“I suggest you entirely throw out demand (by the woman) for free love. This is indeed not a proletarian but a bourgeois demand.” (V. Lenin. Letter to Inessa Armand.17-01-1925)
“It is easily comprehensible that the very involved complex of problems brought into existence should occupy the mind of the youth. However, it is particularly serious if sex becomes the main mental concern during those years when it is physically most obvious. What fatal effects that has!”…”Although I am nothing but a gloomy ascetic, the so-called ‘new sexual life’ of the youth – and sometimes of the old – often seems to me to be purely bourgeois, an extension of bourgeois brothels. That has nothing whatever in common with freedom of love as we communists understand it. You must be aware of the famous theory that in communist society the satisfaction of sexual desires, of love, will be as simple and unimportant as drinking a glass of water. This glass of water theory has made our young people mad, quite mad. It has proved fatal to many young boys and girls.”…”Its adherents maintain that it is Marxist. I think this glass of water theory is completely un-Marxist, and, moreover, anti-social.”…”in my opinion the present widespread hypertrophy in sexual matters does not give joy and force to life, but takes it away. This is detestable.”…”You know, young comrade XYZ?. A splendid boy, and highly talented! And yet I fear that nothing good will come out of him. He reels and staggers from one love affair to the next. That won’t do for the political struggle, for the revolution.”…”Dissoluteness in sexual life is bourgeois, is a phenomenon of decay.”…”Self-control, self-discipline is not slavery, both are necessary for love.”
(From the Writings of V. Lenin about Communist Sexual Morality. From My Memorandum Book, by Clara Zetkin)
