Russian Women: An Awesome Force

This year, in honor of International Women’s Day, our lead takes a lighter angle than year’s past. There will be no talk of supersonic pilots, Heroines of Socialist Labor, human rights activists and duma deputies. For, like other women the world over, Russian women want to look beautiful. Russian Life Executive Editor Mikhail Ivanov attempted to find out how Russian women cope with this challenging task, while balancing between the old spiritual traditions of Mother Russia and the multiple temptations of modern times.

Russian emigré writer Vassily Aksyonov, who shuttles back and forth between Russia and America, recently commented that, in America, “beauty and sex appeal is strongly commercialized,” but that this is not the case in Russia. “Here, a pretty girl and a sexy person is already a profession,” he said in an interview with ON-ONA (he-she) magazine. “If she is good-looking, she doesn’t need to go to college, as she will be provided for anyway ... She just goes to work as a highly paid model and makes enough money for her whole life, then invests it in securities, in production. All beauties are taken into account by some agents, they are all hidden. In Russia, such girls are walking down the street, you meet them here and there, some sort of electric waves emanate from them which overwhelm you, and men feel like men in such an electric field ...”

Little does he know. The streets of Russia are haunted by an unbelievable number of pretty girls. And Russian beauty agencies are on the prowl. Girls respond accordingly, regarding their innate beauty as serious start-up capital for a top modeling career. From 1994 to 1996, models from Russia’s top modeling agency, Red Stars, were among the top three winners of the world’s most prestigious model contest, Elite Model Look (see photos, page 10) for three consecutive years.

Every day, 10-20 young girls pop into Red Stars, which is headed by the elegant Tatyana Koltsova. Koltsova said she agrees with Aksyonov on the “street factor.” “I am not even talking about top models now. Just look at the incredible number of beautiful girls on the streets,” she said.

And it may have long since been this way. According to Sem Dney magazine’s Irina Popovich, the world’s first top models were Russians. This century’s first wave of emigration, during and after WWI, led women from the aristocracy to Paris (recall that Russia’s court language had long been French). Penniless, jobless countesses, duchesses and princesses began doing what they did best – i.e., wearing clothes, shining and charming everyone. Top model Natali Poley, daughter of Grand Prince Pavel Romanov and cousin of Nicholas II, was apparently so pretty that her employer, the owner of a Paris fashion house, divorced his wife to marry Poley.

“I think this is all about genes,” Kolstova said. “Our country is so vast, we have such a mixture of blood. We have everthing from Oriental-type women to pure Scandinavian or European types. That’s why the nation itself is very beautiful. I have about 400 top models at my agency who come from all different remote corners of our limitless country – from Sakhalin island to the Baltics, we cover all the former Soviet Republics.”

Artemy Troitsky, editor and founder of the Russian version of Playboy magazine, agrees. “There are beautiful women everywhere, but Russia has a lot of different ethnic types. It’s one thing to see women from Central Russia, and quite another to see women from the Russian North or women from Southern Russian or women from Siberia ... This all creates more variety. I personally think that, in Central Europe, in Poland and in the Czech Republic, women are also very beautiful. But they are all beautiful in the same way. Whereas there is no standard Russian type of woman. If someone tells you that a Russian beauty is bound to have a wide face and blue eyes with blonde tresses and wide hips – well, she is not so easy to find; most often one can find totally different women, not worse at all.”

Not only is the blood mixture unique and explosive, but the “physical parameters” are improving. If in 1989, when the Red Stars agency was launched, girls with a height of 1.75 meters (a little over 5 foot 7) were a rarity, at present, this is the minimum height the agency will consider. And candidates are easy to find. Such is the trend in Russia’s top-model business. In the opinion of Koltsova, it is all about akseleratsiya (acceleration – i.e., more rapid growth).

Add to the “acceleration” and ethnic factors the newly-gained access to cosmetics, clothing and fitness clubs, and you have a brave new world. Western journalist Wendy Taylor-Hall, who researched the local perfume market, said “Russian women are infatuated with beauty products. In America, the first thing my girlfriends do when they visit my home for the first time is check out my bookshelf or CD collection,” Taylor-Hall confessed in The Moscow Tribune. “Here, my girlfriends head straight for the bathroom to pore through and even test my perfumes and moisturizers.”

No wonder: a long-forbidden fruit is all the more sweet. During Soviet times, good cosmetics were nowhere to be seen. Now, with the arrival of economic freedom, the demand for beauty products has grown quickly and steadily since the Russian business world has opened up. And supply is catching up. From 1992 to 1996 alone, the volume of perfume and cosmetic sales in Russia rose from $79 mn to $150 mn, a growth of nearly 90%.

Mark Kapustin, general manager of the Perfumes & Cosmetics Division at Haliton Russia, said he believes that “even if Russians started to produce excellent perfume and sold it at half the price of imported items, women here would still buy [imported perfumes].” Women, he said, do not look for bargains when they are buying perfumes. “This fanatical willingness to pay exorbitant prices for quality name-brand European products,” Taylor-Hall said, “is just one more testimony to the infamous Russian saying ‘beauty demands victims’.”

However, those women who need to make tough choices in drafting their family budget often sacrifice perfumes to a slimmer waist. According to Irina Gryzova, marketing manager for Beach Club, a Moscow fitness club, prior to the big holidays, especially March 8, when her fitness club runs a special promotion and offers a discount for a trial membership, “men gladly buy a monthly membership to the club (worth $140) instead of perfumes – with the lady’s prior acquiescence, of course.”

Beach Club’s business is on the rise, thanks to the growing affluence of middle-class female clients. “Some three years ago, only the wives of New Russians could afford our services,” Gryzova said. “Now we have more and more office workers and rank-and-file bank tellers – i.e., representatives of the middle class.”

Overall, Gryzova said that Russian women seem to be much more particular about their figure than men. “Our club membership is 50% women and 50% men. But, in reality, women are much more frequent attendees,” she said. “Our men don’t come that often – maybe twice a week, though the membership gives them the opportunity to come every day. Women, though, do come every day, and some women even come here many times a day – they come in the morning for aerobics and then arrive at night to work on weight simulators.”

Gryzova said she is convinced of the truth of the Russian proverb “a healthy body carries a healthy spirit.” “Exercise at a fitness club gives a woman more confidence as she becomes better protected against troubles, because her endurance rises. I love this Chekhovian phrase – ‘everything should be perfect in a human being – the soul, the thoughts and the clothing.’ But I always add, ‘and the body too,’ as no clothes can hide body imperfections. I can see a distinct trend judging by our clients – the more success a woman achieves in her life, the more time she finds to work on her body.”

Yet Gryzova admits that, for now, no Russian schoolteacher can afford the gym’s $140 monthly membership fee. So what is a poor schoolteacher to do? Luckily for Russian women, as ON-ONA magazine’s Editor-in-Chief Taisiya Suvorova noted, “their inventiveness is the greatest achievement of world civilization.” Those who cannot put up the equivalent of their monthly salary for a fitness club membership can always follow the advice of the popular health guru Galina Shatalova, who, in her late 70s, looks a healthy 50. One of the leaders of the healthy lifestyle movement in Russia, Shatalova offers a package of affordable prescriptions that she successfully tested on herself, ranging from “separate dieting,” to “hardening” cold water baths, to physical exercises.

So, there are the face, body and clothing. What about the soul? An overwhelming majority of respondents agreed that the key ingredient to Russian beauty is dukhovnost or dushevnost, whose approximate translation as “soulfulness” or “spirituality” fails to render its full meaning in Russian culture. Some also call this factor “internal energy” or just “energetics.”

“I saw a lot of beautiful girls in California,” Red Stars’ Koltsova recalled, “and the top model market is highly developed there.” But, she said, “Russian faces are more spiritual. You feel a shortage of this internal energy abroad. Therefore, Russian women are more emotional, and you can feel this even in pictures. It shines through photography.”

A recent visitor to Moscow from Montreal, Pierre Valiquette, confessed that he was mesmerized by the local “female energy.” And frequent traveler to Russia Erwin Fignut (from the Netherlands) said that he finds Russian women “more natural in their beauty.” Judging from local hearsay and the foreign press, many expats have a similar reaction.

The “natural” factor also plays a role in the erotic sense. “More and more Russian women are appearing on the pages of our magazine,” Playboy Editor Troitsky said with a poorly hidden sense of patriotism. “Gradually, they have supplanted American women – we began with a virtually 100% American ‘kit’ of women, and now we have a lot of beautiful women from Russia. This is dictated by the readers’ demands and also by our editorial strategy and tactics and mere common sense. Of course, US Playmates are ‘gorgeous,’ to use this English word, but they are very far from real life. As a rule, these are girls who recall a man’s dream of a woman, rather than a real woman. Their shapes and faces are way too perfect, their busts seem to defy the laws of gravity. So, our readers say: of course, these American babes are great, but we also want to see our Russian girls, because they’re closer to us, more dear to us and make you feel the woman is real and not made of plastic.”

One such “unexpected gift” to patriotic Russian male readers was proffered by 1996 Olympic gymnastics champion Svetlana Khorkina, who posed for Playboy’s November 1997 issue. Troitsky, who believes his magazine is not obscene but, on the contrary, portrays “a romantic picture of the woman,” attributed Khorkina’s move to a new boldness among sportswomen, a desire to let off steam at the peak of their careers after so many years of overtraining. The appearance in Playboy magazine of such a national heroine as Khorkina did cause, if not a shock, then at least a big splash. But the gymnast assured the press that she liked the novelty. Her mother, Khorkina said, did not go ballistic but found the shots beautiful. Khorkina did not say anything about her father, but the issue did sell well ...

Taisiya Suvorova, editor-in-chief of ON-ONA, has her own way of explaining the phenomenon of Russian women’s beauty, courage and boldness. Unlike Red Stars’ professional “face-hunter” Koltsova, who cited “meaty lips” and “high cheekbones” as the two obligatory beauty traits, Suvorova offered a more abstract explanation of what Russian female beauty means for her. “The key to understanding it is in this phrase, ‘I have never been beautiful, but I have always been devilishly cute.’ In my view, a Russian woman, like no other woman, is capable of generating something without which love is impossible, without which the continuation of gender or a stable society is impossible. A Russian woman has her two feet planted firmly on the soil. And, at the same time, her eyes are aimed at the heavens.”

“Nothing similar happens in America or in Europe ...” Suvorova said “Maybe it’s because the Russian woman has been faced with the necessity to preserve herself ... to remain attractive in spite of everything, not to dare say to her husband in spite of terrible fatigue the phrase which is on the lips of many Western women: ‘Tomorrow, tomorrow – not today.’ I don’t know of any woman in my country who would allow herself such a phrase. Our woman goes for everything for the sake of preserving relations with the one she chose. Me saying to my husband – give me a break, leave me alone?! We need constantly to go for some heroic deed, I don’t even call it sacrifice or immolation. It is interesting, it is some sort of game one allows oneself, in spite of everything. Who else is capable of this?”

This “in spite of everything” fatal attraction is relayed in Suvorova’s favorite quip on Russian women by the satirist Mikhail Zhvanetsky: “‘And this [she looks so good] – after she cut a path through the taiga forest.’ She cut the path in the taiga, she built, she washed something, cooked. And here she is, again in great shape, ready for battle, ready to open her arms. In short, she is indefatigable in everything – in love, in work. I am not calling it endurance, it is something different, it is some sort of self-perception in space, the feeling that the world belongs to you. At least, this is the feeling I am living with. I don’t know why it is so in Russia – maybe from peasant traditions ... But, on the other hand, you have the same rural traditions in Italy, and there a woman feels different. She may be passionate, but this passion of hers is limited by the family framework, and a Russian woman – well, she is so generous, she is a typhoon.”

Suvorova said she feels that foreigners are attracted by Russian women because they lack from their women warmth, compassion, attention, “the readiness to get up and guess the desire of one’s husband.” She recalled that “once upon a time in America, our US friend was completely agape at this: we were sitting at a table all together, and my husband said: I want more tea. I got up, though the tea was within reach. But I got up, it’s natural for me, and our poor friend Bob’s eyes showed astonishment; he couldn’t fathom what was going on. But, in a month’s time, I guess he was ready to become my second husband ... Of course, I am joking, but I don’t think his wife felt very reassured after our visit.”

Like many women of her generation, Suvorova said she deplores the fact that much of this traditional abnegation and generosity is being lost by the younger generation. “More and more things are done out of calculation rather than out of love. The women of today’s generation would probably not follow the Decembrists to Siberia – very few would, maybe only for big money.”

Troitsky, however, said he has serious reservations about the much-talked-about spirituality of Russian women. “I think there are many types of women on the planet who have been mythologized,” he said. “The most mythologized is the French woman. It is believed that French women are beautiful, sexy, spicy and attract men like magnets. False myth. Russian women are also often portrayed as very kind, soulful, with high spiritual values, women of virtue. This is also a myth. I personally believe that, with regards to all these Christian values, our women are neither worse nor better than others.”

Troitsky said he feels that, since Russia is on the border of Europe and Asia, the traditional traits of Asian women are strong in Russian women, and this makes them different from European women. “On the other hand, if they get rid of these traits and try to look quite Western-style, as a rule they do it in an even more loose and distorted way than the European women themselves. On the whole, I would say that one should not idealize Russian women or attribute some special spiritual traits to them – especially to modern women and young ones. Russia has been an isolated country for a long time, a country with strong ideological control. This quite naturally has had its impact. Now, this is no longer the case, and the pendulum has swung to the other extreme. On the whole, young Russian women and girls are more liberalized in their behavior than, say, Americans.” So much so that Russia seems to be taking the lead in sex exports, a trend that Troitsky said “hurts.”

The irony of Playboy’s editor criticizing the sex trade is plain. But, in any case, the scale of Russia’s sex-mafia is alarming enough to have prompted the organization in Moscow in mid-1997 of an international conference called “Sales of CIS Women Abroad for the Purpose of Sexual Exploitation.” The conference revealed that “cheap, undemanding and submissive” Russian girls beat out “colleagues” from Africa and Latin America in popularity among exploitative traders. The conference coordinators did not release any official statistics, as this business is illegal and Russian girls travel as tourists or fiancees. Yet, according to unofficial estimates, the number of CIS women who have fallen prey to sexual exploitation abroad is in the hundreds of thousands.

“This is sexual aggression from foreign states – and this is really bad,” Troitsky said. “I keep hearing stories and reading in the press about tens of thousands of young Russian women going abroad, almost like in the times of slavery, where they become cannon fodder in brothels and strip bars. I know that many of our countrywomen vegetate like this in China and Southeast Asia, Turkey and Greece, and I am afraid, in America as well. And, quite naturally, this all involves young, attractive women. Therefore, I have a feeling that there are fewer beautiful women in Russia now than before, especially in major cities. This will have a negative impact on our gene pool, our demographic situation. If before they talked about brain drain, now you can talk about ‘flesh drain.’ This is also bad for Russia’s image abroad.”

“I think there are objective economic reasons for this,” Troitsky continued. “Quite naturally, our salaries are very low, unemployment is rather high, plus there’s the high crime rate. On the other hand, I am sure that, in addition to objective reasons, there are also subjective reasons for this. And this has to do with Russian society being managed and urged on by men. The ideas of reasonable, moderate feminism – which I think is absolutely useful – have reached our country on a small scale only.”

Indeed, feminists like playwright Mariya Arbatova, married to a husband who is “an even tougher feminist than she is,” are hard to find in Russia. Interviewed in the popular ON-ONA, Arbatova criticized the tradition of rigid role separation (husband as breadwinner, wife as guardian of the hearth). But even Arbatova urged that feminism not be confused with female chauvinism.

In today’s Russia, however, traditionalism prevails even in the minds of such sophisticated women as modeling agency directors. And it is this unique combination of European sophistication with traditional Russian soulfulness which gives Russian women a serious plus in the eyes of many representatives of the male population. “Journalists keep asking me about emancipation,” Red Stars’ Koltsova said, “and I tell them that Russian women will never have emancipation in global terms ... For we have been educated to be a wife and a mother. These virtues are still valued by Russian women. And I think this is good. When Russian women marry (vykhodyat zamuzh), they are literally going ‘behind their husband.’ It is the husband who is the head of the family. So, I think we are pretty far from emancipation. For I have seen what an emancipated woman in America is ... They pay separately for their dinner, for their apartment. For us, this is something weird. In our modeling agency, girls still want to get married. And here, I don’t regard the mere fact that a woman is head of a business as meaning that she is emancipated. You can succeed in business, you can have a high level of knowledge, but I don’t call it emancipation.”

Koltsova said she is convinced that even her top models will not escape the general traditions and that this profession does not impede her from being a faithful wife and virtuous mother. “She is not working as a prostitute, is she? This is a purely female profession, she only becomes more feminine. This can only help her [in her family life].”

But how many top model agencies are out there? Not enough to stop the “flesh drain” – which is due not just to sexual exploitation. “Young, smart, attractive women leave Russia not only to work abroad in whorehouses, but to make a career,” said Troitsky. “I came across a great many such Russian women in Europe and in America, who have great, highly qualified jobs there, and some of them graduated from college or some training course there. I don’t remember hearing a single positive answer to the question: ‘how about getting back to Russia?’ They all say: Russia is a savage country, they don’t give many opportunities for women. And here, I am a professional woman, and they treat me as a professional. And in Russia, no matter how professional I am, if I am pretty, I am considered, in the first place, an object of sexual aggression.”

Still, an increasing number of Russian women are making a successful business career at home. The Russian economics weekly Kapital publishes features virtually every week on businesswomen working for foreign companies. One recent example was the charming Galina Savina, general director of the US advertising agency Friedman & Rose. It is largely thanks to Savina that this agency, which is not very well-known at home, became a leading ad agency in Russia. And a successful business career does not stop Galina from caring for a husband and one-and-a-half year old son. Savina heads a collective of 30 people, mostly women. “A woman is more careful and picky about details in doing her assignment,” Savina told Kapital.

Troitsky, who himself works at Independent Media, surrounded by “careful and picky” professional women, believes that, on a national scale, cases like Savina are still rare, “though there are more and more such exceptions,” he said. “And I believe that five years from now, this will become a rule. But it is mostly happening in foreign firms or in firms where there is a high percentage of foreign management. There, professional women have great career opportunities, I would even say better opportunities than men. Because expats are now already somewhat allergic to Russian men. Now the stereotype is: Russian women are very executive-like, modest, hard-working, they like to explore new challenges. And Russian men – even if they are intelligent, professional and have great skills and knowledge and good connections – drink hard, smoke a lot, come to work late, don’t deliver on their promises, etc., etc. But again, here we are talking about foreign business in Moscow, whereas in Russian companies, for instance in Russian commercial banks, male solidarity rules.”

Olga Dergunova is another success story of a Russian woman working for a foreign company. Dergunova, the successful managing director of Microsoft Russia, increased company sales in Russia by 89% from 1995 to 1996. For this, she landed herself on the cover of the prestigious Russia Review business magazine. However, even such an attractive and forward-looking businesswoman as Dergunova voiced no concern over beauty as the potential basis for sexual harassment. Dergunova said she believes that “American women have become crazy about this issue.” The reaction of most other respondents, specifically in reaction to scandals related to the US White House (which receive plenty of press here), was similar. Suvorova said that, if any sexual harassment occurred, it should have been reported on the spot, and, in the case of a love affair, a lawsuit after a multi-year silence was simply “despicable.” Modeling exec Koltsova concurs: “It’s all money-making on behalf of the plaintiffs.”

Playboy editor Troitsky sees the issue from both sides. “I don’t think our society will be seriously threatened by this craze in the foreseeable future, he said.” “On the one hand, it is good, on the other – bad. In my view, this sexual harassment thing has a rational seed in it, but this rational seed has grown out of proportion to reach the point of absurdity. Quite naturally, to make a compliment to a girl, even a spicy one, to hug her around the shoulders and offer her flowers is an absolutely normal thing to do. On the other hand, when a director uses his secretary as a prostitute, and not only for himself, but for some special guests too, this is outrageous. Maybe some basic sexual ethics will come to our country later, but for now, I am confident that, given the Russian mentality and the strength of old Asian traditions, this will never take the form it has in the US.”

So, it seems, for Russian (and visiting Western) men, it is still possible to admire a pretty woman without risking a court case. And the same goes for Russian presidential hopefuls. While it might be near impossible to find females willing to emulate the Decembrist wives and follow their spouses to Siberia, likewise it seems improbable that a sexual harassment lawsuit could haunt a Russian president the way it has haunted President Bill Clinton.

But this should all end on a lighter note ... So there is this for those prone to carp on the idea that Russia has lost its status as a superpower. “Beauty is a awesome force,” said the Russian comic actress Faina Ranevskaya in a famous line from the movie version of Cinderella. As long as the beauty of Russian women is in Russia’s arsenal, the country will be invincible. Which is something for Russia’s enemies to bear in mind ...   RL