Oddly enough, the baths I was invited to in St. Petersburg (then Leningrad) required swimsuits, even though the sexes were segregated.

Your commnet about Leningrad doesn't surprise me djb. After the Revolution there was an initial period of radicalism in the Arts and personal life in the USSR. Joke from the 1920s (told to me by my Dad) - two strangers in a train compartment, <BR>Man: I'm from Omsk. <BR>Woman: Oh, I'm from Tomsk.<BR>Man: Enough of these Bourgeois platitudes, take off your clothes.<P>In the latter years of the Communist system, however, puritanical attitudes held sway. It became difficult to run the annual Moscow Film Festival as there were so few Western films that could be shown without breaching the 'moral' code. <P><p>[This message has been edited by Stuart Sweeney (edited May 09, 2002).]

I was brought up in a rather old fashioned strict household with many Victorian attitudes about sex and nudity. I found this a challenge in many ways as a dancer, where the body is viewed as an instrument. And in time, that's exactly how I came to view my body.<P>My mother upon attending a ballet class I was taking, was absolutely shocked beyond measure that a male teacher had 'touched' a female student (in a totally acceptable way for a ballet teacher). I compounded her horror by telling her that not only had the male teacher touched the female, but that the female student had paid him to do it. I think that added a couple of gray hairs to my mother's head.<P>I think most dancers come to look upon the body as an instrument. One day as we walked into the ladies' dressing room at the studio, a male dancer was sitting practicing his makeup, using the superior mirror in the ladies dressing room. We all walked in, started chatting with him (we knew him well) and it was only a few minutes later as several of the women began to change, that it dawned on EVERYONE - he and the women - that uh oh - he better leave. The point is, there was no automatic horror as there probably would have been in the general population.<P>For dancers, I think, this attitude translates to the stage.

Thanks for the joke, Stuart -- something to add to my collection of jokes about/from the USSR. When I was there (1988, 1990, 1991), I picked up some great glasnost jokes.