The History of Sex: Prague -- Sexpionage, Soviet-Style -- (Chapter X, Part 5)

For Beria, this institutionalized sadism took the form of kidnapping and raping young girls.

Professionally, he also turned sex into one of the KGB's most advanced weapons against the West.

'By using specially trained prostitute spies and combining their skills with the latest technological advances, the Soviet secret service has achieved the most refined form of sexpionage possible,' declared the author of what is in turn one of the most fascinating books from the Cold War era.

In Sexpionage: The Exploitation of Sex by Soviet Intelligence, David Lewis claimed to expose how the KGB trained its agents for work that was literally undercover—revealing, for instance, that the Russians called male sex spies 'ravens' and females… 'swallows.'

Though Lewis was billed as 'one of Britain's leading investigative reporters' in 1976, there's no way his book could have been completely accurate, simply because of its timing and the top-secrecy of its subject.

What's more, the photo on the jacket—a Caucasian jezebel beneath a Soviet flag bedcover—makes you wonder if it should carry a 'Warning: Parts of this book may have been sexed up.'

So more than thirty years afterwards, I tracked down the author to find out. Having documented Commie-v-Capitalist spy gadgets during the Cold War—my fave is the American 'breast transmitter' that fit under a fake nipple—Lewis is now a neuropsychologist who uses brain sensors to advise multinationals on how consumers think as they shop.

Back when he was researching Sexpionage, he tells me, it was hard to assess the information he dug up.

'I think a lot of it was exaggerated—not through my desire—but simply by what I was being told,' he says candidly.

'You just didn't know who to trust. Everybody could've been spinning you a yarn.'

The History of Sex: Prague -- Sex with Crocodiles in the USSR -- (Chapter X, Part 4)

Just as the West was settling into the conservativism of the Fifties, Stalin's regime also tried to recast the bourgeois family unit in the Soviet mold, instituting what Stern mockingly refers to as 'the reign of virtue.'

'Young Pioneers' vowed to stay 'pure in thought, word and deed,' while novelists and filmmakers cranked out heroic tales of Soviet supermen and women who saved their energies for the Party, resisting sex—and the temptation of marrying someone from a dubious (bourgeois) background.

'If you want to be like me--just train!'
A Soviet poster from 1951

A university tract on Youth and the Revolution declared that 'to be sexually attracted to a being who belongs to a different class which is hostile and morally alien is just as much a perversion as it would be to feel sexual attraction for a crocodile or an orangutang.'

Personally, I'd go with the orangutang.

In private, however, the new Party elite were far from abstemious.

Beria, the chief of Stalin's secret police, had cut his teeth in the Cheka, the forerunner of the KGB.

The 'Chekists' were loathed by ordinary Soviets, and Stern gives a good idea why.

The poster for Chekist,
a Russian movie from 1992

The mother of one of his patients was a peasant who left the countryside during the great famine of the early 1920s, a time when people in the Volga region had supposedly resorted to eating children to survive.

While she was at the train station, an armed Chekist bullied her into accompanying him home, and she consented, thinking he would at least give her a crust of bread if she had sex with him.

Instead, 'he ordered her to strip—and gave her to his dog.'

After his pet had his way with her, the Chekist kicked her onto the street, without any food or money.

The History of Sex: Prague -- The USSR's Bureau of Free Love -- (Chapter X, Part 3)

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

Lenin confided to a comrade that the 'the so-called new sexuality of our young people and adults alike often seems to be merely petty bourgeois, like a version of the fine old bourgeois institution of the brothel.'

Lenin himself ended his days chaste and childless—Stern reckons 'the Communist titan was in fact a sexual pygmy'—and his successor eventually forced the USSR to do a U-turn on its disastrous (and often contradictory) sex laws.

By encouraging copulation, the Bolsheviks had hoped to boost the population.

One of the letters in the Erotic Alphabet designed by
Soviet artist Sergey Merkurov in 1931,
supposedly to combat illiteracy

An early Communist decree in Vladimir had ruled that 'from the age of eighteen all young women are hereby declared to be the property of the state,' requiring them 'to register, on pain of the strictest prosecution, with the Bureau of Free Love.'

When it came to choosing a spouse, frisky Vladimirians were allowed to pick a new one each month, with any offspring deemed 'property of the state.'

Paradoxically, in 1920, the Soviet Union had also become the first major country since antiquity to legalize abortion, effectively making it the birth control of choice.

By 1934, the ratio of abortions to live births was three to two in the countryside—and three to one in Moscow.

With Stalin purging Soviets almost as fast as the proletariat could pump them out, however, the USSR soon outlawed abortion (and homosexuality) and scrapped 'divorce postcards' in favor of red tape and taxes.

By the end of World War Two, the government had started lauding heavy breeders as 'Heroine Mothers,' and a survivor of the gulag recalled that male and female prisoners in his camp were suddenly allowed to commingle; the resultant bastards were spirited away—to be trained as policemen.