Soviet Union -- Biography; Soviet Union -- History -- Revolution, 1917-1921
2. In the form of secret earnings.
The first form is very slightly developed and is of slight extent.
In Petrograd, for example, where raids were undertaken against
prostitutes, this mode of combating prostitution practically
yielded no results. The second form, although highly developed in
other countries, also assumes a great variety of forms in Russia.
Prostitution is practised by Soviet employees, in order to obtain for
the sale of caresses, boots that go up to the knees; prostitution is
resorted to by mothers of families, working women, peasant women,
who are out after flour for their children and sell their bodies to
the manager of the rations division in order to obtain from him a
full bag of the precious flour. Sometimes the girls in the Offices
associate with their male superiors, not for manifestly material
gain, for rations, shoes, etc., but in the hope of advancement in
office. And there is an additional form of prostitution--“careerist
prostitution”--which is also based in the last analysis on material
gain.
The Commission made this recommendation after many hot debates: “All
persons wandering in the streets and deserting their work should be
assigned to the Commissariat of Social Welfare and thus sent out,
in accordance with general fundamental considerations, either to
the Sections for the Distribution of Labor Power of the People’s
Commissariat of Labor, or to courses, sanatoria, hospitals, and only
after a repeated desertion by a prostitute, in other words, after a
malicious effort to desert, should the individual be subjected to
forced labor. There is no special culpability attached to prostitutes.
They are in no way to be segregated from the other bodies of deserters
from work. This is a revolutionary and important step, worthy of the
first Workers’ Republic of the world.”
That such a liberal attitude is really effective is proven by the
fact that in Soviet Russia to-day there is less prostitution than
anywhere else in the world. Under the Tsar, Russia was known as the
most disgraceful country in this respect. And Kollontai says, “There is
no doubt that the poor, insufficient pay for female labor continues,
in Soviet Russia, to serve as a chief factor. Under the law the
earnings of men and women are equal, but the great majority of women
are unskilled laborers. It resolves itself into a question of how to
make female labor skilled labor. And the second case is the political
backwardness of women. It is not the woman who is inspired and carried
away by the idea of the revolution and the desire to aid reconstruction
who falls into this pool of degradation.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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