Russian Women Guy

Photo by Anna Nazarova
By Robert Bridge, RT
Place: At the computer, in a dark bedroom, in the middle of a quiet American neighborhoodTime: After midnight, close to sunrise
Mission: Spice up your monotonous suburban life with some international intrigue.

You are burning the midnight oil, swilling imported beer while dispatching electronic love letters across the lonely void to some Olga, Anna or Natasha. Eventually, things start to overload in this virtual relationship and you decide it’s time to take the wired romance to a more advanced level. So you unplug yourself, board a jet plane to Moscow, and meet your Russian soul mate in the warm flesh and blood.
Welcome, cowboy, to the Motherland, the legendary land of milk and honey. So what should a wide-eyed westerner expect from a Russian female? Well, first you must be absolutely willing to leave your big bag of stereotypes at the border. They won’t help you here.
Russia, despite the advances that have been made in the field of communications, still gets its international media coverage courtesy of a cracked funhouse mirror at the local amusement park. Indeed, the stereotypes are so deeply etched into our mental hardware that even when we come face-to-face with the cool reality we fail to fully recognize or appreciate it.
And so it is with that delightfully mystifying creature known as the Russian female.
Bikini, balalaika, or both?

Hairdresser turns robber into sex-slave

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Published 14 April, 2009, 14:05

Edited 10 February, 2010, 15:30

A hairdresser from the small Russian town of Meshchovsk has subdued a man who tried to rob her shop, and then raped him for three days in the utility room, Life.ru reports.
Yahoo StumbleUpon Google Live Technorati del.icio.us Digg Reddit Mixx Propeller The incident occurred on Saturday, March 14. The working day was coming to an end at a small hairdressers, when a man armed with a gun rushed in and demanded the day’s earnings.
The frightened employees and customers agreed to fulfill his demand, but when the shop’s owner, 28-year-old Olga, was handing the money to the robber, she suddenly knocked him down on the floor and then tied him up with a hairdryer cord. The 32-year-old Viktor couldn’t have known that the woman was a yellow belt in karate.

Olga locked the unlucky robber in the utility room and told her colleagues that she was going to call the police – but didn’t do so. When everybody left home, she approached the man and ordered him to ‘take of his underpants’ threatening to hand him over to the police if he refuses to cooperate.

Olga (image from http://life.ru) After that Olga raped her hostage for three long days. She chained Viktor to the radiator with pink furry handcuffs and fed him Viagra.
She eventually let the man go on Monday, March 16, saying: “Get out of my sight!”
Viktor went straight to hospital as his genitals were injured, and then to the police.
Olga was resentful when she was taken by the police.
“What a bastard,” the woman said about Viktor. “Yes, we had sex a couple of times. But I’ve bought him new jeans, gave him food and even gave him 1.000 roubles (around $ 30) when he left.”
After that she wrote a notice to the police claiming the man tried to rob her shop.
Both Olga and Viktor may now face prison terms. The woman could be convicted of rape, while the man of robbery.

Photo by Tatyana Shadrina
In 1968, at the climax of the Cold War, the Beatles came out with a bawdy ode to the Soviet woman (“Back in the USSR, you don’t know how lucky you are, boy…”). It is doubtful, however, that many people took those flattering lyrics very much to heart. After all, on the western side of the Iron Curtain, the iconic Soviet female – with a sickle in one strong hand and a balalaika in the other – was believed to be more industrious than beautiful, more blustering than blush. Indeed, the practical value of a Russian woman ranked somewhere between a good tractor and a surplus wheat harvest: extremely useful in the right situations (snowstorm, famine, revolution), but certainly not the most likely candidate to grace the cover of a glossy fashion magazine, for example, or win Playboy playmate of the year.
(Briefly, I can think of one good reason why so many Americans believed that Russian females were somehow defective: Yakov Smirnoff, a Ukrainian immigrant to the United States. Armed with an absurd Russian accent, Smirnoff went on to become a hugely popular comedian in the 1980s by savagely ridiculing life in the Soviet Union – without sparing the women. Here are two samples of his material that should suffice: “In Russia, if a male athlete loses he becomes a female athlete.” And this tasteless whopper: “I like American women. They do things sexually that Russian girls never dream of doing – like showering.” For any Russian woman who would like to exact some verbal revenge on Mr. Smirnoff, he is still alive and may be hunted down at www.yakov.com).
Before we go any further, caveat emptor: The first half of this article has been researched by mean members of the male sex, a hirsute tribe of moderately evolved monkeys that are said to contemplate life largely with the help of one clumsy tool, and one that is conspicuously distant from the brain at that. In other words, any attempt by mortal men to fully comprehend the sublime features of the fair sex is more often than not an exercise in sheer futility. “Yes, it is true, God did create men before women,” commented one smart female. “But then you always make a rough draft before the final masterpiece.”
Okay, enough said. Let’s just jump right into the blistering action, as Tolstoy advises.
Hello, Natasha

Photo by Julia Borodina, www.eliara.com
You are sitting in a trendy restaurant in the booming heart of the Russian capital trying to forget about your jetlag and lost luggage when you are suddenly slapped with the bracing realization that you aren’t in Kansas anymore. Across the table from you is seated an attractive Russian woman, your Internet flame, a deadly femme fatale for all you know. But definitely a Russian woman.
(Please note that the adjective ‘Russian’ before woman is absolutely essential, because a Russian woman is as different from an American woman, for example, as a French woman is different from a Polish woman, as a Canadian woman is different from a Spanish, etc., etc. But generalizations, although sometimes deadly accurate, are dangerous things to play with. “She had a German mouth, French ears, Russian ass,” wrote Henry Miller in The Tropic of Cancer, for example, in an effort to portray a particular girl he had met in Parisian café one hot summer. No wonder his books were banned in America for so long).
Anyways, things get off to a bizarre start at the restaurant. Before you even set foot into the place, ‘Natasha’ lets you open the door for her; in fact, she coolly expects it, and doesn’t even say ‘Spasibo’ as she sweeps past with a violent toss of her blonde locks. Somehow, this gives you a strange sense of male liberation and empowerment, which might just be the world’s biggest oxymoron. And things just keep getting weirder.
The svelte Slav at your side expects you to help her with her fur coat, position the chair just right under her awaiting derriere, order the food, and yes, even pay the exorbitant bill without even so much as feigning to open her Gucci pocketbook. Wow, you think, there might just be a purpose on this nutty earth for a six-foot-two stumbling male after all. What the heck is going on here? It’s as if that Boeing 747 that hauled you across the Atlantic Ocean was actually a time machine, transporting you back to the 19th century.
Suddenly the reason hits you: feminism, or rather the glaring absence of it.
Feminism, Russian-style

Photo by Julia Borodina, www.eliara.com
Fellow mariners of the stormy seas! A fair word of caution: this conspicuous absence of feminist behavior does not mean that the foreign woman sitting across the table, now thoughtfully stuffing her mouth with sushi, is in any way weak or submissive. In fact, nothing could be further removed from the truth. Russian women somehow achieved, without the angst and anger of the western women’s man-eating philosophy, a sense of freedom, independence and, I dare say, happiness that their bra-burning sisters sacrificed a long time ago on the great battlefield of the sexes.
Russia, which was geographically isolated from many of the West’s most famous fits and starts (the Enlightenment, Capitalism and Industrialization, to name a few), developed more or less at its own leisurely pace until at least the beginning of the twentieth century. Thus, painful questions concerning the rightful place of western women in the early industrial system (exposed for its cruelty by progressive writers of the time, like Upton Sinclair, who wrote The Jungle in 1914) were being debated in the West while, half way around the world, Russian women were peacefully picking raspberries and milking goats in the idyllic countryside.
Ironically, despite all the hype about the United States being the ‘land of opportunity,’ American women did not receive the right to vote until 1920, a full half of a century after suffrage was granted to the liberated African slaves. It took the outbreak of World War II, when America was forced into a wartime economy, for females to be accepted into the workplace, and then only conditionally. Like every minority in America that was not born wealthy, white and male, the females were forced to scratch and claw for every square inch of their rights and freedoms. There is no concept or understanding of an Equal Rights Amendment in Russia.
In the United States, every action on the part of the klutzy man is liable to be misinterpreted, overanalyzed and even persecuted in a court of law. Even one of our otherwise great presidents, William Jefferson Clinton, was laid low by this ridiculous national pastime. In America, as one wit observed, “when a man talks dirty to woman, it’s sexual harassment. When a woman talks dirty to a man, it’s $2.95 per minute.” Even opening the door and letting her pass first may be the ticket to a ruined night. Eventually, some feminists began to realize that it’s no fun to spend your life walking on glass.
The famed American feminist Gloria Steinem summed up the plight of her fellow sisters in the sexless seventies when she wryly observed that women “are becoming the men we wanted to marry.”
Timothy Leary, who spent much of his time while not in the laboratory advocating the use of LSD, probably as a pain reliever against the tyranny of the opposite sex, hit the nail on the head when he uttered, “Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition.”

Photo by Julia Borodina, www.eliara.com
This is what sets Russia apart from the rest of the world: there is equilibrium between the sexes that is immediately recognizable. All of the unnecessary guesswork between the males and females has been cleared away, or never existed in the first place. For the most part, everybody understands their role. Yes, there is always the random wild card tossed into the deck, but in general everything is pretty straightforward. This will come as a breath of fresh air for many western men who have, generally speaking, lost all their bearings when it comes to dealing with members of the opposite sex.
As it is, Russian women, who deftly use every inch of their femininity - high heels and mini skirts included - to their general advantage, have no desire to ‘lower themselves’ in an effort to obtain equality with men. Moreover, you actually get the sense that Russian women truly cherish the fact that they were born females, and not the victim type that cries daily on Oprah Winfrey. And where else in the world can you see two women holding hands with each other as they stroll happily and confidently through the city center? Ironically, perhaps, a big part of the Russian woman’s sense of liberation and even happiness may be found in Russia’s past, both near and distant.
Happy Russian Women?

Photo by Julia Borodina, www.eliara.com
Russia’s 70-year experience with communism, by no means a walk in the park, naturally forfeited, for both men and women, any questions concerning the right to vote. Nevertheless, the system did provide some attractive perks that helped to advance the condition of women without the need for unsightly marches and protests.
Communism, despite some nutty megalomaniacs, made no distinction between the sexes when it came to receiving an education. And upon graduation, Soviet men and women (with some glaring exceptions in favor of the males, easily discernible on May Day on the top of Lenin’s mausoleum in Red Square, and even more visibly in the kitchen) enjoyed equal opportunities. A heavily subsidized educational system, complete with daycare centers for infants and children, gave both the mother and the father the freedom to advance themselves. In some strange ways, communism was a boon for the females and a bust for the men.
Russian women ran a totally different social gauntlet than their female counterparts in the West. And now it must be asked: is ‘domestic politics’ between the sexes in Russia healthier today for the experience? Russian men and women enjoy a natural, fluid relationship that requires no special Women’s History college course to comprehend. Yes, Russians could chuckle through a self-help book like, Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, but chances are they would never feel the need to write it.
Moreover, Russian females seem to feel completely at ease with themselves, and more importantly, their femininity. The female body is not concealed like a horrible scar, but rather decorated, accentuated and put on parade for every eye to behold. Nobody will point and stare at a woman in Russia for exposing a bit too much leg. In Russia, if you’ve got it, there is absolutely no problem to flaunt it. An object of male desire? Undoubtedly. But somehow Russian women manage to navigate the slippery road of being attractive without sliding into the wall of oppression. They are at the controls of their womanhood and the miniskirt and high heels only adds to the sense of their feminine powers that no man has been able to fully explain. Oppressed? Don’t bet on it.
Okay, back to the dinner.

Photo by Ildar Gumerov
The Russian woman sitting across the table from you understands very well the price of a dinner, at least from her end of the bargain. According to female insiders, she will spend at least three hours in front of the mirror applying her makeup, seven hours shopping for shoes, three days finding a dress and five days with little or no food to fit into it. Add to all that the price of a pedicure, manicure and trip to the hairdressers. In other words, don’t be surprised if your date arrives looking like a million bucks. Be forewarned: with all of this tedious preparations she will arrive very fashionably late for the date. But as Holden Caulfield accurately observed in J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, “If a girl looks swell when she meets you, who gives a damn if she’s late? Nobody.”
Alright, the battle lines for the night have been drawn, each side has their ammunition on the table – the man his credit card, the woman her beauty. At this point in the game there can be no discussion whatsoever concerning money, i.e. the cost of the dinner. And please remember this is not Amsterdam, so set aside any notions of ‘going Dutch’ on the check. But if you dare try, she will sneer and fork over half, but it is pretty much guaranteed you will never see her again.
So, if you ever have the unforgettable experience of taking a Russian woman to dinner, it is strongly advised that you bring along your credit card collection – bronze, gold, double-platinum; yes, just bring them all. Travelers checks, too. Maybe even your father’s mobile phone number in case you need a quick cash transfusion from Western Union. Perhaps as punishment for all the work this date has cost her, and regardless of how skinny the girl is, she will order enough food from the menu to sustain the Russian Army for a week, with a doggy bag to spare. And the fact that cases of obesity are practically unheard of in Russia makes the Russian woman’s humongous appetite all the more unexplainable. Perhaps they only eat a full meal on dinner dates, I really don’t know.
Okay, so this leads us into the neighborhood of the $50 million dollar question: Are Russian women materialistic? Yes, of course they are. After all, they are women, and I can’t think of a single place in the world where the sight of a mall does not cause heart palpitations in the female species. However, given the fact that Russian women were denied the thrill of shopping for French perfume and German cars for seven long decades certainly has had no small affect on their appreciation for earthly stuff. It would be safe to say that Russian women spend the great majority of their disposable income on perfume and clothes, and the number of specialty boutiques in Moscow would seem to prove that point.
So let’s imagine that the date was a stunning success and it’s time to say goodnight to Natasha. First, although the metro (subway) is a very convenient form of public transportation in the Russian capital, as well as in other Russian cities, it is better to blow your last rubles on a taxi ride. Her feet, already bleeding inside of tortuous high heels, will appreciate the thought.
Naturally, throughout the course of the ride, you may be asking yourself: ‘Oh boy, what happens next?’ Then you will start to rehash all those wild sex stories involving Russian women that you possibly read about in the eXile [a now defunct alternative newspaper that was devoted to the seedier side of life in Russia] or some other equally reliable source. So are the rumors about Russian women true? Is it easier for a man to ‘have a good time’ in Russia than in other places? Since I am a gentleman, a mere male, I will leave that very delicate question to a Russian lady to answer (see last section for a full response to this article by a Russian female).
But will she make you happy?

Photo by Julia Borodina, www.eliara.com
So is it possible to find happiness with a Russian woman? A British friend of mine, Sam, who has been calling Moscow home for over 10 years, believes the answer is an affirmative ‘no.’
“Never happy, never complimentary, always calculating and scheming,” Sam responded via email, “a Russian woman’s concept of what a man should be is completely at odds with reality. To her mind a man should be a sort of composite of Vladimir Vysotsky (creative and impulsive), Bill Gates (rich), Joe Average (a good family man) and Arnold Schwarzenegger (huge and strong).”
According to this foreigner, all of this is simply too much for the average male to handle.
“Men can’t hope to live up to this contradictory and punishing expectation… It makes them feel like failures. Hence they drink (worst), womanize (bearable), or spend inordinate amount of time fixing things around the flat (best-case scenario) to make themselves feel like a man.”
This is not the first time I have heard this argument against Russian women: they are extremely demanding perfectionists, goes the argument, not just with themselves, but with their men as well.
On a recent trip to Riga, Latvia, I decided to catch a movie, which is a special treat there because the films play in their original language, with subtitles for the home crowd. The film was called “The Dark Knight.” Since it was a story about the superhero Batman, it was not the intellectual movie of the year. But that is irrelevant. In the film there is a scene where Bruce Wayne shows up for dinner with ‘Natascha,’ a “prima ballerina” for the Moscow Ballet.
Although Natascha’s speaking part in the film amounts to about four lines, what she said was enough to cause a roar of laughter in the audience.
Talking about the dismal condition of Gotham, Natascha abruptly upbraids the guests at the table for living in such a city.
"No, come on,” she says. “How could you want to raise children in a city like this… I’m talking about the kind of city that idolizes a masked vigilante.”
The audience, made up of mostly Russians and Latvians, instantly recognized that part of the Russian female, the ‘impossible perfectionist,’ which men either love or leave.
But if perfectionism is the worse thing that could be said about Russian women, I suppose that is doing pretty well.
I will now leave the floor to my Russian colleague, Katia Shubnaya, who, as a Russian female, will certainly set the record straight.

A Russian Woman Responds

Photo by Ildar Gumerov
“With a sickle in one hand and balalaika in the other,” well, part of that image is true. That’s the major feature of the Russian woman – her versatility. She can hold the hammer and sickle, but at the same time she will get a manicure, be an academician, and have your dinner ready. There is even a popular quote from Nikolay Nekrasov, a Russian writer of the 19th century, who said that a Russian woman “will stop a horse in full stride and walk into a burning house.”
So, you can say there is just a lot more to the Russian women than a hammer and a sickle. My grandmother is a perfect example. She was head of the laboratory that inspected water purification facilities all over the European part of Russia. She had to wade through bogs and swamps in rubber boots, but at the same time she was known all over town to have the most fashionable dresses, which she made with her own hands, since buying decent clothes at stores was not an option at the time.
Russian women dream about becoming an American housewife, circa 1950s, and as portrayed in the film “Mona Lisa Smile” (2003). But at the same time they are scared of that dream because, overwhelmed by this sick, obsessive love for everything western, not to mention all the articles about “successful women” found in Cosmopolitan magazine, she would say that she wants to be like the girls from “Sex and the city.” The reality is she doesn’t.
Russian women can’t be independent from men, not because they can’t survive without them, but because she knows that a woman should be with a man. And furthermore, that relationship is natural. They really can’t imagine their lives without a strong man by their side. Taking up a job for them ideally should be something they do out of pleasure, not because they have to feed and provide for the family - with nobody to back them up in times of crisis (which Russia has experienced in great number).
Perhaps this sort of thinking derives from an old Russian book from the 16th Century, entitled Domostroy (“The Household Code”). In it, it is written that a wife must obey her husband – and run the house. Furthermore, she should be modest, raise the children, and respect her husband. Some of the clauses even provided that a man could beat a woman. Of course, nobody agrees with that today, yet the saying “If a man strikes a woman, it means he loves her" is still heard.
The picture you painted of a Russian woman, “Natasha,” is just one type, and what we would call ‘a Rublevka wife’ [Rublevka is an upscale suburb of Moscow], who never says ‘thank you’ and runs the city around with her Gucci purse. When you describe “femininity,” which seems to strike your eye so much, you should concentrate on the Russian woman’s grace, on her posture, on the way she moves and talks, and on how she carries herself, not how trendy the restaurant is.

At first, you say that the Soviet (Russian) woman is nothing more than a proper tool to survive in a famine, for example, and then you say you never expected them to look like fashion models. But that’s not a contradiction. A woman with a sickle can by all means be attractive (Look at your American movies with Angelina Jolie, for example. In every shot she is holding something that could be equally dangerous as a sickle, but that doesn’t stop her from being attractive). Here, it seems that you confuse good looks with femininity. I think you meant to say that, to the Western mind, Russian women didn’t look any different from a man driving those tanks and tractors (by the way, crane operators in Russia are usually women; it’s a tradition!).
Today, Russian women are said to be the most beautiful in the world. Like I said, the “sickle and balalaika” stereotype is partially true: Russian women do save lives in the trenches and they do lay railroads, but at the same time, in their souls, they are weak and feminine, fragile and credulous, in search for their prince… Perhaps, your friend has a valid point, arguing that Russian women dream of a composite of Vladimir Vysotsky and Arnold Schwarzenegger. But don’t Western men dream of an Angelina Jolie-Scarlett Johansson hybrid? Some dreams are just never meant to come true…
My friends’ foreign husbands were struck by the versatility of the Russian women combined with their beauty. They were shocked to have such feminine treasures, without all of those complications you were writing about (like going to court over some little misunderstanding). The Russian girls seem very sincere and loving, and, as you correctly mentioned, real women. Five of my close friends found their husbands abroad – in Italy, Great Britain, Belgium, and Canada – and are very happy. They are not at all demanding and are very realistic, and don’t think foreign men are swimming in platinum credit cards they can now lay their manicured hands on. They studied at university and are now happy to build their future life together, with mutual support “in sickness and in health.”
Oh, and on an unrelated issue: can you change goat to cow, because all romantic Russian girls normally milk cows and confide their secrets in them, while a goat in Russian folk tales usually ends up being the aforementioned girl’s young brother turned into a goat by a witch, so I doubt she’d be milking her brother. And instead of picking potatoes, can she gather mushrooms or raspberries?
Today, female Russian businesspeople and politicians are not really in favor with people, and the reason is that, if they are in politics or fighting for their rights, well, that means the woman is unsuccessful in her personal life and hasn’t found the right man.
Personally, I think there is an ideal Russian woman, (my friend and I agree that it is to be found in Tatyana from Pushkin’s classic poem, “Evgeny Onegin”) who has a list of qualities typical of the “pure” Russian woman, the way she was meant to be. She is romantic, vulnerable, sincere (the important thing which has been most violated by the glossy magazine industry: they write all these sordid tips about how to be a real bitch; how to scheme to catch the right man, what set of lies should be told, thus turning the natural female intellect into something dirty and nasty. When men read these tips, and they do, they are horrified to learn what lengths women will go to catch them). At the same time, the Russian woman is very willing to stand by her man and to sacrifice anything for her true love, which, she believes, exists.
Over the years, however, tortured by a number of external factors, as well as dishonest, weak, and indecent men, Russian women have generally become less open, and more suspicious, less happy and more desperate. Again, like I said before, true love is very important for her, and despite being weak and vulnerable, she will follow her man and share all of his ordeals with him. Even worship him, if he deserves worship, and – what’s more important - is that he loves and respects her in return. A perfect example is one of my friend’s parents. Her father served in the army all his life, and being a real hero, he was always dispatched to the most dangerous and distant hot spots where his life was constantly at risk. His wife, having no hope to settle down any time sooner than the date of his retirement, never uttered a word of complaint. She followed him everywhere, raised his children and supported his every decision.
Over the years, though, Russian men have changed a lot, and it is a different story… but even in the 19th Century, the Decembrists wives went into exile with their husbands, and Cossacks’ wives were waiting faithfully for their men to return from war. Perhaps Russian men are not used to the idea that they can be a hero in everyday life as well, so they get depressed because there are no great exploits for them to perform. Of course, there are exceptions; I am just outlining the tendency.
About male clubs like Night Flight, well, these have very little to do with Russian women, and I would say it’s actually the problem of foreign men. There is the assumption that foreign men can come here and entertain, and they can, just like in any other place. But the so-called gentlemen’s clubs and Russian women are apples and oranges. What you need to do is to get rid of that stereotype; stop surfing the Internet in search of those long-legged piranhas who actually created that ugly stereotype in the first place, because they are the ones who want to rip off poor foreigners.
So if you really want to meet a decent Russian girl, just go down to the metro or visit the campus of the local university.