On a Friday night when I visited, crowds gathered around the club entrance’s velvet ropes, guarded by burly bouncers rigorously enforcing the club’s standards for those they deemed attractive enough to allow inside, a policy known as face control. Inside, svelte dancers wearing minuscule panties writhed on platforms above a crowded dance floor. Although reserving one of the tables that line the top-floor balcony costs thousands of dollars, all of them were packed, their patrons picking grapes from fruit trays, sipping Champagne and knocking back vodka. Most were highly conscious of the many eyes fixed on them, but this was Moscow, where ostentatious display is the norm. The neon-and-mirror interior below them was filled with a sea of mostly blond women, many wearing fur vests, the latest hot accessory. Most revelers would stay dancing under the laser lights until the club shut its doors the following morning.
Objectifying women is hardly unique to Russia. What seems to be different there is that as society grows richer, men are increasingly seeking respectability by marrying and settling down, and it’s women who are on the prowl. Paradoxically, that trend reinforces increasingly traditional attitudes. Chekhova said that most women define liberation as having a strong man to take care of them and independence as the freedom to become a model or open a hair salon. Catering to those views, dating agencies that call themselves modeling agencies offer matches to wealthy male clients who take their pick from photos in glossy catalogs.
Chekhova’s theory was borne out when I made a very unscientific test of young Muscovites’ attitudes on Kamergersky Pereulok, one of downtown Moscow’s swankiest shopping streets. While glamorous-looking women glided past Christian Dior and Versace boutiques, a well-dressed twenty-one-year-old named Yulia Gaidakova echoed views I’d heard again and again. Her marriage the year before, she told me, represented attainment of her life’s most important goal. “Women want a good husband who’s dependable, responsible and loyal. Everything else is secondary,” she said. Men agreed. “Everyone should have his role in life,” a bartender named Vladimir Shatilov told me after serving a brisk lunchtime crowd at a nearby restaurant. “If a man goes out and works, a woman has to take care of the home.” But although Gaidakova typically praised Russians’ attitudes toward marriage over those in the more egalitarian West, even she admitted not liking one aspect of relations between the sexes: men don’t respect women.
Later I spoke to twenty-three-year-old Maria Kutsova, a friend’s colleague whose hair was styled in a fashionable bob. We met at a trendy restaurant near the foreign law firm where she worked translating French and English into Russian. Inside, neither women nor men were shy about giving their fellow diners serious once-overs to the loud sounds of disco music. Kutsova complained that while Moscow’s café society may resemble its Western counterparts, Russian women are forced to confront much more deeply entrenched sexism than women in the European countries she’d visited. Yes, women are more emancipated than at any time in Russian history, she agreed, but she insisted that attitudes toward their roles in society remain positively medieval. “If a woman has career, if she’s smart and has a good education, she won’t be able to find a partner who’d be at her level,” she said. “Russian men can’t compete with successful Russian women. They’re just not used to it.”
Kutsova added that dating is a challenge for other reasons. In a country where abortions are a common form of birth control, almost none of the men she met cared about safe sex, even though AIDS is spreading like wildfire. If she were looking for a long-term relationship, she continued, her most important goal would remain freedom. “Women like me are virtual outcasts in Russia. I can find a husband who will expect me to cook and clean and do everything for him. Maybe he’ll earn a lot of money. But that’s not what I want. I don’t want to stay at home.” She found Russian attitudes so oppressive, she said, that she’d decided to leave her family and friends behind to start a new life in Canada.
Relatively few women choose to confront sexism. When I spent a day driving across Georgia with journalist Olga Allenova in 2008 shortly before the Russian invasion, she told me she faced a near-daily struggle against sexist attitudes just to get her work done. A chic correspondent for the well-respected Kommersant business newspaper known for covering some of the most dangerous conflict zones in the Caucasus Mountains region, Allenova was nevertheless often denied permission to accompany male colleagues on press trips. “Sometimes I’m not allowed to ride in military helicopters on the ‘principle’ that women simply aren’t allowed. You just have to learn to deal with those situations.”
Although attitudes toward homosexuality have also evolved, there has been even less progress in gay rights than women’s rights after a brief advance in the 1990s. Same-sex intercourse was illegal in the Soviet Union, punishable by up to five years in prison, until its decriminalization in 1993. Homosexuality was so far from the minds of most Russians that I was surprised during my first visit to Moscow to see men showing affection for each other by touching and even holding hands in public. Later I realized that rather than evidence of progressive thinking, the displays indicated that no one was interpreting them as sexual. Nevertheless, gay culture soon began emerging from underground. Although anyone who drew attention to himself that way risked beatings or worse, young Muscovites began to see aspects of the culture as avant-garde. Some gay nightclubs even became mainstream. One that featured men swimming in giant aquariums became hugely popular.
The retreat of those attitudes with Putin’s emergence became very evident. In 2006, the controversial head of a popular gay website announced plans to organize Moscow’s first gay pride parade. A well-spoken and apparently fearless young man, Nikolai Alexeyev appeared uncharacteristically nervous when I spoke to him shortly before the event. He told me his action was one of the only ways to draw attention to gay and lesbian issues. “The fact that we made the announcement and are discussing a parade, that it’s being written about in the press and even shown on television, it all shows that society acknowledges that gays and lesbians are a real social group that can’t be ignored,” he said.
It also prompted a backlash. While politicians condemned the parade plans, skinheads and elderly demonstrators holding icons gathered in front of gay nightclubs to hurl insults and rotten eggs. Leaders of the Orthodox Church denounced homosexuality as a sin and the country’s chief Islamic mufti opined that marchers should be flogged.
Soon the mayor’s office said it would refuse to even consider an application to allow the parade to take place because the idea caused outrage in society. Subsequent attempts to hold unsanctioned parades ended quickly, after would-be participants suffered punches from homophobic protesters and rough handling by police. The swelling public homophobia was part of a larger movement toward intolerance, xenophobia and racism fanned by burgeoning neo-Fascist and other right-wing groups. Although a strong if less visible gay culture survives in Moscow, it’s nonexistent in Russia’s outlying regions, where gays live under threat of violent attack. A poll at the time, in 2006, reported that more than 43 percent of Russians believe homosexual relations between consenting adults should be prosecuted.
Although gay and lesbian leaders deplored the hardening resistance, they also criticized Alexeyev. Olga Suvorova, head of a lesbian organization called Pink Star, said Russia wasn’t ready. “The announcements set off a war against gays,” she explained. “It set us back many years in terms of the amount of homophobia there is in society.”
Alexeyev dismissed such criticism, saying Russia will never be ready without being pushed. However, his strident public stance helped split the gay rights community. One prominent activist, Edward Mishin, the editor of a gay magazine called Queer, drew attention to himself by suing officials who refused his application for a same-sex marriage. Nevertheless, Mishin said plans for a gay pride parade had been needlessly provocative. “Even people in show business are joining a whole front against gays and lesbians,” he told me. “This isn’t just about the parade anymore. They’re conde
mning homosexuality and believe it’s something that should be combated.”
Alexeyev’s attempts to stage his parades continued prompting scuffles and attacks, including against visiting foreign activists, until 2013, when Putin enacted a new law banning “homosexual propaganda.” Although it refers only to “nontraditional” sexual relationships, the purposefully vague measure essentially recriminalized expression of gay identity by outlawing gay parades and gay-themed events and banning dissemination of information about lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender issues.
The law’s supporters used the old argument about the need to protect the majority from individuals’ destructive impulses by shielding what they called Russia’s non-Western, conservative society from the foreign-influenced threat to its children. By 2013, the Levada Center found that almost two-thirds of Russians condemned homosexuality as “morally unacceptable” and almost a third believed it to be “an illness or result of psychological trauma.”
Seen as part of Putin’s drive to shore up his credentials among conservative voters, the new law made him mocked abroad as a caricature authoritarian who advocated discrimination. Critics focused on how officials would act at the upcoming 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi. Gay bars in the West boycotted Russian vodka. At home, however, emboldened vigilante stepped up attacks against gays.
Russian attitudes toward women, like those toward homosexuality, are the legacy of a highly patriarchal society. Centuries of accepting that the head of the household made decisions for everyone, historian Richard Pipes has argued, were central to the development of modern Russians’ behavior. Starting with medieval Slav tribal communities whose kinship clans formed their basic social units, people related to one another worked “as a team.”
The head of the Russian peasant family, the bolshak (“big one”), had the final say in all matters. 2 Crucially, his decisions governed all tribal property, which was traditionally held communally. Those early communities, Pipes believes, laid the foundation for the later emergence of the legendary Russian peasant commune, the mir. The origins and importance of the mir, which acted as both a village government and a cooperative, have been subject to much fierce debate and mythologizing, especially during the nineteenth century, when socialist revolutionaries and other radicals saw it as proof that Russian society—unlike bourgeois European culture—was naturally predisposed to socialism. (Mir translates as “society” but also means “world” and “peace,” concepts that have provided more fuel for the debate.) Pipes sees it as central to the rise of what he describes as Russia’s “patrimonial” state, an autocracy under which the lack of private property enabled the tsar to consider everything his. Of course America also began with great patriarchal concepts and practices, but the burdens that had to be lifted on the way toward women’s liberation were far less heavy.
By the time of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, Russian society seriously lagged behind Western Europe’s. Although the country was industrializing faster than ever at the turn of the century, a government census conducted in 1897 found that at least three-quarters of the population still consisted of peasants, the vast majority of whom were illiterate.3 Russia was very far from progressive.
Although the Bolsheviks promised radical change, they actually helped freeze social progress by cutting their subjects off from developments in the outside world for seventy years, a legacy that will endure for generations. On the surface, Soviet ideology condemned the traditional image of women as subservient to men and prescribed gender equality. The government used subsidies to encourage women to occupy the role of working mother, especially when the shortage of men left factory and other blue-collar jobs vacant. By the 1980s, more than 80 percent of women, many of them mothers, worked and even dominated some white-collar professions. They constituted 75 percent of teachers, doctors and dentists, according to the 1970 census—a far greater figure than in the United States. Nevertheless, social mores remained antediluvian. In the 1980s, Raisa Gorbacheva, Mikhail Gorbachev’s glamorous and independent-minded wife, tried to provide a new model for women by playing a prominent role in her husband’s affairs. However, she was widely disliked for it, and post-Soviet leaders’ wives have since been much less visible in public, including Putin’s former wife, Liudmilla, who was very rarely seen at all before the couple’s divorce in 2013. Quoted in a biography of her husband, she described his “shall we say traditional ideas about a wife’s place.”
“A woman must do everything in the home,” she explained. “You should not praise a woman, otherwise you will spoil her.” His attitude made it extremely difficult to cook for her husband because “if he doesn’t like the slightest thing” in a dish she’d made, he’d refuse to eat it.4 When the former Aeroflot flight attendant announced the couple’s divorce in an awkward, stage-managed interview on state television in June 2013, the news reignited long-running rumors that Putin was engaged in an affair with a former Olympic gymnast, now a member of parliament, who is half his age. It also prompted some to joke that Liudmilla is the “only Russian who managed to liberate herself from Putin.”
Soviet rhetoric about women’s rights, used largely to persuade women to work, did have some success in reducing bias. However, men continued occupying the highest posts, and behind the propaganda, attitudes toward women remained far more traditional than in the West. Gender scholar Zdravomyslova said that remains especially true in the provinces to this day. “Russians have much stricter limits in their perceptions about gender roles—what’s a man, what’s a woman,” she said. “Society restricts its discussions to those limits.”
The entrenched attitudes are helping perpetuate one of Russia’s darkest secrets: domestic violence, which is so pervasive that many see it as normal. The government’s own almost certainly low figures estimate that fourteen thousand women die annually from domestic violence. That’s the death of one woman at the hands of her husband or partner every hour, more than ten times the number in the United States, whose population is twice the size of Russia’s. Countless more women suffer violent abuse in secret. Although more than half the women questioned in a recent survey said they’d been beaten by their husbands, the real number is impossible to count because domestic violence, seen as a private matter not to be aired in public, remains hidden.
Elena Litvin, a soft-spoken Moscow woman in her late thirties, married a medical student in 1995 expecting to begin a happy family life. She gave birth to two children, but her marriage soon became a nightmare. “My husband began staying out late drinking,” she told me. “He’d come home angry and beat me in front of the children. He hit me in sensitive areas, such as the stomach and chest, avoiding my face and hands so the bruises wouldn’t be seen in public.”
Litvin said her husband also threatened to kill her. Although desperate, she was too afraid to complain: a very common story in a country where victims of domestic abuse often have nowhere to turn. Moscow, with its more than ten million people, has not a single shelter for battered women. The one I visited outside the city was among only twenty government-run shelters in the entire country, and it had a total of seven beds. Like other officials, its director, a businesslike woman named Marina Nakitina, downplayed the issue of domestic violence, assuring me the problem is no worse in Russia than anywhere else.
The government has started to take action, but very slowly. Difficult as it may be to believe, Russian law still doesn’t recognize domestic violence as a crime. Marina Pisklakova, who founded the Anna Center for Domestic Violence, told me that even the few officials willing to intervene in abuse cases are often prevented from acting until it’s too late. Pisklakova’s organization, which is located on the second floor of a small building in central Moscow and employs several people, is the highest-profile NGO combating domestic violence in the country. A petite, smiling woman who speaks flawless English, Pisklakova calmly recounted gruesome stories and shocking statistics.
“It’s very difficult for them to do their job,” she said of
the police. “They know they simply can’t intervene until victims’ injuries are medium or severe or there’s a murder.” To be classified as “medium,” she explained, an injury must prevent the victim from working for two weeks. Even many women able to prove they’ve suffered from domestic violence face other insurmountable obstacles. Restraining orders don’t exist in the Russian legal system; women who file complaints against their partners often end by retracting them.
When Elena Litvin finally gathered the courage to go to the authorities, the police initially refused to investigate her claims, she said. It took them six months to initiate criminal proceedings against her husband, whom she finally divorced in 2004. Like many estranged Russian couples, they continued living together because they couldn’t afford to move apart, an arrangement she said was “seriously harming” their young children. “They tell me it’s difficult to bear his presence. He gets drunk and follows us around, finding fault with every word we say. His goal is to humiliate us.”
After Litvin’s ex-husband was eventually convicted of attempting to murder her, he was sentenced to a year of probation. “I have to go back to the same apartment,” she said. “I have to hear the same threats and can do nothing about it.”
Pisklakova said such stories are common in Russia, where an old saying advises women that “if he beats you, he loves you” and violence is often justified as a way of controlling women. “She must have done something wrong to deserve it,” Pisklakova explained about the attitude toward beatings. “That mentality is still there, the mentality of women being basically created to serve men.”
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