8 - Victim or villain? Prostitution in post-revolutionary Russia

Summary

One of the posters produced in the early 1920s by the Moscow Provincial Soviet of Trade Unions shows a grim industrial town, and a crowd of downtrodden women shuffling from left to right, shawls round their shoulders, kerchiefs over their heads; in the foreground a group of plump men of the bourgeoisie stand and leer. Its central characters are a young man and a young woman: he, disproportionately large, holds in his left hand a hammer, sign of his membership of the proletariat; she, small-scale and dejected, is clearly in need of assistance – and indeed, the worker is holding out his free arm to her in a gesture of fraternal solicitude. The text reinforces this visual image of the prostitute as victim: ‘By destroying capitalism the proletariat destroys prostitution. Prostitution is a great misfortune for humanity. Worker take care of the woman worker.’ The date of publication was 1923, two years after the introduction of the New Economic Policy; the country was still recovering from the economic and social chaos of revolution, civil war and famine, and for the working class faced with a housing crisis, low wages and high unemployment, life was hard. It was particularly hard for women, many of whom had to support themselves and their families in conditions of a shrinking job market. The alarming level of redundancies among the female labour force appeared, albeit as a minor item, on party and trade union agendas.