A delve in the Soviet Lust archives

and an interview with its mysterious owner

I have been following the Soviet Lust Instagram page for a few years and was always amazed by it. The photographs have an otherworldly quality. They show mostly Russian and Eastern European women from the end of the 20^th century; sometimes dressed and sometimes naked, often with a hazy, blissful look in their eyes.

As I delved through the page owner’s archives, I felt myself drawn mostly to pictures of women who are fully naked inside a house, laying on a sofa, a bed or a divan covered in carpets; closing their eyes, smiling or curving their backs to show their bodies. They look like mermaids who have landed on shore.

When I called Soviet Lust for an interview, they emphasized their wish to remain anonymous, wanting the page to keep unspoiled by any kind of pretense. I was not allowed to describe to the public their gender or even the sound of their voice, because, as they said, my guesses and estimates about their age or appearance, would probably be wrong anyways.

There was something baffling and hilarious about having this anonymous person on the phone and becoming an accomplice in their sense of mystique, while at the same time being confronted with a very specific, slightly obnoxious character.

What follows is my account of our conversation, that, even though it was not supposed to reveal too much about the person being interviewed, had something of a confession.

M: How did it start?

SL: I left the USSR very young, at a time when everything crumbled. And so, my knowledge of Russian society and culture is a time capsule from the ‘80s and ‘90s. I don’t know shit about Russia after that. I never followed up. I’ve never been back. And so the only thing I have is those images, those movies, those cartoons.

I just started sharing stuff inside the Soviet aesthetic. And I wanted to create a world of those memories. I started surfing Google Images. I would type in something like, “Russian gangsters 1990.” I swear, in English, you know?

And then I would get a picture of a BMW, or a Mercedes, typically, with maybe a guy on the floor getting arrested or an accident or a bombing.

And then you click that, and it brings you to more similar images. And one of the images will be the gangsters hanging out, and then that leads to gangsters hanging out at the banya (bathing house, red.). And then you click on that- ... and then, all of a sudden you find adult content, you know? And once you get on the adult content, it just keeps recommending more and more adult content. So it’s actually pretty easy to source- ...

I don’t know how people acquired these images. I barely ever even, like, spend the time to read... for example, I’ll find an image in a crazy Russian porn forum from the early 2000s. And there’s just pages and pages of hardcore amateur porn from those times. I’m not super good at reading in Russian. So I just don’t even bother to read because I don’t give a shit.

I’m all about just surfing the images. I don’t care how they got there, who got them there. But it seems like maybe there was a time where there was an underground amateur porn trade thing going on, you know? Where people would have sex and take pictures and then they would trade maybe, or sell them on the black market. It was before there was cellphones where you could just record yourself having sex on a cellphone and post it on Pornhub. People took pictures with disposable cameras and maybe they traded them. Maybe a lot of these women were paid. Some of them are paid prostitutes, I’m sure. I think there was a trade going on, but I’m not deep, I’m not deep like that.

Editor’s note: upon doing some research on the internet, I found out that after the fall of the USSR, there was an explosion in Russian amateur pornography because heavy Soviet censorship and prohibition on pornography lifted, and the underground sex market suddenly became openly available and the creation of pornography flourished.

SL: Sometimes I’m grouping 10 pictures together that are kind of mid, but when you group them all together, it becomes something more interesting. Just the same girl over and over, but it’s a different girl. It looks like one girl almost.

Here’s something I’ll share that’s real. I initially did not want it to become what it is now. I didn’t want the focus to be just the girls. Just the lust. A lot of it, I wanted to be more about some of the music, some of the culture that I remember, some cool gangster shit. Sharing cool stuff from the Soviet Union. But obviously, the girls is what pops off, right?

So by default, you end up sourcing that content more- ... ‘cause that’s what everybody wants to see.

But it kind of pisses me off because that’s not... There was a time in the beginning where it was, one photo of the lust stuff and then it’d be four or five different ones.

Because I had the naivete of someone who thinks, “Everything I’ll share, I want people to find interesting.” When in fact, they just want to see the fucking girls, you know?

I like it to be innocent in a sense where it’s in someone’s apartment, an intimate moment, that happened when you were, you know, young and stupid and didn’t think that the internet was a thing. And now there’s some fucking asshole somewhere, halfway across the world, who’s digging that shit up and posting it on Instagram, you know?

But how many of these women, specifically, want this: these photos to be there? I would say very few.

I think, this is a guess of mine, there’s no facts behind it obviously, but I think the majority of the women who have those photos out there, they either don’t even know they’re out there, or they know and they came to terms with it ‘cause they’re freaking 50, 60 years old now. Or they to this day probably fucking regret it. Not like a super deep regret; it’s not like, ‘I killed someone’ or something. I’m sure 99% of them, 100% of them didn’t know that this thing called the internet was gonna come out in just a few years, where all these photos were gonna end up online, ‘cause men are perverted and they can’t not share other people naked online.

M: Why do you do it then?

SL: I just find it interesting. It’s just interesting, it’s fun, it’s cool, it’s a hobby. It’s cool to not be known by anyone and not have a whole personal thing attached to it. My life is completely separate from this, you know?

But these pictures are like: you’re just done having sex or you’re about to have sex and your cheeks are red and you’re all horny and this guy has a camera and it makes everything 10 times more exciting and he’s taking pictures of you and it’s like, “Oh my god, this is so hot.” And then, 10 years later, you’re a mother of three and every Russian porn site has your pictures from when you were 19, you know? Getting slammed by the neighborhood hooligan, you know? So I’m just being real about it.

These are things I think about that morally might not even sit super straight with me. I just have to be real about it. I know that this is to some degree shitty. In my defence: I’ve had zero women hit me up and say, “This is me. Can you take it off? I don’t want this picture there.” Never once this happened.

M: But it’s also nature’s beauty. You can’t escape it.