Moscow moves to shut down ‘depraved’ nudist beach

Moscow nudists may soon lose their most popular beach as city authorities plan to expel them from the Serebryany Bor natural park.

Moscow City Duma deputy Lyudmila Stebenkova, who is spearheading the campaign, denounced the beach-goers as “depraved”.

“We can’t encourage vice. They’re completely out of their minds,” she said.

Moves to transform the beach in Serebryany Bor park, used by nudists for almost 30 years, reflect an increased enthusiasm for conservative values in the country, often supported by the Orthodox Church.

Everything from what officials call “gay propaganda” to erotic scenes in classic Russian literature have fallen foul of this climate.

In May, a similar beach outside St Petersburg was closed by local authorities. It had been a nudist beach since the 1960s, but this year it was labelled by local authorities as harmful to “public morality”.

“We should protect our children from some old naked hairy pervert passing by,” Vitaly Milonov, St Petersburg’s infamously conservative lawmaker known for his fervent anti-LGBT views, said of the closure.

‘Naked shindigs’

Stebenkova, a member of the Vladimir Putin’s ruling United Russia party, launched her anti-nudist campaign on her LiveJournal blog last week.

“Naked people have occupied the Strogino water meadow. Their shindigs often end in fights, drinking or sex in public. But the police can’t put a stop to this orgy because there are no laws regulating nudism,” Stebenkova wrote.

“We will soon discuss this matter in the Moscow City Duma. I don’t think beaches like this should exist,” she added.

The shore of the Moscow River at Serebyany Bor became spontaneously popular with nudists in the mid 1980s, Sergei Mityushin, head of the Moscow branch of the national naturist federation said. But Mityushin acknowledged that without essential facilities like toilets or rubbish bins, the beach has become quite messy.

“It’s very popular with alcoholics and criminals … They sit there, drink and leave a lot of trash that no one cleans up,” he said, pointing out that other beaches don’t have these problems because they are fully serviced by the authorities.

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Protecting subcultures

Mityushin suggested that Moscow officials wanted to take control of the beach because of its prime location, with an expensive development and real estate project situated nearby.

The leader of the Moscow nudists said the community would gladly consider an alternative venue. “There’s a quarry in Lyubertsy [a town in the Moscow region] where some nudists also go. It’s a good place, not easy to find for regular people, so if there were a beach with all the facilities, including a fence and guards, it would be great [as an alternative to Serebryany Bor],” Mityushin said.

“But no one from the city administration has ever contacted us or asked us to come and discuss options.”

Regardless of these offers for compromise, Stebenkov remains staunchly opposed: “In my opinion, it [nudism] should be banned for good,” she said.

Her colleague in the City Duma, the deputy head of its commission for town planning, Oleg Soroka was less categorical.

“Closing [the beach] is a radical decision. I think we should decide this in a civilised manner … It’s a subculture, and if it exists, it’s wrong to ban it,” he told the Russian News Service radio station.

The issue should be discussed with Muscovites collectively, Soroka said. “If the results of the discussion are positive [for the nudist beach supporters], we will start looking for appropriate places for the naturists,” he said.

A version of this article appeared in The Moscow Times