ABSTRACT
For some sixty years Soviet theatres had been rigidly controlled by various State and Party organs, ranging from the Central Committee to the Party Committee, and from the Ministry of Culture to the City Council's Cultural Departments (Glavnoe upravlenie kul′tury). These organs ensured that no state or military secrets would be divulged, and no taboo would be breached; taboo themes included sexuality, eroticism, pornography, alcoholism, prostitution, drug abuse, crime, and the Jewish question. The same applied to literature (including the dramatic genre), where responsibility lay with the censorship body Glavlit. When control over the theatres and literary censorship was relaxed under Gorbachev in 1987, previously taboo topics became the focal point of many theatre productions and plays. In the theatre, the new “sexual permissiveness” took an almost exaggerated form when, for some time, there seemed hardly a show without a naked body being revealed on the stage. Other media, such as cinema and the printed press, succumbed to the new openness in a similar way: the market was inundated with erotic and pornographic videos and magazines. This concern with the former taboo theme “sexuality” in all its possible manifestations culminated in the early 1990s, but has now returned to relatively “normal” proportions and almost become a commonplace.
