Locked up in the belly of Russia’s main library is a massive collection of porn and erotica collected by the Soviet Union, and it was allegedly visited often by Stalinist henchmen.
During the Soviet’s reign, the Communist Union collected pornographic material from aristocrats that was deemed “ideologically harmful,” and threw it into a padlocked room in the Russian State Library, according to The Moscow Times.
Today, over 12,000 articles of titillating books, paintings, pictures and pornos are locked away from the public in the building across from the Kremlin.
But not everything is explicitly sexual in the collection. In addition to copies of the 1970s memoir “The Happy Hooker,” and anti-homosexuality writing called “Gay is Not Good,” a coffee table book of Picasso paintings and even an album of Beatles photos can be found.
Started by the Bolsheviks in the 1920s, Stalinists began amassing kinky material like Nixon-era steamy love novels, Kama Sutra guides and silk tapestries depicting lovers, because they thought it threatened traditional families values. According to the report, the stash has been restricted to the public, and is still waiting a thorough examination from historians to see if there are any tucked away artifacts.
“We chose to preserve it intact, as a relic of the era when it was created,” the collection’s overseer, Marina Chestnykh, told The Moscow Times.
The library’s collection got a serious boost in the 1940s after a librarian named Nikolai Skorodumov died, and the KGB raided his personal and extensive porn stash. According to the report, it is rumored that Skorodumov was able to amass nearly 5,000 pieces of “vulgar” material because Stalin’s secret police chief, Genrikh Yagoda — an alleged porn enthusiast whose apartment housed a dildo collection — protected the librarian’s collection from confiscation.
According to the report, the collection was often enjoyed by Stalinist henchmen, like revolution hero Semyon Budyonny and longtime Soviet politician Mikhail Kalinin. (RELATED: Federal Government Funded Porn Project)
“They were supposedly interested in the visual stuff — postcards, photos,” Chestnykh said. And they didn’t need a pass because,“no one could refuse them.”