Communist Kinseys

The Soviet Union almost never swings, especially as far as sex is concerned. Scoffing at sexy Western-style romance as a symbol of capitalist decadence, the Communists have imposed an almost Victorian prudery upon the country. Prostitution and pornography are outlawed. Soviet films and television usually portray love in terms of hand-holding affection, and foreign sex flicks are forbidden. There are no beauty contests, no pinup girls, no men's magazines. Sex education is almost entirely limited to a single injunction: don't.

Comes the revelation. For the first time since the 1920s, Russia has produced a sociological study on sexual habits and deportment. Entitled "Youth and Marriage," the report was researched by two Leningrad social scientists, A.G. Kharchev and S.I. Golod, who may well become the Communist Kinseys. From their project emerges a plea for a more rational and open treatment of sex in Soviet society.

The two sociologists based their recommendations on a survey of 620 young men and women in Leningrad. Their findings showed that younger Soviet citizens are considerably more relaxed about sex than the older generation. For example, among students 53% of the males and 38% of the females said that they condoned premarital sex. Attitudes were even more liberal among young graduates who were already earning their own living: 81% of the women felt that premarital relations were in order--as long as the girl was in love.

More than half the women reported having had premarital sexual relations before they were 21. Nearly half the men had between 16 and 18. And for the Russians who did not make the statistics? Nearly half of the men said it was purely for "lack of occasion," a reflection of Russia's severe housing shortage, which affords lovers little opportunity to be alone indoors.

Kharchev and Golod called for revamping "socialist morality" from its present double standard of one code for men and another for women to a realistic new code that would grant both sexes equal freedom and responsibility. They singled out for criticism a recent Soviet film in which the man roughs up his fiancee after he discovers that she is not a virgin. It was none of his business, contend Kharchev and Golod. They recommend that "women should have the right to have premarital and extramarital sex life."

Kharchev and Golod hope that Russia can remedy its rampant divorce rate by adjusting the moral code to the realities of human behavior. Since divorce procedures were simplified in 1965 and again in 1968, the yearly number of dissolved marriages has sharply increased; it doubled in 1969, to about 600,000. The two sociologists place much of the blame on Soviet educators, who still refuse to deal candidly with sex information in the schools. "This is a difficult and sophisticated matter," Kharchev and Golod wrote, "which demands, in a number of cases, education and re-education of educators themselves. To put this matter off or to ignore it would be to jeopardize too much because socialism and Communism are first people, and people originate in marriage and family."

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