The Twelve Sexual Commandments of the Revolutionary Proletariat
혁명적 프롤레타리아의 12가지 성 계율
A guide to sexual life published in 1924 by the Soviet psychiatrist Aron Zalkind. It demanded abstinence before marriage, monogamy and the choice of partners by class purpose, declaring that sex must in every respect be subordinate to class. Advisory rather than law, it became the standard text that replaced the early revolutionary “glass of water” theory.
In depth
Zalkind gave sexuality great weight in the hygiene of party work. People of his day, he held, suffered from “sexual fetishism” in daily life, which science had to overcome to return sex to its proper channel: “the collective must attract more strongly than the lover.” The commandments, printed in 1924 in Revolution and Youth by the publishing house of the Sverdlov Communist University, were these. First, sexual life should not begin too early among the proletariat.
Second, there must be abstinence until marriage, and marriage only at full social and biological maturity, at 20 to 25. Third, a sexual bond only as the final culmination of deep, all-round sympathy and attachment to the beloved. Fourth, the sexual act only as the last link in a chain of deep and complex experiences binding the lovers. Fifth, the sexual act should not be repeated often.
Sixth, partners should not be changed often. Seventh, love must be monogamous. Eighth, every sexual act must bear in mind the possibility of conceiving a child and the care of offspring. Ninth, sexual selection must follow class and revolutionary-proletarian expediency, without flirting, courtship or coquetry.
Tenth, there must be no jealousy. Eleventh, there must be no sexual perversions. Twelfth, the class has the right, in the interests of revolutionary expediency, to intervene in the sex lives of its members. The point was that the energy of the proletariat as a class should not be squandered on sexual relations useless to its historical mission.
Advisory and educational rather than legislative, the commandments were meant to tame the 1920s wave of sexual liberation and were far from always followed in practice, but they replaced the “glass of water” theory of the first revolutionary years in Soviet ideology, and served the campaign of 1926–1929 against it and against sexual freedom. In 2004 the psychologist Sergei Stepanov remarked that, laughable as they seem today, the official Soviet approach to sex education followed them, the idea of sublimated libido, for over half a century, down to the 1980s quip that “there is no sex in the USSR”. They were reprinted in The Philosophy of Love (1990) and in the magazine Rodina (1995).