Nudity Bad for Communism!
The Writer’s Union in the Soviet Union on this day declared nudity in the musical revue Oh Calcutta, then playing in New York, to be a sign of “western decadence.”
The revue opened in New York City in June 1969. A subsequent revival ran for 5,959 performances, making it one of the longest-running shows in Broadway history. (The title is a pun on a vulgar French expression.)
Totalitarian regimes are repressive in the arts, as well as in politics. If you allow freedom of expression in one area, totalitarian regimes believe, people will demand it in others, especially politics. Both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany had aggressive programs of censorship that prohibited artistic expression that clearly indicated or suggested criticism of the government or of marxist ideology. The officially preferred style in art in the Soviet Union was known as “socialist realism.”
As soon as Hitler came to power in 1933, the Nazi regime attacked and prohibited avant-garde art which it labelled “degenerate” art.
Watch a video of Oh Calcutta [YouTube requires you to verify your age]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3x6ju7rWY4
Learn more about art in Nazi Germany: Peter Adam, Art in the Third Reich (1992)
And more: Joes Segal, Art and Politics: Between Purity and Propaganda (2016)
Read about socialist realism in the Soviet Union: James, C. Vaughan. Soviet Socialist Realism: Origins and Theory (1973).