It’s one of the most famous phrases ever uttered about the USSR: “There is no sex in the Soviet Union.” But American film director Chad Gracia wants to disprove that outlandish claim. He is filming a new documentary on the what was, perhaps, the Soviet Union’s biggest taboo.
Gracia is not new to Eastern Europe. He shot his first film, The Russian Woodpecker, in Ukraine during of 2013-2014’s Euromaidan revolution. The documentary, which follows an irradiated Ukrainian artist as he explores a conspiracy theory about the 1986 Chornobyl nuclear disaster, received critical acclaim and won a Grand Jury Prize at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival.
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Now, Gracia has returned to Ukraine to investigate a new “hidden” topic: sex in the USSR. Looking back to the Soviet Union’s revolutionary roots, Gracia explains that “the revolution was not only in politics and economics. It was a sexual revolution as well.”
Influenced by everything from official policies to sexual violence, popular attitudes toward sex evolved throughout the Soviet period. Traditional sexual morality, which the Soviet Union initially sought to overthrow, returned with a vengeance under Stalin’s conservative rule. Sex became a taboo subject about which few spoke openly.
And while a lack of sexual education caused problems for the population at large, Gracia discovered that some people were learning about sex from an unexpected source – the Soviet secret police (KGB).
According to the director, the recruitment and training of “sex spies” played a key role in the Cold War for both the Soviet Union and the United States. “To this day, the programs continue. It’s very hard to find information. We’re still searching and I hope that in our film we will have actual people who worked in these programs,” he says.
To find out more, Hromadske spoke with Chad Gracia about what he learned from working on his new film about sex behind the Iron Curtain.
Read the full interview here.
