The History of Sex
(But Not As We Know It)

'Well, how was it?' my ' friend ' leers afterwards, sitting alone in the bar. (Martina's off screwing another john.) ...

Tramping off to another club, I ask him why Czech women get into prostitution. 'Lazy!' he snorts. 'Most of them are just plain...

Having thrived during the free-market boom of democracy, the Czech sex industry is now experiencing the cut-throat side of capitalism: a mar...

An even bigger mystery is why so many ex-comrades resorted to the world's oldest profession after the fall of the Iron Curtain. The ea...

Visiting the free Czech Republic today, you wonder if it's really what heroines like Horakova would have wished for their country. Af...

For the most part, the protests against the invasion were fatality-free. A unique eyewitness account comes from a sex writer who toured Cz...

And most of the government's reforms were very moderate indeed. As a teenager, Jan Kaplan took advantage of the new freedom to travel...

In late twentieth-century Prague, Bittman says, sexpionage was conducted on a case-by-case basis using known prostitutes. The women's...

Against this backdrop, the Czechs used every dirty trick in the book—inventing many of their own along the way. In one year, 25 of their o...

By the Sixties, though, all that had changed. The Czechs were both physically and psychologically closer to the West than the Soviets, wit...

For straight targets, the most sinister honeytraps involved being framed for rape and threatened with life in a Soviet jail. After Verkhon...

The tale of Claude put a positive spin on the real-life story of John Vassall, one of Britain's infamous Cold War traitors. Lewis reck...

If the KGB's swallows occasionally found their work hard to—well, you know—then pity the poor ravens. A defector called Dimitri Labyav...

The training started with a series of sex films more explicit than anything Vera had ever seen. Still a virgin at eighteen, she had been r...

The most remarkable aspect of Sexpionage was Lewis' interviews with reputed alumni of the KGB's top 'sex school'—or the ...

For Beria , this institutionalized sadism took the form of kidnapping and raping young girls. Professionally, he also turned sex into one ...

Just as the West was settling into the conservativism of the Fifties, Stalin's regime also tried to recast the bourgeois family unit in ...

For his part, the 'Father of the Russian Revolution' appears to have been appalled by the other revolution he'd unwittingly con...

In theory—particularly the Marxist-Leninist variety—it was never meant to turn out that way. In trying to build their secular paradise on ...

Gad's family already knew he was gay when he told them he planned to study in Berlin in 1986. His grandfather was fine about the move;...