On April 8, 1991 Pravda published an article about the 12-th International Symposium of Gravitational Physiology held in Leningrad entitled Love Amongst the Stars. And no, the article was not about international celebrities descending into an orgiastic bender. Rather, it was dedicated to a round table discussion held on the sidelines of the symposium on the theme of Sex in Space moderated by one of Pravda’s own journalists – Andrey Filippov.
The initial question and the answer, reproduced in translation below provide a glimpse into the fast-changing parameters of accepted social discourse in the Soviet Union, albeit in its latter-day, on-the-verge-of-collapse iteration.
The moderator: We have received many letters from our readers, the authors of which are interested in space exploration and the achievements of space medicine and biology, and not only from a practical perspective. … Along with our readers, I am interested in learning more about the following. Sigmund Freud, whose ideas about humans at the time had great influence, once posited that the world is governed by sexuality. [And so] I would like to pose the question in the following manner: Is it possible to disregard this factor now that we find ourselves on the brink of long-distance space travel, for example a mission to Mars? In other words, is it conceivable for astronauts to travel to other planets while completely ignoring their sexual identity?
V. Antipov: I think my answer is the expression of the generally accepted view that until now space biology and medicine have managed just fine without Freud. So, I assume we’ll continue to manage without him. But without sex – no, especially during interplanetary travel.
Though it now reads like part of an elaborate Soviet joke, complete with a punchline, it was anything but. In a sense, it perfectly illustrates how far things had come in the Soviet Union since the time a Soviet housewife from the City of Lenin (Leningrad) proudly and with honest outrage declared, “We have no sex, and we are strictly opposed to it!”—a made for TV moment that gave rise to the now-memefied phrase, There is no sex in the USSR.
“True monogamy,” declared the Soviet magazine Soviet Woman in 1947, “… is possible only in Socialist society, in which the economic and legal oppression of women, prostitution, the decay of the family and sexual laxity, all of them based on private property, disappear.” No private property, no sex. The episode above was the soft proof that not only sex was back in the USSR, the Soviets were ready to catapult it into space! Not for nothing men are from Mars and women from Venus, as the title of the popular American relationship book suggests.
The materials cited in this post are a courtesy of Pravda Digital Archive and Soviet Woman Digital Archive, both of which are available through East View Information Services.