Down with Shame society
수치 타도 협회
A radical Soviet nudist movement active in 1924–1925, mainly in Moscow. Holding that only nakedness embodied democracy and equality, its members marched through the streets wearing nothing but a sash reading “Down with shame!”. After Bukharin cited it at a party congress in 1925 as an example of the moral decay of youth, the militia stopped its actions.
In depth
Almost no records of it survive. “Evenings of the naked body” were held in Moscow in 1922, followed by marches in Moscow and Kharkov, and actions are also reported from other cities such as Saratov. Members walked about completely naked or wore only a sash over the shoulder reading “Down with shame!”. Researchers see the movement as one more stage in the collapse of the traditional ideal of masculinity in early Soviet society, after the decline of religion, the decriminalisation of homosexuality and abortion, the recognition of de facto marriage and the declared pursuit of sexual equality.
The writer Natalya Baranskaya linked it in her memoirs to an official policy of uprooting shame as a form of hypocrisy. The memoir of an émigré anti-Soviet leader recalls a speaker in Krasnodar in 1922, naked but for the sash, shouting from a platform “Down with philistinism! Down with priestly deceit! We are children of the sun and the air!” before being beaten, and passengers fleeing a tram, cursing and spitting, when a naked group climbed aboard. At the 14th Party Congress in December 1925 Nikolai Bukharin, attacking Zinoviev’s opposition, named the society as an example of the moral decay of youth, and according to Varlam Shalamov Health Commissar Semashko wrote in Izvestia on the harm to health of going unclothed in a large northern city. The militia firmly suppressed its actions until they stopped entirely.
It appears in Lev Gumilevsky’s novel Dog Lane (1926) and a 1924 satire by Yevgeny Petrov, and in 1994 the Ukrainian director A. Muratov made a film of the same name.