The History of Sex: Prague -- 'A Lot of Clients Don't Like Stretchmarks' -- (Chapter X, Part 30)

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

'She was gorgeous.'

'Were you happy with the service?'

'Yeah. She was gorgeous.'

That's my line, and I'm sticking to it.

And anyway, John pretty much fills in the rest of my hour for me: 'Did she give you a shower? Was she enthusiastic? Because some of them just lie there. Was she shaved? They're very clean, don't you think?'

I nod knowingly.

'What was the name of that girl again? Linda? I'll have to remember her: Twenty-four. Lives in Prague. No kids—and no scars or anything?'

I couldn't say, but the best answer is probably no.

'Good. No stretchmarks. A lot of clients don't like that.'

Sweet Paradise club: Catering to pigs

I can't help but feel sleazy. Just one night of this warps me; maybe that's what happened to the nice guy John used to be.

At my insistence, though, we round out the night by returning to Wenceslaus Square and an upscale strip club that used to be a Communist hangout.

Ladislav Bittman told me he took the KGB's chief of disinformation to the Alhambra during a night on the town in 1965, joking that by leaving their panties on, the girls had performed a 'socialist striptease.'

But even that was too decadently Czech for the visiting Soviet. 'During the first break indicated he was ready to return to the embassy.'

The History of Sex: Prague -- Bliss Without Risk? -- (Chapter X, Part 19)

At present, though, you could be forgiven for mistaking the modern 'heart of Europe' for its throbbing groin.

The Czech Republic ranks not only as one of the world's biggest sources of trafficked women (and children) but also a major destination and transit country, with 'Romeo spies' having been replaced by 'loverboy' pimps who seduce girls into prostitution.

And whereas a British prime minister once betrayed Czechoslovakia to the Nazis by calling it 'a small country about which we know nothing,' nowadays hordes of British, German and American tourists fly into Prague to get to know it in the Biblical sense.

FROM BIG BROTHER TO BIG SISTER

Many aid agencies work from the premise that the sex trade is simply a fact of life.

'Bliss Without Risk' is a catchy name, but it seems an odd choice for a group trying to help prostitutes (surely most of the 'bliss' they encounter is male-oriented).

In its fight against sex diseases, the charity distributes comic books that are so graphic, they could be called 'How to Be a Whore,' complete with pictures of infected penises and blowjobs, handjobs and hotdogging.

Meanwhile, would-be prostitutes have a plethora of job opportunities, including specialist agencies like 'Oral Without Condom' and a club that's put a postmodern twist on the Big Brother sexpionage of yore: at the BigSister brothel, punters pay a cover fee of €10 for toiletries, but the sex is free—provided they sign a contract allowing BigSister to broadcast the video footage on the World Wide Web.

One client in 2008 was a lardy socialist from Scotland, a former candidate for the Solidarity party.

'Yes I did it,' he told The News of the World, 'but I was drunk.'

In other words, sex is so cheap in Prague, they're virtually giving it away.

The History of Sex: Prague -- 'The Most Atheistic Country in Europe' -- (Chapter X, Part 18)

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 easiest explanation seems to be that prostitution (and human trafficking) have always thrived in Central Europe—an early Czech feminist opened a local branch of the International Bureau for the Suppression of Traffic in Women immediately after World War One.

It could be that the reopening of the borders after 1989 simply gave women and the men who prey on them more opportunity to ply their trades.

But there's more to it than mere logistics.

As with Spain's cultural revolution during the 'Me Decade,' the former satellites of the USSR had the misfortune of playing catch-up at a time when the 'Greed is Good' ethos was all the rage in Western society.

Both Britain and America had produced more than a few 'robber barons' in their time, but even the Carnegies and Rockefellers felt compelled to throw some money at philanthropy, if only as a hedge on hellfire and damnation.

Fast forward a century later, and rather than capitalism with a human face, the former Soviet bloc has gotten capitalism without a conscience.

According to czech-bride.com,
'The Heart of European Union countries is truly Czech Republic.'

Communist rule degraded sex into a tonic for boredom, an impotent protest against the system, and even a currency in its own right, while simultaneously dispensing with religion.

Traditionally, Czech national identity had revolved around religious figures like St. Wenceslaus and Jan Hus, yet the Czech Republic now vies with other former Soviet satellites as the least religious country in Europe.

As many as three out of four Czechs are agnostics or atheists—a statistic that horrifies US missionaries who've parachuted in to 'save' the country (much like Western feminists).

'The Czechs say they're the most atheistic country in Europe, and they say it with some pride,' an emissary for the Catholic Church told a US newspaper.

'This is how Western civilization may look in fifty years.'

The History of Sex: Prague -- #FeminismFail -- (Chapter X, Part 17)

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

After the Velvet Revolution ousted the Communists, Czechoslavakia was invaded by American do-gooders preaching Westernized feminism.

They were shocked to find that many of their newly liberated sisters just wanted to get back to hearth and home.

'One of the most puzzling trends in post-1989 Czechoslovakia has been the expressed desire of women to withdraw from the world of work into the world of the household, domesticity and the family,' noted one academic amid the forest of research on the subject.

A spoof poster from Prague's Museum of Communism

In reality, the reasons were fairly obvious.

For the most part, Czech women (and men) were fed up with '–ists' and '–isms,' and the novelty of slaving away in a day job had long since worn off for many rank-and-file females.

The USSR was so 'liberated' it even had all-female construction crews, including one of Dr. Stern's patients, who orgasmed up to ten times a day from her jackhammer but still couldn't understand why she got depressed when she changed jobs.

Long before their supposedly more advanced Western sisters, Czech women had realized that 'liberation' wasn't all it was cracked up to be—especially when men expected them to work full time and still do more than their fair share at home.

In fact, a far more interesting question—largely ignored by academics—is how women in the East and West have wound up reaching similar conclusions despite taking such different paths.

The History of Sex: Prague -- 'The State is Pimp' -- (Chapter X, Part 16)

For the most part, the protests against the invasion were fatality-free.

A unique eyewitness account comes from a sex writer who toured Czechoslovakia before, during and after the Prague Spring.

Mankoff's Lusty Europe is a vintage sex guide, one of those books you can't believe was ever published, let alone in 1972—and by a reputable publisher.

Having already ventured behind the Iron Curtain into East Berlin, author 'Allan Mankoff' (rhymes with…) also trawled the streets of Prague.

'There are no apparent pimps,' he concluded. 'The State is pimp.'

Dolled-up 'Tuzex girls' would sleep with foreigners for hard currency to buy Western luxuries in state-run 'Tuzex' stores.

One 'beautiful young coed' was selling herself for thirty dollars a night. 'The Soviet Union will never let us go… and so, I shall sleep with a hundred men and then I shall have enough money to go to England.'

Mankoff also described the tense scene as a schoolgirl mooned Russian troops in the Old Town.

'For a frightening instant, one young guard who looks no more than seventeen teases the nipple of her heaving breast with his bayonet. Then he lowers it, grins, says something dirty in Russian, and the girl runs off in the direction of the macabre, death-mask likeness of Kafka which marks his former residence.'

One of the main goals of the Prague Spring had been to force the Party to punish those responsible for the purges and show trials of twenty years earlier.

The media had taken advantage of its freedom to try to rehabilitate a little-known martyr of democracy and genuine heroine of postwar Europe.

Milada Horakova had fought against the Nazis and spent nearly five years in concentration camps.

Horakova defending herself at her trial

After the War, she resigned from parliament to protest against the Communist coup.

Accused of conspiring against the regime, she was arrested, tortured and sentenced to death in 1950.

Her last words under the gallows were: 'I have lost. I die like a soldier—with honor. I love my country and its people… I wish for you… I wish…'

And then the hangman cut her dead.

'The Communists did what the Nazis never dared to do. On June 27th, 1950, Milada Horakova was hanged.'
You can read this Cold War 'comic book' about her life here.

* * *

The History of Sex: Prague -- Premature Perestroika -- (Chapter X, Part 15)

And most of the government's reforms were very moderate indeed.

As a teenager, Jan Kaplan took advantage of the new freedom to travel to visit London.

He describes the Prague Spring as typically Czech, comparing it with the attempts by national hero Jan Hus to gradually change the Catholic Church from within a century before the Reformation—a statue of the martyred reformer is one of Prague's landmarks.

Student Jan Palach committed suicide by self-immolation in Wenceslaus Square
to protest the crushing of the Prague Spring.
This still is from Burning Bush, a Czech miniseries set in the era. 

'You can't live in central Europe and be landlocked and hope to change things except from within,' Kaplan says.

'The Czechs were developed, and the Russians were peasants, with an almost feudal form of control in the way that they implemented Socialism. The Czechs could have done it far more elegantly,' he adds wistfully.

That may be, but the Russians realized that their template for undermining democracy now threatened to break up the Communist bloc.

In August 1968, the Soviets decided to crush the 'premature perestroika,' and the Red Army that had once liberated Prague returned to shackle it.

The History of Sex: Prague -- The Last Chance for Communism -- (Chapter X, Part 14)

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

The women's motives had nothing to do with patriotism; they did it to score cash or avoid jail.

Officially, prostitutes were 'social parasites'—not for having sex, but for living off the state—but they could stay on the game if they worked for the police.

Brothels would be rigged a la Salon Kitty or luxury hotel suites would be kitted out with secret cameras to film dignitaries' indignities.

Although the Eastern bloc may have used sexpionage more, Bittman says the West also used dirty tricks—in fact, he puts the split at seventy-thirty.

'Western intelligence services, including the Americans and the British, used the same methods. But I think some of the Soviet bloc authorities overestimated the potential to recruit people based on sexual entrapment. Gradually, in the Sixties and even in the Seventies and Eighties, when I was not involved anymore, this method became rather secondary.'

Mainly because of changes in Western attitudes toward sex.

When he defected, Bittman was working as a press attaché/spy at the embassy in Vienna.

'Every trip home was a distressing experience,' he writes. 'Czechoslovakia, once a highly developed country, had become the victim of economic and political mismanagement and a paradise for idlers and empty-headed babblers.'

Good TV interview with Larry Bittman; 
great footage of Prague and Vienna during the Cold War

At the beginning of 1968, though, there had been real hope for change.

With the initial blessing of the Kremlin, a mild-mannered reformist took power in Czechoslovakia, beginning the ill-fated experiment known as the 'Prague Spring.'

Contrary to popular misconception, Bittman notes that the Czech reform movement 'was neither anti-socialist nor anti-Communist. Many Communists who took part in the democratization process considered it the last chance for communism in Czechoslovakia.'

The History of Sex: Prague -- Interview with a Spy -- (Chapter X, Part 13)

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 operatives carried out over 100 campaigns around the world, a success rate that impressed even the KGB.

Sitting in Bittman's office overlooking the Vltava, the Soviets' supreme head of disinformation surveyed a file of Western newspaper clippings containing Communist propaganda.

'If they did not have press freedom,' he remarked, 'we would have to invent it for them.'

To try and clean up the mess he helped create, Bittman took a job as a journalism professor in the US after his defection, changing his name in the process.

With some sleuthing of my own, I manage to find the former spy living in retirement.

Now in his late seventies, he's initially reluctant to talk about the bad old days, though he eventually agrees to speak with me on the phone.

Obviously, I'm very enthused about this—it's like getting to talk with a real-life baddie from a Bond film (Connery era), complete with domed skull and piranha underbite.

Imagine my disappointment, then, when the spy who came in from the cold pours cold water on the Sex School for Spies story.

'I don't think there was a school for this kind of job,' Bittman tells me. 'From a strictly professional point of view, there's always a very strict security protection in the recruitment of an agent, even if it is a prostitute.'

If you had schools, he reasons, 'this would mean that there would be a class of thirty prostitutes, and they would know each other. That is not professional.'

However, he notes that the set-up may have been different at the KGB: the Soviets thought sexual indiscretions were highly compromising, whereas the Czechs were harder to shock.

After all, Czechoslovakia was where Casanova retired to write his memoirs and where archeologists found the oldest ceramic figurine in the world, the pendulous-bosomed 'Venus of Vestonice,' dating from 27,000 BC.

The History of Sex: Prague -- Sex and Communism -- (Chapter X, Part 12)

By the Sixties, though, all that had changed.

The Czechs were both physically and psychologically closer to the West than the Soviets, with easier access to new ideas.

Whereas those born before the Communist coup tended to be true believers, the younger generation knew that Socialist rhetoric rarely matched social reality.

'I don't remember anyone having any qualms about hopping into bed with one another,' says Jan Kaplan, a Czech émigré.

'Part of the allure of collective farms and summer projects was that they were fuckfests: "To hell with bourgeois ideas of chastity; let's have a lot of sex!" How did you get young people to build factories for free? Because at the end of the day, they got to fuck themselves silly.'

Jan Kaplan was also a consultant for
Prague's Museum of Communism

Not surprisingly, then, Prague flourished as a center of sexpionage during the Cold War.

Che Guevara partied there with Fidel Castro's brother while trying to broker an arms deal for Cuba.

According to their official minder, both the Czechs and the Russians viewed Che as 'an anarchist,' while Raul Castro—now the president of Cuba—'was no laggard in debauchery:' 'Every night I went with him to some nightclub, where we would stay drinking and dancing with the hostesses until the small hours. I would also procure blonde girls for him to sleep with—he was obsessed with blondes.'

Che Guevara's lived in Prague for a few months in 1966
before setting off on his ill-fated trip to Bolivia
(Source: Czech news site)

To find out more about the heyday of sexpionage, I've decided to try and track down one of the last veterans of the era.

Like many top Czech spies, Ladislav Bittman defected to the West after Soviet troops crushed the 'Prague Spring' of 1968, a doomed attempt to reform the Communist bloc from within.

In The Deception Game, written shortly afterwards, the former deputy chief of 'Department D,' describes how he helped pioneer the field of disinformation.

'For a long time I was a disciplined Communist intelligence officer, speaking the same language and thinking along the same ideological lines as my fellow officers, praying with them to the same god named Lenin, admiring the majestic panoramas of the Charles Bridge and Prague's Hradcany Castle from the headquarters of the Czechoslovak intelligence service.'

The spies' HQ was actually a former monastery kept intact by the Communists because of its artistic value.

'As a result, Party and official meetings took place in the monastery's chapel, where portraits of melancholy saints looked down from the walls.'

The former spooks' HQ
(the dark facade beneath the dome)

The History of Sex: Prague -- Puritanical Communists -- (Chapter X, Part 11)

For dirty tricks abroad, the Soviets liked to use their satellite spy network in Czechoslovakia, 'the aristocrat of all the Communist intelligence services.'

With its location in the heart of Europe, Czechoslovakia had always been a bridge between East and West, making it more cosmopolitan, prosperous and liberal than the rest of the Soviet bloc.

Its first democratic president, Tomas G. Masaryk, had been a former spook whose spies sided with the Allies during World War One; in 1918, he signed Czechoslovakia's declaration of independence in Philadelphia at the same table used by Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin in 1776.

And in a nod to women's rights, the founder had also added his American wife's surname to his own: the 'G' stood for Garrigue.

Tragically, the Allies had tried to avoid a Second World War by gifting the tiny democracy to Hitler.

Unappeased, the Führer entrusted its subjugation to Reinhard Heydrich, an SS chief who'd helped engineer the Night of the Long Knives, chaired the committee on the Holocaust and masterminded the Salon Kitty project in Berlin.

'May 1945': A Czech poster
commemorating the victory over the Nazis '

When Czechoslovakia was finally liberated, the Red Army captured Prague first, and the Soviets quickly set about undermining democracy.

The Czech foreign minister—Masaryk's son—was one of the democrats who died mysteriously during the Communists' (relatively) bloodless coup, which became the blueprint for subverting democracies in the West.

And after briefly flirting with sexual excess as 'a provocation of bourgeois society,' Czechoslovakia soon pursued the Soviet ideal of 'Socialist puritanism.'

'In the early Fifties, we were more puritanical than in the West,' scoffs Jirina Siklova, a Czech feminist who came of age during the Stalinist era.

As a teenager, she remembers building a bridge as part of a Socialist youth brigade.

At night the sexes were strictly segregated: any boys or girls caught sneaking over to the other side were dismissed and officially blackballed for leading a 'bourgeois lifestyle.'

The History of Sex: Prague -- The Breaking Point -- (Chapter X, Part 10)

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

After Verkhonoye, Vera's first assignment was to seduce an American businessman in Moscow.

She was given a job as a chambermaid at the man's hotel and 'accidentally' walked in on him while he was showering.

He offered to show her a good time in bed, and as soon as he'd finished, two KGB men posing as hotel security broke through the door.

Vera started to scream that the man had raped her.

While the goons pummeled him, the man begged her to tell the truth, but she swore she'd been attacked.

Behold, the nipple transmitter!
In Sexpionage, David Lewis writes: 'If a female undercover agent wears fake nipples fitted with radio equipment, even the most intimate body search won't reveal that she's wired for sound. Powered by body heat, the nipple's chip transmitter with microphone is said to have a range of several hundred feet.'

'Then, suddenly, they all began to laugh,' Vera said.

'The American got up and pulled on his clothes, saying to me in Russian that I was very good in bed. It was a final examination, and I passed successfully. Even while I believed that the man was an innocent victim, his whole life threatened with ruin, I felt nothing for him… A man was merely a target, to be rapidly assessed and then dealt with.'

Then she added a quote that's almost too good to be true.

'By the time our training was completed, we were hard, cynical, sophisticated young women capable of bedding any heterosexual man and providing him with the time of his life.'

And here's a close-up.
On his website from his days as a photojournalist,
Lewis shows how to make a nipple transmitter 

In time, however, Vera's pillow talk with Westerners made her doubt her indoctrination.

In 1963, she was ordered to bed a French student who was due to marry an aristocratic girl back home.

The boy was very much in love with his fiancée and initially resisted Vera.

However, she eventually seduced him.

The KGB showed him the photos and threatened to derail his marriage unless his father, a major figure in mining, handed them commercial intelligence.

'The boy said he needed time to think it over,' Vera said. 'The same afternoon he walked in front of a car near Red Square and was killed. Perhaps it was an accident. But it was the breaking point for me.'

* * *

The History of Sex: Prague -- Gay Honeytraps -- (Chapter X, Part 9)

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 reckons a raven from Verkhonoye helped blackmail Vassall.

A gay man from a good family, the embassy attaché was invited to a party in Moscow where he was photographed sleeping naked with a man.

Back in London, he agreed to steal official documents for the Soviets from his office overlooking the back garden of No. 10 Downing Street.

In fact, if a similar plot had worked, Communist puppetmasters would have pulled the strings at No. 10 itself.

In his memoir, a former spy named Josef Frolik recounted how one of his colleagues at the Czechoslovakian Embassy in London spent two years trying to trap a Conservative who 'was not markedly heterosexually inclined.'

The Tory was unmarried and a keen musician, so the Czechs arranged for a bisexual organist from Moravia to visit London and bump into him at recitals.

As they chatted, the British MP mentioned that he'd like to play the organ at the Church of St. James in Prague.

The Czechs immediately invited him to visit—the idea being that once he was there, the Tory would also take a turn on the Moravian's organ.

Unfortunately, 'at the last moment, some wise member of British Counter-Intelligence warned the would-be organist that someone waiting for him in Prague was prepared to play another kind of tune.'

Sexually ambiguous to the end, Ted Heath went on to become Prime Minister (only to be posthumously 'outed' by a gay Tory in 2007).

The History of Sex: Prague -- 'Their Trade is Treachery' -- (Chapter X, Part 8)

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

A defector called Dimitri Labyav told Western debriefers that he'd been instructed to seduce only middle-aged women, given the surplus of unmarried female secretaries in Western Europe after the War.

'To have sex with a pretty girl is easy, but being passionate to order with a frigid spinster takes skill,' he noted, no doubt eliciting sympathetic nods from his interviewers.

Labyav's first hands-on lesson at Verkhonoye came in the form of a Russian peasant who was 'ugly, uncouth and unwashed.'

For some of his gay cadres (who had been blackmailed into service), having to make love to women as old as their mothers was too much.

'Two of them committed suicide during my stay there.'

A WISER, IF SORER, MAN

By the 1960s, sexpionage had become such a problem for the West that it featured in a cautionary MI5 booklet.

As its title indicates, Their Trade is Treachery is written in a lock-jawed, humorless style that's often unintentionally funny now.

Contrary to the fictional womanizing of James Bond, gay entrapment appears to have been more of a peril for the British than hetero honeytraps.

Case No. 1 tells the story of 'Claude Robinson'—'a man who liked the Russians'—and learned the hard way about vodka: 'Claude gulped a great deal'—especially when he was 'subjected to a homosexual assault,' then photographed and blackmailed.

In the case study, he promptly reports the incident to the embassy and is whisked out of the country a wiser, if sorer, man.

In reality, though, reporting a sexual indiscretion to your superiors wasn't that easy: a forced return from a foreign posting was a black mark on any diplomatic or corporate career, and if that threat didn't work, the KGB could always post the photos to your family or the media.

The History of Sex: Prague -- How to Train a Sex Spy -- (Chapter X, Part 7)

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 raised by an aunt who was very religious.

In subsequent sessions, the girls were ordered to strip for each other and watch a couple have sex in front of them, while an instructor in a white coat narrated their technique.

Then the girls had to undress for a trio of male instructors who ended up fondling them.

'On the sixth day the men began to abuse us and comment on our bodies. During the first week I often cried myself to sleep out of shame. But slowly it didn't seem embarrassing any longer.'

Katya, the KGB head in the TV series, Archer

Around the eighth day, a group of officer cadets were bussed in and each girl was given a partner for the evening.

In a bugged cocktail bar on the site, the boys were instructed to play the part of nervous foreigners, while the girls deployed their training to seduce them.

In reality, most of the soldiers were actually chomping at the bit—visiting the sex school was a special reward for them.

Vera described her target as 'an animal.'

'There was no romance for me that evening. He tore off my brassiere and began to massage my breasts very hard… It was to this stranger that I lost my virginity.'

The next morning, the girls were ushered into the theatre for more sex films—only to find out that their performances had been secretly filmed.

One girl whose target had failed to have an erection was criticized so harshly she became hysterical.

The trainee swallows then had at least three more bouts of sex with strangers: once to get them used to the hidden cameras (one girl was so self-conscious her bedmate beat her for 'acting like a robot'); then to teach them how to seduce fumbling virgins (actually teenage boys); and finally the ultimate test—conjuring a performance from a jaded sexagenarian.

The History of Sex: Prague -- The Soviet 'House of Love' -- (Chapter X, Part 6)

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

Having passed their preliminary training at the Marx-Engels School outside Gorky, potential sex spies were transferred to a special training center at the Lenin Technical High School at Verkhonoye*, a godforsaken spot near the Autonomous Tatar Soviet Republic.

Between lessons on politics, economics and how to kill people—the usual spy stuff—the recruits were told their mission and forced to lose their inhibitions.

This titillating article...

A defector in London named Sasha Demidov recalled that 'ravens' were ordered to start having sex with each other—even though homosexuality was officially illegal:

'If they were invited to an orgy in the West, they had to be able to participate with both sexes. If they thought a Western male could be blackmailed after having an affair with them, they had to be able to overcome any repugnance and sleep with him. At all stages it is emphasized that any task which is for the good of the Soviet Union must be undertaken.'

SWALLOWS AND RAVENS

The same ethos applied to the opposite sex.

With the aid of a former West German spook, Lewis managed to track down one of the few swallows who flew the nest and lived to tell the tale.

'Vera' seduced a KGB colonel to travel in East Germany and then escape West.

At the time Lewis met her, she was in her mid-thirties and living in Tunisia with her husband and two young girls.

Still fearing a KGB hit, she chose to meet Lewis in a small café in the walled brothel district of Sousse.

As she lit a cigarette—just like in the movies—the former sex spy recounted how the fifteen women and five men in her group were transported to Verkhonoye, split into groups, and systematically degraded into accepting their Party-designated fate.

After a pep talk from a female instructor promising them a life of luxury (countered by a uniformed man telling them their true motivation should be love of the Party), they were gradually made aware of what their country expected in return.

...is from this 'men's magazine'
from April 1965

----------
* Note for potential researchers/documentary makers: Lewis--and other sources likely based on his book--consistently spell the location as Verkhonoye; unfortunately, a Google search for that name doesn't yield any hits, though that could be for any number of reasons. 

According to Lewis' book, Verkhonoye itself was located 'about 100 miles from Kazan near the Tatar Autonomous Soviet Republic.' Kazan is actually the capital of modern Tatarstan, so I take that to mean that Verkhonoye itself was just outside the Tatar Republic.

The closest fit I can find on Google Maps is Verkhniye Tatyshly--though there are a lot of other potential candidates (like Verkhnyaya Salda).

The Lenin Technical High School, or 'Verkhonoye House of Love,' was reportedly part of a complex covering seven square miles, 'approached by a long, narrow road which runs through bleak countryside.' So for anyone on the ground, it shouldn't be hard to miss.  

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.

The History of Sex: Prague -- Hammer-and-Sickling Out a Solution -- (Chapter X, Part 2)

In theory—particularly the Marxist-Leninist variety—it was never meant to turn out that way.

In trying to build their secular paradise on earth, the founding fathers of Communism were downright puritanical.

Marx, for instance, seems to have been too busy fathering children and a misbegotten economic theory to dabble in infidelity.

Likewise, his money man, Engels, contended that 'marriage founded on sexual love is of its nature monogamous,' arguing that more men would be faithful if women were truly equal.

Decades later, Lenin also supported women's liberation, mainly because he needed all the lumpenproles he could get to prop up his revolution-wrecked economy.

Even so, when it came to the ancient problem of sex, the first Communists had some trouble hammer-and-sickling out a solution.

Sex in the USSR:
a fascinating book from the 1970s
by Dr. Mikhail Stern

Traditional Russian society had been religiously patriarchal, so one of Lenin's first acts—barely a month after the Revolution—was to outlaw church marriage and replace it with civil registration.

A series of truly revolutionary laws put cohabitation on a par with marriage and made it so easy to divorce that a husband could dump his wife without even consulting her: his ex would be informed via an official 'divorce postcard.'

A dissident Soviet sexologist, Dr. Mikhail Stern, later described the social chaos as a 'total collapse of moral values;' by comparison, America's Roaring Twenties were a feeble meow.

'DOWN WITH VIRGINITY!'

While a few bohemians in the West fooled around with 'free love,' Russia's Young Communists went for the full shag, hailing it as the perfect anti-bourgeois model for society.

In one of the more bizarre episodes, crowds marched naked through the streets of Moscow and other cities in 1922 shouting 'Love! Love! Down with Shame! Down with Guilt!'

In the countryside, wily peasants capitalized on the Communists' sex laws by getting hitched to starving 'seasonal wives' in the spring, using them to help plant and harvest, and then throwing them out during the winter.

In the cities, too, the new economic approach to love tended to be freer for men than women.

'Male students despise the girls who refuse to sleep with them,' a female comrade complained to Pravda. 'They consider them to be politically backward petty bourgeois who haven't been able to free themselves from the prejudices of the old society.'

To liberate their classmates, students at Odessa School Number 49 set up a porn group, while a secret society at another school published a magazine called 'Down With Virginity!'

Meanwhile, their elders held public meetings to discuss whether they should build special booths next to public toilets for the sexually incontinent.

The History of Sex: Prague -- Spies and Czech Mates: From Big Brother to Big Sister: The Metamorphosis -- (Chapter X, Part 1)

Chapter Ten 

SPIES AND CZECH MATES 

From Big Brother to Big Sister: The Metamorphosis 

'The twentieth century has taught us that every society, every social and political order, has imposed certain prohibitions on sexuality.' 

--Soviet dissident Dr. Mikhail Stern, Sex in the USSR, 1979 

While hounding homosexuals, the Nazis also snooped on heteros, combining the latest technology and the world's oldest profession to pioneer a sinister new form of espionage.

In 1940, the SS converted a brothel in Berlin into a high-tech booty trap with microphones in the walls and a monitoring station in the basement.

Code-named 'Salon Kitty,' the project recruited twenty women to give their bodies for the Fatherland, plying diplomats and potential dissenters, including the Führer's own foreign minister.

The poster for the movie
based on the book by Peter Norden

Of course, sex and espionage were old bedfellows.

In the Old Testament, before the walls of Jericho came a-tumblin' down, two Israelite spies spent the night hiding in a prostitute's house.

As they made their escape, they promised the archetypal hooker with a heart of gold that she could save her family from being massacred by hanging a dyed rope from her window, forever linking the color scarlet to illicit sex.

Several millennia later, with the threat of nuclear annihilation hanging over them, spies on both sides of the Iron Curtain decided that preventing The End justified the means.

As a result, the Cold War finessed the use of sex bombs, making old-timers like Mata Hari look like deluded amateurs.

'I would not have kept her on my payroll,' sniffed Markus Wolf.

The East German über-spy was best known for infiltrating his spies into West Germany while keeping his own identity secret—for 25 years, Western intelligence didn't even have a photo of the spymaster they were fighting.

Wolf after the Cold War

In his memoirs, though, Wolf boasted that his real claim to fame should be his use of 'Romeo' spies.

'If I go down in espionage history, it may well be for perfecting the use of sex in spying.'

Never mind that he was using similar techniques to those pioneered by the Nazis.