Law on Pornography in Art or Literature
Central Executive Committee and the Soviet of Peoples Commissars, The Distribution of Pornographic Works. October 17, 1935
Issued jointly by the Central Executive Committee and the Council of People’s Commissars in October 1935, this decree treated “pornography” not as a private vice but as a public threat that demanded police and prosecutorial action. Its language belongs to the same mid-1930s turn toward cultural discipline that produced socialist realism: the state asserted the right to define acceptable representation, to police distribution networks, and to punish publishers, sellers, and possessors as agents of moral and political contamination.
Original Source: Postanovlenie #2112335 (17 October 1935) in GARF, f. 5446, op. 16, d. 4002, l. 1.
The Central Executive Committee and the Soviet of Peoples Commissars of the USSR decree:
To advise the governments of the Union Republics to add to the criminal codes of the Union Republics a statute of the following content:
The production, circulation, or advertising of pornographic works, printed publications, pictures, or any other articles [of a pornographic character], and also the trading therein or the possession thereof with the goal of sale or dissemination shall carry with it the deprivation of freedom for a term up to five years with the mandatory confiscation of the pornographic articles and the means of their production.
Source: Paul W. Goldschmidt, Pornography and Democratization: Legislating Obscenity in Post-Communist Russia, 1999