text: All the time I was in Russia I saw only one contemporary statue in the nude and that was of a little naked boy sitting next to a little girl (discreetly clad in marble bloomers) on the edge of a pool in a park. In all statues, even when the woman is about to enter water, she is portrayed as wearing plaster bikinis, marble brassieres and slips or some other kind of Soviet ‘ceinture de chasteté’ [chastity belt]. No Victorian cover-up of sex was ever more complete. It was not a ‘black-out’ but an official ‘white-out’ blurring the whole field of sexual passion in the imagination… Of course all this is part of the State idiom in these things. Immediately after the Revolution all over Russia there was a period of extreme licence and excess in sexual behaviour, legalized abortions, abandoned babies, neglect of children, and contempt for marriage as a bourgeois enslavement. But the reaction against it since has been widespread and profound. Officially the Party are both Puritan and Spartan in all these matters.