When Americans think of Communism in Eastern Europe, they imagine travel restrictions, bleak landscapes of gray concrete, miserable men and women languishing in long lines to shop in empty markets and security services snooping on the private lives of citizens. While much of this was true, our collective stereotype of Communist life does not tell the whole story. Some might remember that Eastern bloc women enjoyed many rights and privileges unknown in liberal democracies at the time, including major state investments in their education and training, their full incorporation into the labor force, generous maternity leave allowances and guaranteed free child care. A comparative sociological study of East and West Germans conducted after reunification in found that Eastern women had twice as many orgasms as Western women. Researchers marveled at this disparity in reported sexual satisfaction, especially since East German women suffered from the notorious double burden of formal employment and housework. In contrast, postwar West German women had stayed home and enjoyed all the labor-saving devices produced by the roaring capitalist economy. But they had less sex, and less satisfying sex, than women who had to line up for toilet paper.

Why Europe? Problems of Culture and Identity pp Cite as. Seven years after the fall of the Soviet Communist Party, which had the emancipation of women as one of its overt aims, it is time to take stock of the contemporary situation of women in post-communist Russia and the former USSR. The discussion presented here makes no claim to be comprehensive, but simply to complement and update previous research Buckley, ; Corrin, ; Posadskaya, ; Marsh, ; Rule and Noonan, , and to stimulate debate on some vital questions.

Writer-director Inara Kolmane is our guide to the weird and often troubling world of Soviet sexual mores. A world where young women were taught nothing about sex but learned how to strip down a Kalashnikov, and where nearly every copy of a tame sex manual for young married couples wound up being fed into a giant furnace. Petersburg to Kiev—meeting sexologists, historians, doctors, artists and ordinary citizens.