Authors

Ekaterina Vikulina¹;  ¹ Personal capacity, Russian Federation

Discussion

The paper looks at the phenomenon of nudity in Soviet culture during the Thaw. This study is based on photography and movies primarily from the Baltic republics, which had close ties with socialist countries and the capitalist West. The main questions of my research are the following: How did nudity go through strict Soviet censorship? What were the censorship frameworks that limited its appearance in publications and movies? To answer these questions, this paper will cover the main traits of Soviet culture during the Thaw, the specificity of censorship in the 1960s. The context of art is crucial here to understanding why nudity took place in the USSR. The paper traces how the artistic context redefined what was permissible, and how the framework of representation was changing depending on the place of publication, screening or exhibition. Another important point of the paper is the correlation between “official” and “unofficial” art at the time. These relative categories help us to define the cultural priorities of the Thaw, to find out what range of images were acceptable. Other reasons for such liberalisation are seen as a consequence of the weakening of censorship, as well as gender norms in the post-Stalin period. In many ways the appearance of nudity in Soviet culture after a long break was also the result of external influences: many foreign movies and illustrative magazines were circulated in the country.