The Other Russian Revolution
For the greater part of the 20th
century, Russia's population suffered from the nightmare of wars,
repression and perpetual hunger. There was the famine of the Civil War,
the famine of the years of Collectivization and the famine of the
Second World War. It almost seems as if the relative prosperity of
recent years has engendered a peculiar reaction of the flesh, something
almost akin to gratitude. All across the country, a plethora of
beautiful girls has sprung up.
With bared midriffs and piercings, they are outwardly
very like one another. In fact, there is an immense gulf dividing this
throng of beauties. One group is astoundingly uneducated; their lives
consist of nightclubs, concerts and narcotics. The other (and these are
many) is just the opposite. They are highly educated, and have plunged
rapturously into the ocean of literature now being published in Russia
-- those famous books by which the world lived in the 20th century and
which have only now come to us. These women study with merciless
obstinacy, hours and hours every day. Each knows several languages. In
spite of their youth, they have already visited the great capitals of
Europe, as if realizing the dream (so recently unattainable) of their
grandmothers and grandfathers.
There is yet another amazing group among our new
youth. Their fate, as a rule, was chosen by their parents, themselves
generally former athletes. Therefore, they correctly recognized the
value of a very small ball which very quickly helped their Cinderella
daughters turn into real princesses. The story of the father of the
Williams sisters taught them a great deal. Our Russian parents entered
this vicarious competition with gusto.
Notwithstanding the
difficulties, they brought their little girls to wherever the ace
coaches lived, to those who could see the value of their "human
material": little girls, hungry for success, ready to fight
Russian-style -- that is, to the death. Anna Kournikova was just a
testing of the waters. She was the necessary sacrifice to intoxication.
Maria Sharapova -- who takes her athletic grace to the U.S. Open this
week -- is the next, and more impressive, stage. Watching her
illuminate our lives, one can only think of what passed before in
Russia.
"A chicken's hardly a bird, a woman's hardly a
person." This is a common Russian saying and it reflects the Russian
way of thinking. In spite of the complete absence of women's rights in
18th-century Russia, there were five empresses of Russia who presided
over the lives and deaths of their subjects. This historical paradox
would recur in an inverted form -- with the attainment of equal rights
in the 20th century, Russian women vanished from political power and
from political life in general. The Bolshevik radicals who established
holidays in honor of women's rights made their absence from politics a
fixed tradition. There was not a woman to be found in Lenin's or
Stalin's Politburo. Stalin himself (as his wife would later write sadly
in her correspondence) tended to replace the word "woman" with the
somewhat crude and common "baba."
After his own wife committed suicide, Stalin had the
wives of many of his closest associates imprisoned. In the theater at
the traditional state holiday concerts, only men sat in the Government
Box. The sole aspect of the life of the country where women truly
retained equality of rights was in labor. Women worked alongside men or
even independently of men in the most taxing and unhealthy industries.
Woman the Hero of Labor, Woman the Worker -- this was a central image
in prudish Soviet literature, from which sexual thematics were excluded.
Party leaders
lived meekly with their ugly old wives who never appeared in public.
Only under Khrushchev did the first woman appear in the Politburo --
Ekaterina Furtseva, known as Catherine the Great. As Minister of
Culture, she believed unquestioningly in the slogan: "There is no sex
in the USSR!" and fought mercilessly for morality in art. Yet the
entire elite was well aware of her torrid affairs: scarred veins on her
wrists bore witness to her ill-starred passion.
Amid all this, however, a covert sexual freedom
coexisted with the complete Absence of Sex. We must not be surprised,
then, at the stream of passionate Priestesses of Love pouring out into
the world after the disintegration of the USSR and at the thousands of
prostitutes currently filling the cities of Russia. This state of
affairs issues primarily from the prevailing moral condition, and only
secondarily from the standard of living. It issues from the 70-year
exile of God from the country, a land where only airplanes remained in
the heavens.
The first shock of Gorbachev's new era was his
appearance on the television screen together with … his wife! This was
the true beginning of Perestroika. For the first time, the wife of the
General Secretary ceased to be "the Empress of the Dark Chambers." And
this wife even dared to speak her mind on matters of politics! This was
received with bewilderment by the majority of the populace, and in
particular, by women. Immediately, there arose one of the most
dangerous of Russian rumors: that the wife rules the husband. It was
one of the main reasons for the decline of Gorbachev's popularity. The
wives of subsequent presidents made their appearances on screen, but
they took the experience of the Gorbachevs into account: First Ladies
now conducted themselves with extreme modesty. They remained what women
were supposed to be in Russia -- mere women.
A woman in Russia lived through her family. And she
had to have a husband. The key role for women in the USSR was to be a
"warrior's holiday." "A man knows the happiness of one who receives; a
woman knows the happiness of one who gives" -- this was the dream and
the rule.
With the advent of Perestroika, all this began to
change. The first Russian businesswomen came onto the scene. It was in
business, not politics, that the road to true gender equality in Russia
began to be laid. The first businesswomen were poor young girls when
Perestroika hit. Now they're over 30. They can be found in the most
varied professions -- from advertising firms to travel agencies, from
computer companies to mass media agencies, from law firms to major
commercial enterprises. And professional sport, too, one must remember,
is foremost a business. They arrived speedily at a new slogan for the
independent Russian woman: "If pants must be hanging in the closet,
they might as well be mine!" They can have children without husbands,
they can leave one husband for another -- the important thing is to
live as they like, not as he likes. They're finished with the
"warrior's holiday" for good.
A prosperous businesswoman invited me to dinner. She
owns a fashionable Moscow boutique. Five of her colleagues were also
present at our late gathering. She had brought in a well-known chef
from Paris for one night for this affair. Throughout the evening, I
listened to their stories -- about their youth, where they left their
poverty and a good deal of humiliation. Readymade theater played itself
out before me, and its central theme was entirely new for Russia: the
path to independence from men.
The role of the Tennis Lolita, of the Beauteous
Champion, is but Russian womanhood's most public face. Miss Sharapova,
or those new little beauties who are now to be found in every corner of
boundless Russia, have discovered a road to the fairytale. The Russian
Invasion of the tennis Klondike is in full swing. But there is a world
beyond tennis, and they will have it, too. The Russian girls are
coming. They don't want to change the world. They want to put their beautiful lip prints on the world scene. I cannot wait.
Martin S. Friedlander, Esq.
www.freedompost.typepad.com
FREEDOMPOST, A lawyer's commentary
Recent Comments