, Kesic, for instance, concluding that “feminists do not put pornography on trial because it shows sex and the human body, but because it does it in an unscrupulous and dehumanized way, usually combined with psychological and physical violence against women”.

In theory, at least, they would seem to see a form of pornography that, properly disconnected from Capitalist dehumanization and “bourgeois morality”, would be compatible with Marxist-Feminist values, although remaining heavily critical of it in its current form, and pushing back against anti-Feminist opponents who argued that “via pornography one can become liberated from the slavery of sexuality imposed by the class-based society.”

In any case, though, the very existence of the debate helps to illustrate the relative permissiveness around the medium within Yugoslavia. The government had some oversight, with leeway to warn and fine, and in theory, even, ban publications, but it simply did not exercise anything close to the level of control over sexually charged content as was the case within the Soviet sphere, limited mostly to statements criticizing such salacious content.

So this offers, hopefully, some insight into a few Communist countries, but we would again stress it doesn’t necessarily translate elsewhere. Common themes about decadent bourgeois vices, improper sexual encouragements, and damaging of family morality no doubt can be found in others, but so too in non-Communist countries to various degrees, so despite the inclusion of Marxist rhetoric, shouldn’t always be taken as some uniquely Communist opposition to smut.

And again, whatever the commonalities, they don’t mean that Communist (or other) countries dealt with it the same way. The Soviets were fairly strict and harsh, even if violations and black-market material abounded (Especially by the 1980s), while East Germany allowed some specific outlets such as Das Magazin, and then the in Yugoslavia such content not only could be published but was done so essentially outside government oversight.