Birgit Beumers is Professor Emerita of Film Studies at Aberystwyth University (UK) and working on a project on Central Asian cinema at Passau University in Germany.Catherine Géry is Professor of Russian Literature and Cinema at INALCO (Paris) and Director of the Pedagogical and Scientific Council of the Cité du Genre in France.Eugénie Zvonkine is Professor of Cinema Studies at the University Paris 8 and a junior member of the French University Institute.

• Introduction: New ventures on sexuality, nudity and body culture in Soviet cinemaPart 1. Body Culture in Early Soviet and Stalinist CinemaChapter 1. The Overcoat (1926) through a gender lens: sexual desire and desire for dominationChapter 2. The ecstatic body as image of sexual liberation: Fedor Nikitin’s roles in Fridrikh Ermler’s films of the late 1920sChapter 3. Nina Alisova’s ‘flirtatious movements’ in Stalinist cinemaChapter 4. Towards a history of Stalinist spectatorship: bodies on display in 1930s fizkul'tura filmsPart 2. Bodies in RevolutionChapter 5. From icon to flesh: The pregnant body in The Commissar (1967) and The Story of Asya Kliachina, Who Loved but Did Not Marry (1966)Chapter 6. Savage youth: Documentary and desire in the cinema of Dinara AsanovaChapter 7. Adolescence as a site of lesbian desire in Soviet cinema: The case of DubravkaPart 3. Shifting Body CulturesChapter 8. Nude comedians of the ThawChapter 9. Sexuality and nudity in Central Asia during Soviet times: the naked female body as surgissement in Andrei Konchalovsky’s The First TeacherChapter 10. The image as eroticised and sexualised body in Andrei Tarkovsky’s filmsChapter 11. Disturbing eroticisation of (male) bodies in Sergei Parajanov’s films: Mythological revelation of a moral impedimentPart 4: Body PoliticsChapter 12. The cinematic Calyptics: Screened desire in Kira Muratova’s films of the Soviet periodChapter 13. Sexy scripts? Nadezhda Kozhushanaia’s body languageChapter 14. The naked turn in perestroika cinemaChapter 15. Not all nudes are sexy: Psychoanalysis and Stalinist biopolitics in Vitalii Kanevskii’s Freeze – Die – Come to Life!