An experienced psychologist, Alina carefully recorded the strategies that seemed to work for these gazelle-like young women. For example: “A man will value a woman much more if she constantly drags gifts out of him,” she said, “and he will value her much more than a woman who says, 'No, no, no, I don't need anything.' Alina held the cup in awe. “They get everything that way,” she said. “I think these things need to be taught to girls as children. It's very important. It doesn't matter whether the girl is smart or not, because you can have a girl who goes to university and gets a doctorate and has great success, but then loses out to these pretty young girls who take her husband away from her before she can count to three.”
Feeling superior to these women, Alina warned me, is a stupid consolation. “Everyone makes fun of them because they carry designer bags with diamond clasps, but they do great,” she said, shaking her head. “They are geniuses. Absolute geniuses.”
A few months later, on a cool September evening, I sat cross-legged with a dozen women on the floor of the Academy of Private Life, not far from Alexander Solzhenitsyn Street. Our teacher was Olga Kopylova, a middle-aged psychologist with a blonde haircut. “A person does not go where he is sawed, he does not go where he is humiliated, but where he is told that he is exceptional, a god-emperor, a light in the window,” Kopylova said. The Academy of Private Life was holding an open house, and Kopylova and her fellow teachers came to explain how these busy Muscovites can find happiness in their personal lives.
It was not an easy task. During World War II, approximately twenty-seven million Soviet citizens were killed, most of them men in their prime reproductive years. Hoping to restore and repopulate the country, Nikita Khrushchev encouraged women to get married and have as many children as possible, but there were no men left to marry. Those who managed to return from war often returned wounded, both physically and psychologically. These men were also encouraged to get married and stay married. Getting a divorce has become much more difficult. As a result, millions of women had to be content with having children with men married to other women, and the state approved of this. By the 21st century, the male population had long since recovered, but there was still a feeling, bordering on panic, that good men – single, decent, with well-paid jobs – were in danger of disappearing. As one Russian friend told me: “Men are like a public toilet: either they take it or they shit themselves.”
Many Russian women had a keen sense of time, as if they knew down to the second how much time remained until their physical beauty – their main activeits main asset will cease to be competitive in a merciless market. Until then, they capitalized on what nature gave them, investing as much as they could in clothing, makeup, and beauty treatments. (Women in Moscow often asked me why their American counterparts weren't “taking care of themselves.”) During the 2008 financial crisis, Russia was the G20 country hardest hit by the economic collapse, yet cosmetics sales stagnated. Russian politicians, usually men, have often touted Russian women as the most beautiful in the world, as if they were, like oil and gas, another natural resource to be exploited on the country's path back to superpower status.
Russian women competed fiercely among themselves for male commitments, a commodity even rarer than real men. Expecting a man to be faithful in marriage was considered puritanical and unrealistic; infidelity is only male nature, the women said, implying that in this country, which once changed the direction of stormy rivers and dried up entire seas, male nature is unchanged. If anything, having mistresses was a status symbol: how many women (and loving children) could a man afford to support? A Moscow banker I know, who married for the third time at age thirty-six, told me about a real estate project that his bank was about to finance: an elite gated community with ten million dollar houses in the center, for wives and legitimate children, surrounded by a ring of small and modest houses, costing about two million each, for mistresses and their illegitimate children. “It would be more convenient for everyone,” explained the banker, who told me that he always vacationed with his wife, two ex-wives and all their children, although each subsequent wife began as a mistress.
