If Stalin wanted the state to lord over every aspect of private life, Putin is in many ways his opposite. The government that still grants cradle-to-grave social welfare on paper provides virtually nothing in reality, obviously not caring how people live in their own homes. While Russia remains a country where individual will is suspect, now no group represents the common interest. The state’s interests are almost entirely Putin’s. He manipulates public opinion to strengthen his power while Russians are left to fend for themselves in daily life. The family is still important for getting by or ahead, more so than in the West. But the leaders’ essentially nihilistic attitude is helping perpetuate the sexism and violence that is tearing at the social fabric.
My parents at the 1959 American exhibition in Moscow shortly after they met.
My father (on the far left with microphone) lecturing at the Ford stand at the American exhibition.
6
Domestic Order
Women are long of hair and short of brains.
—Old Russian saying
Ahumorous 1980s television commercial for Wendy’s restaurants reflected the Western view of Soviet life at the time: a grim fashion show with one dumpy model whose every outfit was the same shapeless gray dress. Most Americans were convinced Russians were also puritanical in those supposedly sexless days. But although the USSR hardly evokes an image of a sexual hothouse, that’s what it often was. Attitudes toward sex were still very permissive when I first visited in 1991. Liaisons were made on the street, in shops, in the metro, on the escalators leading to the metro trains and pretty much everywhere else.
Official Soviet broadcasts and publications were prudish, to be sure. But although sex was taboo in public and government-approved literature and films presented a prim society, communism’s crushing drabness didn’t reach into the bedroom. Soviet realities, such as the difficulty of obtaining restaurant reservations and tickets to the Bolshoi, actually encouraged promiscuity by compelling people to look elsewhere for entertainment.
Such permissive attitudes emerged in the 1950s, partly thanks to the great shortage of men after World War II, when 40 percent of males between the ages of twenty and forty-nine perished among the thirty million Soviets who died in the conflict. With so few men around, women had little hope for marriage if they wanted physical release or a child. Competition was so intense that many women who longed to raise children often forwent the luxury of bothering with propriety or niceties. Sex often took place when and where it was possible and there was nothing shameful about it.
As so often in Russia, new views were imported from abroad, especially from early foreign tourists to the Soviet Union. Some of their very limited contacts outside officially approved channels were with enterprising young men who took risks by buying or trading anything that could be resold for several times its actual worth, from clothes to books and radios. Among the most popular items were glossy Western magazines that showed American and European fashions. Well-thumbed secondhand copies of Vogue and Playboy also provided glimpses of the budding sexual revolution in the West. They contributed to the change of attitude, which started with the young elite in Moscow and Leningrad who were increasingly less interested in the mores of their parents. For all the USSR’s dictatorial aspects, sex there was very free by the early 1960s.
The biggest problem was where, even where to get things going. The lack of bars, let alone clubs or discos, meant that state restaurants were among the few places people could go to escape their communal apartments—that is, if they were wealthy, lucky or persistent enough to get in. Even on freezing nights, long lines routinely formed outside restaurants that were half empty because the employees inside were illegally selling produce, which made them as much as or more than they could make by serving customers. Supplies were always of questionable quality in any case. Visiting the resort city of Sochi, my father once took a table at a restaurant imaginatively called Fish that overlooked the Black Sea from the town’s hills. When the waitress came along after a half hour or so in a typically surly mood, he asked which fish was fresh. “Young man,” she admonished him, “stop clowning!”
The authorities generally frowned on restaurants, which many popular books and films portrayed as places where no-goodniks and criminals met to conduct their dirty dealings. But if you got in, you could dine while musicians performed popular songs and sometimes even jazz, although that remained risky until the mid-1980s. Anyone could ask anyone else to dance; refusing even highly intoxicated strangers was considered bad form. Splurging diners often ordered many dishes and left their plates largely untouched because they were really there for the drinking, talking and dancing.
But most partying was done at home. Among the experts in that during the 1960s was a friend of my parents named Sergei Milovsky. A gifted criminal lawyer who gave parties in his tiny apartment as well as in those belonging to his large circle of more privileged friends, Seriozha, as he was called, was much liked for his irrepressible good cheer and generosity, which extended even to distant friends of friends. The master seducer was also able to take advantage of the permissive attitudes of the day to maintain a steady stream of girlfriends. My parents once visited Milovsky’s apartment when he happened to be entertaining three very young women. As my parents sat down, one of the three who had left for the bathroom emerged naked. Clearly trying to outshine her companions in the competition for their host’s attention, she asked, “Do you want to see my pussy?” and didn’t wait for an answer. That was typical.
“Everything was allowed then,” my mother remembers. “There was no shame, nothing holding people back. Fellini was nothing; Russian girls could do anything!”
Life had become easier by 1959—six years after Stalin’s death—when my mother turned sixteen and began going out by herself. Some consumer goods, such as shoes and even furniture, had begun arriving from abroad, mostly from Soviet Bloc countries but later even Germany and Britain. Exhibitions about life in other countries entertained and sometimes dazzled Muscovites, especially the fairs from Sweden, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. But the event that really shook the capital was the 1959 American National Exhibition.
That summer, more than two million people thronged leafy Sokolniki Park in the city’s northeast, where a set of newly constructed, futuristic-looking pavilions brimmed with the latest American consumer goods. Braving a broiling sun—Moscow often suffers heat waves—people gawked at Polaroid cameras, the latest washing machines and a model house. The exhibition was an iconic episode of détente, one of the landmarks of rapprochement that came between the shoe thumping and nuclear brinkmanship of the Cold War. The Americans also intended it to astonish Soviets into accepting the superiority of capitalism over communism. On opening day, then–Vice President Richard Nixon escorted Khrushchev through the pavilions. Reaching a model kitchen, they stopped in front of surprised onlookers and faced each other in what would become known as the kitchen debate.
It was continued later in an RCA television studio on the exhibition grounds. There Nixon suggested to the portly, combative Khrushchev that the United States was ahead of the Soviet Union in some areas, using as an example the then-astounding development of color videotape, on which their meeting was being recorded. “This indicates the possibilities of increasing communication,” he said. “And this increasing communication will teach us some things and it will teach you some things, too. Because after all, you don’t know everything.”
Khrushchev was having none of it. The Soviets were ahead in most areas, he insisted. Anyway, the tape would probably be used for propaganda back in the United States. “What I have to say here is being translated only into your ear,” he said. “The American people will never hear it.” Khrushchev could easily have been seen as having spent his entire political life preparing for that chance to demolish the apparent benefits of capitalism. At the time, however, most Americans believed, as they were inclined to, that Nixon won the debate. Either way, the major interest of many of the young
Americans serving as the exhibition’s guides was their once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to experience the Soviet Union, a state portrayed back home as America’s fearsome, mortal enemy.
My father, George, was one of the guides. Two years after that first visit, he would return to Moscow for a graduate exchange year. He’d studied Russian during a two-year stint in the navy after his hopes of joining the Sixth Fleet headquarters in Naples—where he pictured himself wearing a summer uniform with a mandarin collar and carrying a sword—were dashed by the navy’s consuming interest in Russian rather than Italian speakers, it being the height of the Cold War.
The choice fit my father’s proclivities. As a high school student in New Jersey, he’d shocked his prosperous secular Jewish parents by announcing that he wouldn’t attend college, then leaving home to apprentice himself at a farm in Vermont instead. After a miserable summer there, he eventually graduated from Harvard. Speaking to crowds at the Moscow exhibition’s Ford display, he found himself spending far less time answering questions about cars than other aspects of American life, from the school system to the cost of bread. “Very surprisingly, there was a sea of affection for the American people,” he remembered later. “There was also among those supposedly downtrodden and oppressed people, as we were incessantly told, a great deal of humanity and originality and humor.” And there were questions, almost certainly from a corps of KGB plants, about why Americans lynched blacks, didn’t have universal health care and surrounded the peaceful Soviet Union with military bases. But other voices emboldened by the crowd’s anonymity sometimes shouted down the hostile questions.
That reaction came as a surprise to George, who, along with the other seventy-four guides, had been coached by the CIA on their voyage by ship from New York to Genoa, then by train to Moscow, on how to respond to challenges from Soviet visitors to the exhibition. On arrival in Moscow, he found it far more economically depressed than he’d expected. Countless men without limbs—the war had ended only fourteen years earlier—hobbled about on crutches or with empty sleeves. The model socialist city seemed more like a village in the sense that streets were dusty and many people were dressed in what looked like peasant clothes. Still, he was very quickly hooked. Although George and his fellow guides found Russians in groups difficult to deal with, they were very relieved to discover that individuals in America’s enemy country seemed entirely human.
Visitors stood in line for hours at the front gates. Many of those who entered got their first taste of Pepsi-Cola. Tatyana came with a new boyfriend, a dashing cadet at one of the country’s elite Suvorov military academies, who, after studying English, had been trained by his teachers to engage enemies of the communist order with arguments about the superiority of everything Soviet. Inside the park, Tatyana was drawn to the most crowded displays, where the American guides spoke openly about everything, and with humor. “I just somehow sensed how free that country was,” she said of her first impression. “Through their gestures, through the way they behaved, through the way they were dressed. You could just see that they were free people, and we were not.”
At the Ford display, my sixteen-year-old future mother asked my twenty-five-year-old future father (whom she’d tell she was nineteen) a question about American jazz that he, a lover of classical music, was unable to answer. But after following the microphone cord to the source of the voice and gaping at her beautiful face, he immediately announced a break in his question-and-answer session in the sun. Feigning an interest in a discussion with Tatyana’s cadet, he got the couple to return the following day by giving them one of Moscow’s hottest items that summer: exhibition tickets, so they wouldn’t have to stand in an endless line again. More tickets for more days were required until she got the point and came alone.
When George returned to Moscow in 1961, it was to study the Soviet legal system for his doctoral studies at Columbia University. He invited Tatyana to the Bolshoi on one of their first dates. Late as usual, she rushed from her communal apartment in the handsome old building I’ve described into a big snowstorm. No car was in sight, let alone a taxi, which were perpetually scarce in the best of circumstances. Hurrying to a larger street, she engaged in a game of fatalism: if a taxi somehow saves me now, she told herself, I’ll marry George. It was just a way to comfort herself for a moment: the idea of marrying a foreigner was much too far-fetched to take seriously. An instant later, a car appeared at the end of the street. As it drew closer, she saw it was a taxi. The green light behind its windshield meant it was vacant.
She’d soon forget the coincidence. It would remain forgotten for many years as their relationship evolved, but not for good.
Permissive attitudes toward sex ended with the fall of communism, when, paradoxically, it was suddenly everywhere. Sexual images appeared in public with a vengeance prompted by reaction to the lifting of Soviet suppressions. Mafia gangsters and their molls had the run of Moscow’s loud new nightlife. No self-respecting nightclub lacked for a strip show, while television channels showed an endless parade of B-grade Hollywood films containing plenty of nudity. Until recently, network TV broadcast the weekly Sex with Anfisa Chekhova, hosted by a voluptuous young brunette who posed nude in Russian Playboy. The show, which featured segments just this side of soft-core pornography, addressed topics with its tongue held firmly in cheek, including the pros and cons of sex in cars, whether blondes really are dumber and reviews of sex toys.
Despite her youth and naive, if not exactly dumb, television persona, Chekhova is well informed, well spoken and very ambitious. When I met the elaborately dressed and made-up starlet in a trendy French café on Moscow’s central Tverskaya Street, she said between sips from a glass of white wine that the 1990s raised the curtain on sex, but not in a good way. “There was sex, but no sex education. Rapes skyrocketed because men believed women had no right to refuse their demands. And girls believed prostitution was something to aspire to.” I remembered seeing advertisements for secretaries in the help-wanted sections of the time that required women to include their photographs and measurements with their applications.
Although there’s no lack of prostitution today, a decade of oil wealth and authoritarianism has helped stabilize urban society, enabling increasing numbers of female lawyers, accountants, journalists and others to take top jobs in fields previously seen as male domains. Russia’s capitalist boom is helping women make their own decisions about where to work and when, if ever, to marry and raise families. And although life in the mostly impoverished provinces remains largely unaffected, women’s ever-greater role in society is slowly transforming perceptions in Moscow, St. Petersburg and a handful of other cities, especially among young men, who tend to be more exposed to global culture. Perhaps nothing more visibly reflects the seismic shift in that aspect of life than the number of female drivers on Moscow’s streets. Whereas one could go weeks without seeing a single woman driver twenty years ago, there now seems to be one behind the wheel of every second car. When I spoke to a young Muscovite in her middle twenties named Lera Labzina, who’d been driving for two years, she said that made her “very, very happy.”
“Driving represents another step toward women’s independence,” she told me. Not everyone is happy about that development, however. Another typical Muscovite, a young man named Nikolai Mukhin, complained that only men should be allowed to drive. “When I’m waiting at a traffic light,” he told me, “I keep an eye on the light. But what do women do? They’re putting on lipstick. For them it’s normal to read a magazine at the wheel. That’s dangerous for everyone.”
Even women drivers believe women can’t drive well. Elena Zdravomyslova, a gender studies scholar in Moscow, told me such attitudes reflect the growing disparity between a changing reality and deep-rooted sexism. “Women work in traditionally male professions,” she said. “They drive cars and engage in business, but the public discourse is still about how they have ‘different’ brains, how their psychological differences from men prevent them from playin
g an equal part in society.”
Popular culture offers two basic roles for women: housewife and sex symbol, both of which are presented in the hundreds of images that bombard Muscovites from billboards, television programs and glossy magazines. They are “aggressively sexualizing” the general idea of women’s roles in society, Zdravomyslova declared.
Sex show host Chekhova told me the media portrayal of women in a society that provides few “constructive” roles for women to counteract it is seriously affecting their behavior. “Physical beauty is idealized to the point of hysteria,” she said. “Women dress every day as if they’re going to a ball. Moscow has beauty salons on every street, more than any other city. There’s fierce competition to catch one of the eligible men throwing around large sums of cash.” In a country where women still outnumber men by more than ten million—the highest disparity since the 1970s, according to a 2010 census 1—the best options are to marry either an oligarch or a foreigner—“that is,” she explained, “to live it up or leave.” Despite her own show’s relentless promotion of dressing up to attract men, Chekhova complained that the energy women spend on their looks comes at the expense of their intellect. “You go out at night and see women dressed to the nines and all looking like one another, like clones.”
Moscow’s reputation as a place where women dress up is well deserved, and it doesn’t just apply to the wealthy. After midnight on any typical night, even during the depths of winter, young women in miniskirts and boots emerge from lines of cars parked up and down the streets surrounding the city’s most “in” nightclubs. One is the international discotheque chain Pacha, which opened a branch a stone’s throw from the Kremlin in 2009, at the height of the global financial crisis. Business boomed nevertheless. Pacha’s manager, Basil Vasiliou, a large, bald Englishman with a penchant for shiny suits, assured me that far from putting a damper on the good times, the financial squeeze had left Muscovites with more free time to spend whatever money they had left. Oil prices having since recovered, any real concern was short-lived.
Russians Page 17