Reddit reviews Village Life in Late Tsarist Russia (Indiana-Michigan Series in Russian & East European Studies (Paperback))

In detail:

I summarized the problem above, but here is a breakdown of each terrible, offensive and inaccurate paragraph.

Some problems:

> It is important to make clear first that Soviet people did not have any bedrooms -- at least the majority of population. At best, couples slept in one of two or three communal rooms, without any privacy at all. Many more lived and slept in the same room with their children and/or elderly parents.

Many apartments had bedrooms. The rooms weren’t purely communal. There were communal apartments, and they were the most cramped, but they weren’t just a room full of people. Also, they were gradually phased out over time, so there were less people in them by the end of the USSR than say, in the 1930s. However, it is true that they were cramped. A communal apartment was essentially a shared kitchen/bathroom space with each family unit getting their own room or rooms. If you had two rooms, then you could use one as a living room/sleeping room for the children and one as a bedroom for the parents.

If you had one room in a kommunalka or a one-room apartment (a studio in Western-speak), then you would be sharing space with any children. However, many people had at least two-room apartments (bedroom and living room). This allowed parents to sleep in one area and children in the other. More relatives in the house could make things more cramped, but in general it was not everyone all in one room never having sex.

> Since grown-up children lived as a rule with their parents, it was almost impossible to have a "trial" marriage in Russia. Of course some people still engaged in premarital sexual relations, but it was sex in a hurry, in the most inconvenient and inappropriate places.

Getting new housing was not very easy, so young people did tend to stay with their parents prior to marriage if they did not move for study or work. I’m not sure what the author means by trial marriage but it is true that unmarried couples living together were not as common as they are today. People could have sex but it is true that they couldn’t spend days naked. Older people found it easier to live together, sometimes for decades, particularly during times when divorce was more difficult so getting free of an ex was not easy.

> An amorous couple couldn't even find respite in a hotel room for an evening. The hotel and motel business was badly underdeveloped. Hotels did not have enough rooms even for visitors from other cities, much less local couples in search of privacy. Besides, they allowed only registered couples to stay in the same room. A marriage certificate was required when renting a room.

The availability of a hotel room depends on the era of the Soviet Union. There was a lot of construction over the decades and getting a room was easier in 1980 than in 1940. However, the registration/permission to travel/morals code issue was a challenge. I don’t know if an actual certificate was required – that sounds fishy - but an internal passport was and that would show your last names. Another issue was cost. Another again was being seen as acting badly could damage career or academic prospects.

> Other roadblocks included the official puritanical policy of the socialist government regarding sex

Again this varies by era. The early Soviet Union was quite free with sex. One radical even said “changing sexual partners should be as easy as sipping a glass of water.” Under Stalin things got more conservative, in part to increase the birth rate and in part as part of larger efforts to control the population and develop proper socialist ways of living.

> a complete lack of information about sexual relations and contraceptives
Contraceptives were largely unavailable, although condoms did exist in small quantities. [Abortion was illegal some of the time but was still common](
http://www.amazon.com/Revolution-Of-Their-Own-History/dp/0813333660)

> rampant alcoholism, abusiveness, and selfishness among Russian men.

There was a drinking problem in Russia/the USSR and although rates are going down, they are still high compared to some other places. It is very unfair and relying on lazy stereotypes to say that most Soviet men were abusive and selfish drunks however. A more accurate thing to say is that most men were about as fine as they are anywhere, so mostly OK, but that women were in a challenging situation thanks to a combination of factors. Part of it was the challenges of Soviet life. Getting goods and services required effort. Another was WWII. Many men died, leaving women with fewer options and having to put up with more if they wanted to maintain a relationship. On top of that was the rise of women’s roles in the workplace, but the survival of women’s roles when it came to working in the home (and men’s when it came to not).

However, these are not issues that may have made sex or good relationships impossible by any means.

> Even before the Revolution, Russia had been a puritanical country on the question of sex. In the lower classes, sex had only one function -- conception and the birth of a child.

This is not true when it comes to actual village life how it was lived. Young villagers did have relationships and on occasion even had sex and a child. It was the small middle class that subscribed most to these ideas of sexual morality. However, I do not believe that this ended sex for them. I do not have any direct data, but I have read contemporary research on attitudes in sex among the stereotypical anti-sex women – those from Victorian England, and they mostly reported liking it very much, and avoiding it only to avoid having too many children. I would imagine that many middle class married Russian women felt the same.

> There are many days in the Orthodox calendar when sexual relations are not permitted. Monasticism and hermitage were widespread. Sexual chastity was considered fundamental to human purity.

This was more true in the 16th century and earlier. Not any time which the author is claiming to explain.

> If a girl lost her virginity before marriage, or gave birth to an unwed child, she was guaranteed a miserable and disgraced existence. Such girls often committed suicide, preferring death to eternal shame.

This is just someone making things up based on their understanding of stereotypes. See my link above to a good source on how this was not true for the largest group of people – serfs/villagers. It wasn’t something to be proud of, but not cause for total ostracism and suicide.

> Russians' history of chastity in sexual relations finds its expression in the Russian language. In it, there are no proper words to describe sexual intercourse and other aspects of sexual relations. There are either obscenities or clinical terms -- nothing in between. Even highly educated people in past centuries used the much richer and more figurative French language when discussing intimate relations. "Goodness! How can we say this in Russian?" they wondered.

There are words for sex in Russian.

Highly educated people mostly did speak French better than Russian and although I do not speak French, I would not be surprised to learn that the French have more words for types of sex than many other languages.

> talking about sex has not been considered a proper topic of open conversation in Russia. Even now traditional girls feel awkward when they have to discuss such -- as they call them -- "ticklish" subjects.

This is true. I do not think that it is special to Russia however, or that it somehow shows that people in the USSR/Russia had less sex than anywhere else.