| Review | Journal of Social History, 39.2

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| Review | Journal of Social History, 39.2 | The History Cooperative

REVIEWS

Sexual Revolution in Bolshevik Russia. By Gregory Carleton (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005. 288 pp. $34.95).
This book provides a detailed reading of discussions of sexuality in the Soviet Union in the 1920s. It begins with articles written by communist leaders such as Alexandra Kollontai, Nikolai Semashko (a physician who served as commissar of health), and Anatolii Lunacharskii (the commissar of "enlightenment"), then proceeds to belletristic works. The author, a literature scholar, has augmented his textual analysis with archival research. The result is a study not of sexual practices in the immediate post-revolutionary years, but of what writers and party officials said about those practices.	1
Carleton argues that the 1920s was a period of considerable argument over how sexuality should be dealt with literature. This argument in turn was part of the larger task of developing literary standards for the new Soviet society. Should literature talk about the problems of a disrupted, poverty-stricken reality or should it emphasize positive developments that pointed the way to socialism? This question was particularly likely to arise in criticism of sexually explicit works, of which these were many in the 1920s. Carleton points out that Soviet censors were far more permissive of sexual exploration in literature than their counterparts elsewhere in Europe at the time.	. . .

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