Сергей Медведев - The Return of the Russian Leviathan

This object was always taboo in Russian culture. When I was a young man it cost two kopecks in the chemist’s, sold in envelopes made of rough, official paper, under the code name, ‘Product No. 2’, and made in the Bakovka Factory for Rubber Products (‘Product No. 1’, of course, was the gas mask). As teenagers, we were too embarrassed to say this word, as if it was a swear word; the sacred word ‘condom’ caused Soviet schoolchildren to catch their breath and speed up their pulse rate; occasionally, we would run to the chemist’s to look at this semi-forbidden fruit tucked away in the corner of the shop window.

We saw a similar flash of discomfort cross the President’s face during his press conference in December 2011 when he was answering a question about the ‘white ribbons’ worn by the opposition movement on their clothes. Faltering, Putin said: ‘To be honest, I think it’s rather inappropriate, but nevertheless I’ll say it: I thought it was publicity for the campaign against AIDS; I thought that they were contraceptives.’ Because of old Soviet habits he, too, couldn’t bring himself to say the taboo word ‘condom’, using instead the neutral euphemism, ‘contraceptive’.

The sanctimonious nature of Soviet culture, in which ‘there was no sex’ (in the famous words of a Soviet woman who was taking part in a tele-bridge between Leningrad and Boston in 1986), is now returning along with other types of Soviet absurdity. The Duma proposed banning advertisements for condoms outside specialized publications. In fact, even without any changes being made, condom adverts have effectively already disappeared from the media and migrated to the Internet. And considering the growth of the campaign in support of having children and promoting the family, almost to the point of introducing high duties for divorce and a suggestion to bring back the Soviet tax on singles and childless families, we cannot exclude the possibility that sooner or later condoms will go the same way as cigarettes: they’ll disappear from open sale at petrol stations and by the checkout in supermarkets and they’ll be hidden away in closed drawers at the chemist’s, where they’ll be available only with special permission. And why not then bring in an age limit for their sale, like for women below forty; or restrict the number of condoms one person can have? If in the new state–church ideology contraception is declared to be a sin, HIV to be God’s punishment and the best way to prevent pregnancy and infection to be self-restraint and marital fidelity, then condoms should be seen as a Western perversion, contradictory to the national traditions of healthy sex; a latex ‘fifth column’, threatening Russia’s demographic security.

Condoms were always considered to be foreign agents in Russia, little French things passed around the aristocracy in the gallant time of Ekaterina, in the period of Voltaire, the Marquis de Sade and Casanova, which, as everyone knows ended with the French Revolution. Two hundred years later in the Russia of the 1990s, they once again became the symbol of liberalization and moral emancipation. Western charities brought them into Russia as humanitarian aid and gave them out to all who wanted them, along with syringes; sex education programmes were introduced in schools and on television; and on Myasnitskaya Street in Moscow a specialized condom boutique opened, offering not the mass-produced condoms you would find in the supermarket, but an individual selection of items. At the same time, a lot of amusing advertisements appeared in the media (such as ‘Come properly to the end of the evening’), which didn’t just sell the product but educated people in their use and quietly got across the idea that you can talk about sex and joke about it, and that sex is fashionable, prestigious and happy.

The condom became as much a part of everyday life as the aspirin or the toothbrush. At the same time, the patriarchal, sanctimonious foundations of post-Soviet society also began to change. According to an All-Russian opinion poll carried out by the Levada Centre in 2012, only 23 per cent of Russians considered premarital sex to be immoral, compared to 29 per cent in 2007 and 42 per cent in 1992. More than half of those asked (55 per cent) considered it acceptable for someone to have more than one partner, while 77 per cent of young people approved of cohabitation, against 30 per cent of the older generation.

Russians’ sexual habits are rather relaxed. According to the annual Global Sex Survey carried out by the research department of the Durex Corporation, Russians have more sexual partners than almost any other country, losing out only to the Austrians. On average, our men will have twenty-eight partners in the course of their lives, while Austrian men will have twenty-nine. Russian women on average have seventeen partners. And 42 per cent of those questioned say that they are totally satisfied with their sex lives, which is higher than in Europe or the USA. Finally, and most importantly, thanks to widespread sexual education and modern methods of contraception, for the last twenty-five years the number of abortions carried out in Russia has been consistently falling (although we still remain the world champions): the annual rate has fallen from six million per year in the 1960s, to four million in 1990, and down to under a million in 2013.

Today’s conservative attack on sexual freedom in Russia goes against these trends. Advertisements for condoms are being banned, sex education lessons in schools are being replaced by the ‘God’s Law’ programme, and social adverts on billboards in the cities aggressively call on people to turn away from the idea of safe sex. The results of this puritanical propaganda could turn out to be completely the opposite of what is intended. They won’t be able to destroy the sexual freedom that people are now used to, but restricting the availability of condoms will lead to widespread unprotected liaisons, as a result of which the number of abortions and sexually transmitted diseases will rise; this will lead to a drop in the reproductive capability of the population, which the conservatives are so zealously fighting for. And this is to say nothing about the proposed bans on advertising and the sale of condoms, which will make people’s lives worse, restrict their choice of sexual practices and scenarios and limit people’s freedom in one of the last areas where the citizen is relatively free from the unsleeping eye of the Tsar – in bed.

It turns out that in that press conference in December 2011, Vladimir Putin was right: in an era of total biopolitical prohibitions, the condom does indeed become a symbol of the opposition and the citizen’s self-awareness. Free citizens choose safe sex; and also they decide themselves whether they have children, without any instructions from above.

I’ve made an important discovery: the ‘worldwide homosexual lobby’ really does exist. And beavering away behind the scenes, it really does rule the world. One warm autumn evening I stood on the corner of Castro Street in San Francisco, right in the heart of the most famous gay quarter in America, not far from the well-known glass-walled ‘Twin Peaks’ gay bar. A mixed crowd was going past, which included the city’s most varied types – gays, transvestites, freaks, queers, old hippies, tramps – and I was surrounded by a large group of curious tourists. There was music playing, police sirens wailing, lights of clubs flashing, rainbow flags hanging from balconies; and the sensation grew that this never-ending carnival of human variety, this display of eccentricity, was the heart and soul of this place, an essential part of the identity of this great City by the Bay.