Chapter Broadcasting Communist Morality: Sex Education in Soviet Latvia

Abstract

Mass media was an important technology of sexual enlightenment in the Brezhnev-era USSR. In the Latvian SSR, sex education materials positioned medical experts working within the state healthcare system as the chief authority on matters related to both sexual health and sexual morality. Expert knowledge was entangled with broader political programs, as doctors lent their authoritative voices to further state goals, such as prosecuting those who transmitted VD ‘maliciously’ and addressing declining fertility. In this context, medical experts played a key role in the articulation of specificspecificspecificspecific ideas about sexual health that aligned with the pro-natalist priorities of the Soviet government and addressed demographic decline in the western republics of the USSR. The role assigned to doctors at the Latvian Republican VD Dispensary required them to step outside their area of expertise (venereology) and discuss a broad range of issues related to sexual morality and sexual behaviour. Despite the push for mass sex education with the goal of reducing rates of VD, the messages pushed in articles, brochures, lectures, radio broadcasts, and films were often in conflict with the broader public health outcomes that state official officials set out to achieve. In casting syphilis and gonorrhoea as illnesses contracted primarily by amoral and antisocial individuals and constantly reminding their audience about the criminalisation of VD transmission, the sex education materials prepared by staffstaffstaff at Latvia’s Republican VD Dispensary disincentivised seeking treatment within the state healthcare system and likely contributed to high rates of venereal infection