The Other Russian Revolution

[Kire]

The Other Russian Revolution
All across the country, a plethora of beautiful girls has sprung up.

BY EDVARD RADZINSKY
Tuesday, August 30, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

MOSCOW--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."

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