Friend Praemedia sends me a link to this lovely post Nikolay Bakharev: Life Under the Soviets II (fantomatik75.blogspot.com), with a large collection of Nikolay Bakharev‘s nude photos. Bakharev was born in 1946 and became a photographer during the USSR. He photographed people at beaches, which was the only place that citizens could bare their bodies; the people he photographed at the beach asked him to take more intimate photos of themselves at home. These images, which became a passion he sought to capture more of, would have been forbidden under the Soviet Criminal Code. Additionally, even non-nude photos he got of men with tattoos were very edgy, as tattoos were seen as signature of non-conformists and criminals.
Seeing the fashionable images, and the playful sexual openness they depict, is really cool. I think my friend sent me this link today because I just tweeted my excitement at inking my second Russian book translation — soon I’ll have Lust: Erotic Fantasies for Women in Russian to add to the stack of my own books in a language I can’t read! Hooray! Sex-positive female-authored erotic fiction in Russian! (My first Russian translation was just three months ago with Seal It With A Kiss).
