More than 12,000 pornographic books and pictures have been discovered in “an erotic hell” acquired by the Russian state library during the Soviet era. According to a report in Le Figaro.
Japanese erotic prints, “sensual” photographs, pornographic drawings of women and a wide range of pornographic literature have been discovered in a “very confidential” secret department of the Russian State Library in Moscow.
The existence of the 12,000 books and images was recently brought to light by the Moscow Times.
The special collection was started in the 1920s from material seized by Soviet officials because of its “bourgeois mentality,” and continued through the 1970s and 80s, the result of seizures at customs.
While the “ideologically harmful” collection was never shown to the public, under Stalin the erotica was available to well-placed officials and other powerful people, “amateur lovers of explicit images,” as the French report puts it.
Among the porn fans were thought to be Marshall Semyon Budyonny, Red Army commander, “Hero of the Soviet Union,” and friend of Stalin, and also Mikhail Kalinin, another friend of Stalin, nominal head of the Russian state and Politburo member.
Many of the first pieces were confiscated from the pre-Revolutionary collections of aristocratic Russians. Later in the 1930s, medical literature on contraception and sexuality were also seized and deposited in the library’s secret department.
According to Le Figaro: “Some books are now available to the public but the ‘secret’ collection remains out of sight and nobody has been charged with identifying the works in a catalogue. The ‘hell’ of the Russian State Library thus remains untouched, a profane relic of a bygone era.”
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