Authors

Discussion

This paper examines sex education in the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic in the 1970s. Silence on issues related to sex was broken in the decades following Stalin’s death. Concern regarding falling birth rates and declining health indicators caused the Soviet government to initiate significant shifts in state policy towards sexuality. In the 1960s-1970s, the Soviet government issued a call to intensify the ‘struggle with venereal diseases’ by prosecuting those who knowingly infected others. Medical experts were enlisted to articulate ideas about sexual hygiene and morality through mediums of mass communication, like newspapers, television, and the radio. The slightly freer discussion of sex in the USSR was accompanied by the sharper delineation of appropriate sexual activities, reflecting the Soviet regime’s pivot towards health ‘education’ as method for regulating gender and sexuality, rather than prohibition and force.

Drawing upon correspondence, newspaper articles, radio and television broadcasts held at the Latvian State and Party archives, this paper will explore how medical experts reached to technologies of mass communication to communicate expert knowledge and categorise physicians and state bureaucrats as the chief authorities on all matters related to sex. Using the Latvian republic as a case study, the chapter will also explore how far Soviet citizens engaged with and resisted the messages articulated in sex education materials.