Off limits to the public but enjoyed by Soviet-era leaders, the Lenin Library collection grew out of erotica confiscated from aristocrats after the revolution. The Moscow Times reports. I n the heart of the Russian State Library, Marina Chestnykh takes the creaking elevator up to the ninth floor. She walks past stack after stack of books kept behind metal cages, the shelves barely visible in the dim light from the frosted-glass windows.

Some people even used tights packages as wallpaper, turning their bathrooms into peep shows. When perestroika came, Burda and tights were joined by illegal porn movies and Playboy print issues, for those who could get their hands on them. The late 80s were also the time when so-called chernukha films like Interdevochka and Little Vera hit screens — the first Soviet films with scenes of explicit character, they attracted millions of viewers. Rewatching music videos from the 90s, with Babylon by Angelika Varum among the highlights, it can seem like the new-found freedom that mattered most was the right to be naked. Here is our list of the magazines, projects and photographers reinventing erotica. In contemporary Ukraine, unrest and a lust for freedom blend with new national truths and audacity: this is what Kiev-based street artist and photographer Sasha Kurmaz treats with poetic irony in his nude series.

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Consistently fixing their gazes to camera, his subjects bear all, both literally, in many cases posing nude or semi-nude, and emotionally. Bakharev, a mechanic-turned-photographer, took the images mostly between and while working as a Communal Services Factory photographer in the remote city of Novokuznetsk in south-west Siberia. As a sideline he photographed local inhabitants in all manner of places from schools to swimming pools, parks, nurseries, and at weddings — wherever his services as a portrait photographer were required.