To care about unrelated “neighbors”, folks are too occupied with their own daily matters, or with someone more interesting like “stars”, politicians, or soap opera characters.
To a Western man searching Russia / Ukraine for unspoiled virtue, health, high moral values, sound family background, top model beauty, unconditional love, and proper mothering of his children, - hinterland is the last area to seek a wife. Post-Soviet specifics of economy and mentality contradict American-based reasoning on the percentage of “sound” or “flawed” women in small communities, of “deserving” or “evil” girls who relocate upscale, and of “fine” or “filthy” city-borns.
A keen observer can discern a range of more specific social types. A psychologist would consider the entire combination of individual factors to make a right match. And it takes a native to detect ancestry & upbringing by manners, speech, style, even by facial features. But let’s now clarify the first-approximation guidelines.
How do major factors of origin affect a Russian or Ukrainian woman’s character? What marriage behavior can a stranger forecast by them?
Here are some trends you need to know. Feels bad to spill – and to conceal.
First mention & counter-arguments
One can find these descriptions offensively stereotyping. But let me begin with a mathematical joke. A black box contains a cat, a radioactive particle, a Geiger meter, and a cylinder of poisonous gas. If a particle gets into the meter, the gas is released, and kills the cat. Question: is the cat alive or dead? Answer: in any given moment of observation, the cat is both alive and dead, with 50% probability.
A behavior pattern, as frequent as just 30% of all situations, tends to be perceived as a predictive characteristic of a person – or a society – that displays them. Of negative patterns, even less examples may suffice to form a looming rule, supported by media and memes (self-propagating, catch-recognizable references). Unfortunately, the social circumstances below are like leaking gas in that box. Their impact on certain people in a certain place and moment occurs all the way up above 30%. Therefore exceptions feel even more incredible than they may be.
Now down from the pulpit, into life!
Must-watch: “Glyanets” (“Gloss”), 2007, director Andrei “Andron” Konchalovsky. This satirical drama outlines the path of modern Russian Cinderellas.
The smaller place, and the larger distance from important centres of business activity, – the more decay pervading all spheres.
The bigger city with the more varied (!) economic profile, – the more options not only for “sinning”, but for perfection. Of more people, more can group by personal standards into each other’s “survivable collective shelters” distanced from the fallout over newly-rich and ever-poor.
(These types can be met countrywide.)
The gap between rural and urban, town an city, production and service, province and capital, is expanding. Money lacks, skill flees, cultivation doesn’t reach. This already disturbs even the national governments (at least in their papers).
Alcoholism in the Russian realm, especially post-Soviet, has been way deeper in the countryside and outskirts than in busier places. This affects not only immediate personal morality, hygiene, longevity, efficiency, reproduction; not only generations of family relations. Most importantly, it has accumulating impact on the genetic pool, including constitutional health, brain functions, immunity to infection…
…and, yes, beauty across the population. Parroty attire, full makeup, and fast-spent credit of youth is not all. One may think he’s found a diamond in the dirt, while she’s just a strass (that this sort of girls are so fond of wearing everywhere). Many foreign men, particularly American, need to take time just browsing Russian dating sites of various quality, to develop some immunity to Russian-Russian-Russian Girls and adjust vision to discern a gem from a trim chip of bottle glass.
BTW, did I quote a Russian proverb: “There are no unbeautiful women – there can be little vodka…”
What makes drinking habits differ by locality?
- Physical labor, even craft, is habitually accompanied with alcohol, (exc)used “for courage”, “to cheer up”, “to make the eye keener”, to summon sinew, to sauce the routine, or at least to “rinse the result” and wash off the fatigue. Office jobs demand sobriety, save for social rituals. Village binges beat city parties by scores of scores.
- Urban competition squeezes out messmakers – countryside lacks workforce. Its mode of production also leaves much idle time and incurs more shortages, to be compensated through inebriation. (On top of many anecdotes, I remember a story how a tractorist has drowned a tractor he took for a joyride; as I have personally known the farming enterprise owner, I believe it still more than Zadornov’s comic report on a flight by a slop-fixed decrepit planelet in the Far East of Russia.)
- In cities, alcohol has to be bought – in towns and villages, it can be home-distilled of whatever, from rotten fruit to wood (jocular name “taburetovka”, translatable as “Stooloff”), all hazardous side-components included.
How about drinking household antiseptics or firemaking fluids? 93% denaturate or 95% glass-cleanser? Brake fluid or dichlophos insecticide? Cologne drinkers look pure dandies in this comparison. All attempts at governmental regulation lead to still higher cost of legitimate quality spirits. Looks like “social Darwinist conspiracy”, but what moves the “bottom feeders”? It’s not even desperate nihilism; there’s a big deal of experimental bravado. Here’s a Russian joke. Three men find a bottle. One takes a gulp and drops dead. The second, fearfully, takes a sip and drops dead, too. The third screams: “AAAAA!!!” and rushes onto the rest of the liquid.
- Urban parents try to combat children’s bad habits – rural kids learn smoking and drinking earliest. Where? Heavy advertisement of tobacco and alcohol on TV reaches countrywide. TV is the ultimate “window on the world”, if luckily there’s no power cut. Also adults offer an endless reality show.
Drugs have been leaking in everywhere since the 80’s, notably through schools. But who needs them when there is sniffable glue in any kiosk or tramadol pills below the pharmacy counter. Where asphalt ends, there’s also some plot for “wild” pot. And the scantiest police is usually the biggest thief.
Health awareness generally is lower in backward areas. Let alone the subzero state of medical aid: literally “start curing, or let live?” Primeval lands engender genii of naturopathy, as well as dim powwows. Wise recipes of holistic self-help, – age-proven, borrowed even by the national pharmaceutical industry, by advanced doctors in specialized medical institutions (located in major cities), and by cutting-edge health magazines, – are neighboring with truly savageous inventions.
I also heard a report by a US doctor of Slavic origin, Stephen Bezruchka, on the prime impact of disparity between the richest and the poorest strata on national health, through stress alone.
Peer pressure makes the “patriarchal pastoral” just another Russian souvenir postcard.
A traditional need for public approval is rather a “face value”. City or village, everyone is paying more attention to behaviors and opinions of their immediate acquaintances. To care about unrelated “neighbors”, folks are too occupied with their own daily matters, or with someone more interesting like “stars”, politicians, or soap opera characters. The custom of inquiry / report on each other’s lives lets people not only judge but also justify. “Collective trials” with demolishing consequences are in the past together with the Communist party, so scavenging is just another entertainment.
Spending energy, feeling important, filling time with emotion are vital to every human being. Now imagine a typical Russian rustic community. Work, if any, is unrewarding, and impressions are barren. The public creed is “Be simple so people would like you”, “Don’t stick out” (else you invite sabotage – “The neighbor’s house has burned down. A trifle, yet a pleasant one”), “Chicken ain’t bird, woman ain’t person”, “Love’em like dears, shake’em like pears”.
As the result, man’s worth is measured by debauch; woman’s worth is reduced to a hole (errhm, I meant “zero”); domestic violence is the simplest means of communication – men to women, women to men, parents to children, and even children to parents, each other’s burden and oppressor.
Ukraine, with its mild climate, fertile soil, and Cossack history, can boast more serenity, liberty and mutual respect. Still, envy has been proverbially proportionate to diligence here…
Women are bombarded with examples and “common knowledge” that just don’t let them respect men and manhood. Yet they learn to chase and manipulate men in order to feel accomplished by the measure of Being Desirable. A lot of suitors is big success and a method to hold some One; physical promiscuity is frowned on. But hiding from the surveillance by the Bench of Baboushkas is not too hard a skill, – and after all, everybody knows that those would gossip anyway even for no good reason.
This pattern is as well characteristic of urban workers. It’s only recently that factory wages or fees for manual skill have begun rising. Still they are rarely sufficient to raise personal culture and to “steal childhood from the kids” by loading them with extracurriculars. Many people don’t ever want to “tear themselves off their roots”, and praise those who “remain the same simple guys” whatever achievement. Such folks also like to refer to their background experience as the landmark of Exemplar and Eternal Truth. “And in o-u-r…” Nostalgia can be a horrendous power – application matters.
Very spectacular are some successful go-getters or their children, shining with glamour, connoisseurship, high-brow education, eager discources into Culture and Morality,.. until it comes to the corner touchstones – man & woman issues, or a whoop-de-doo, whereby louts are proven. Gone places, done anything, gotten rich, trained to sublimate aggression, but the environment he/she has grown in is imbibed, so to say, “on the cellular level”.
Intellectuals generally carry out more scrupulous upbringing than laborers.
There has been disruption between these strata, since the 1917 October proletarian revolution and civil war that had prepared the building plot for the Soviet system, founded on brutalizing genocide. “Of Intelligent Family” is a top brand on the dating & marriage fair here. The Russian word “intelligentny” means not just IQ, education or occupation, but more so “delicate, conscientious, considerate, noble, decent, well-mannered”.
Illustrations: The “worlds apart” were vividly depicted in Bulgakov’s “Heart of a Dog” (“Sobachye Serdtse”), coming alive in the film by Vladimir Bortko, 1988. For some finer shades, savor the movie “Athenian Evenings” (“Afinskie Vechera”) by Peter Gladilin, 1999. It contrasts an old Russian lady and her surface-polished son-in-law, when they are concerned by the fate of their young (grand)daughter.
Exceptions to this rule could be found first of all among “bohemia” and “establishment”. Artistic circles – from Hollywood to petty – differ from “philistines” by specific personality accentuations, erratic earnings, pursuit of edge stimuli and turbulent advertisement. First steps into show business etc. are often made in escape from families objecting to this path – especially from province. Officials of Former Soviet breeding are often labeled a separate race, but they are “the flesh of the flesh”. They owe their careers rarely to competence – predominantly to power games, cronyship, sleaze and intimidation, hardly letting “fresh blood” in. Their sense of omnipotence, nourished by formal and informal privilege, and assumed superiority make a monstrous complement to the prevailing rural or proletarian descent, that the Soviet Union was holding as credentials of eligibility.
If we compared collective portraits of Ukrainian cities,
- most elevated and genteel culture would be preserved in Lvov (Lviv) – a humanitarian centre, influenced by Austria the advanced and by Poland the proud;
- next follows Kiev (Kyiv), with its ancient mission of national enlightenment (this city has born worthy wives for European monarchs during the reign of Yaroslav the Wise, and a fiance to a Thai prince in the late XIX);
- reliable culture exists in Kharkov (Kharkiv) – the alternate capital of Ukraine – also famous for its school of economics and law;
- but the centres of heavy industry in the russified East-South of Ukraine are associated with mafia and violent crime;
- thieves, gangsters and sluts became byword for the main sea port city Odessa.
95% prostitutes, of total 4 thd. on Kiev police records, are coming from minor locations in the Donetsk, Dnepropetrovsk, Lugansk, Ivano-Frankovsk and Volynian oblasts. Sure, the “upper crust” of this profession stays in disguise, but their “working conditions” and life are incomparable to what the “rank and file” are to endure. As for sex-profiteers and gold-diggers, this is still another topic.
“These provincial chicks would jump down from the third storey hugging a bunch of brand shoes safely. You see, designer shoes are vulnerable, and a Russian gal has ribs of steel and a special shock-proof skull… Everything you need to know about women is written in those hilarious glossy magazines. Till oligarchs are fond of “models” whose course of education is eleven years’ collection of “Cosmo”, I know Russian women inside out. A regular girl knows that a Graff stone is cool, it means love. But, by Golly, how is man supposed to court aficionados of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky? Where should he take them out?”
– Peter Listerman, famous / notorious Russian “entertainer”, scouring every corner of the Former Soviet Union for model escort, introductions and matchmaking. The prototype of the “godfather fairy” to the heroine of “Glyanets”.
“Innocent flowers of wilderness” are an extincting species of women.
The most traditional people have been met in the Transcarpathian region – absolutely authentic, but more “pagan” than today’s American Right may expect. But a great part of its population, female in particular, is away to cities, even to Eastern or Western Europe (notably Poland and Italy), working in construction / decoration, “shuttle” trade, or domestic service… usually in order to provide for their remaining families.
An interesting phenomenon is a movement towards eco-settlements, sustainable natural households and home-schooling. It attracts downshifters from corporate careers, self-employed professionals and well-paid urban craftworkers. Such decisions are sooner developed in already married couples. (Our future agency’s programmers, Max & Irina from Russia, bright earners and frugal “ethical consumers”, are now accommodating in a quiet Crimean town on the bank of the Black Sea.) Singles, prone to this idea, are usually reading about holistic health, nutrition, yoga, self-improvement, new-age matters, as well as patriotic history that traces Slavs to Aryans and associates them with the very seed of the humanity. So a respective section of book stores or Internet forums could be the junction point… oops, city dwellers again.
If you prefer a “blank slate” , record-protected from vicious Western practices, be prepared that her mindset may also fail at routine adaptability. The main “conflict of versions” is going to occur when it comes to educating children. An adult woman can change herself by willpower, but her best learning time may have been wasted.
ALARM! Post-Soviet province lacks not only English teachers, but qualified teachers, good teachers, and teachers at all. Schools get closed; libraries die away, the book market stream becomes shallow on its way to the grassroots. Teachers who remain are not the best role models. They can snap at children, humiliate them, use violence, foul language, even sexual abuse. Urban or rural, classmates of “down-to-earth” background turn out to have more teaching authority. Their “expertise” and behavior – coarse, aggressive, cynical – is extremely infectious.
Most dog-eat-dog momentum is brought into the “vicious city life” by active newcomers from villages and small towns, added to the struggle of local ex-proletarians.
Both would hate to come back to the misery they know too well. To get the place under the sun, they are forced to beat the natives (especially the offish “intelligentsia”), who’ve been calmly building on their “birthright” to housing, support and connections, and thus could have been affording the distractions and restrictions of cultural-ethical “razzmatazz”.
On the other hand, there are migrants who focus on studies, on moonlighting for self-sustenance, on diligent work in a company, on businessmaking. Unlike city residents, they are too pressed for time and money to afford the temptations. Student dormitory life is full of nasty thrills, too. But many girls resist, or parents do their utmost to rent if not buy them a separate apartment. They may also rely on city relatives for a room.
When this kind of girls advance, they just reinforce their backbone belief that all good things in their lives have to be deserved…
…and with my network in the academic circles, I know where and how to find these pure gems of womankind. )
Every mother in the Former Soviet “periphery” dreams to get her children “Out of Here”, and aims at greatest opportunities attainable within resource available. Regarding a girl, it means a destination where she can be admitted to a reputable or promising college (by her own aptitude and parents’ money / networking), find a better-paying and desirably interesting job, and – of course – meet more single men in order to get a good husband (whereas the gifted and active men also struggle their way from the “backveld swamps” toward success in central cities).
Material difficulties of the launch are contended by ultimate parental effort (overwork, economy, borrowings, credits, savings, finding contacts, exchanging favors, collecting and giving bribes, fearful of law but justified by national ethical standards) and by the family’s connections that should support the newcomer’s first steps on the stepmotherly turf.
If one is “Still There”, it might account to any of such reasons:
- No sufficient resources due to the general impoverishment and isolation. That’s understandable… but what else?
- Her parents have lacked hard work and care. What a heritage.
- She, her parent(s) or both sides have been harnessed by excessive co-dependency, lack of confidence, anxiety, or fatalism. “Handy where born” is a very Russian attitude, but not too convenient dowry for a foreign bride to be.
- Her educational basis was insufficient (see above), or she’s altogether not too bright, ready for change, and willing to strain for results. That’s a dealbreaker to an international, cross-cultural marriage.
- She wants to remain a big fish in a small pond. Such was Joseph’s Siberian ex-wife. A wonderful woman, who nevertheless, in the long run, proved unwit for him and unfit for his world.
- Ambition can be of idle sort – awaiting free rides from fate, by the example of Ivan the Fool. This favorite of Russian folk tales has spent his life dozing on the oven, but got a magic pike to get him a princess who just broke into laughter at the sight of him upon the oven set in motion.
Is there any reason to equate Inert to Safe?.. Nature knows many species of passive predators. Like beautiful actinia to exotic fish.
Ironically, it’s the less fortunate strata that provide most assuming “entitlement queens” – yet often far from beauty queens. Just watch the flow of applicants for all sorts of castings and reality shows.
“Pet beasts” are the nightmare mistake of “civilized” Western men.
One can adopt what I call a “bear cub” – first cute and fluffy, then a houseful of unruly trouble. Or even a “wolf in sheep’s skin” – a dating consummante, a greencard scammer, or a devastating gold-digger. If you assume that deficite of quality men, lack of professional opportunities, simplistic standards, insecurity, and growing in humiliation breed humility, – this is very far from truth.
Empathy and tenderness, that man may need a traditional wife for, are deafened in a rough environment that squares round pegs. Delicate, perceptive, emotionally keen, forgiving souls have all chances to go insane there, unfathomed, derided and abused. Survivors learn to shout their way and bite back even in advance. A dream to find peace and stability in the “promised land” is common, but…
A typical complaint of Russian emigrants, accustomed to Marx motto “Life is Struggle”, summarizes the famous Russian Nostalgia in one word: “boredom” of the peaceful, stable West. Men stick it, leave, or shift countries between earning and spending. Women, especially if unable to vent in the outworld, subconsciously wind up drama – could even throw tantrums off the cuff – to stir the unbearable ease of family bliss that they feel “too good to be normal”.
In Sydney, there’s a steep, such an End of Land, favored by suiciders. “Why any?” – I wondered, charmed by the city’s vivacious comfort. – “But is there any life? Can’t go out, neither punch a face, nor get one”, – joked the rascal son of our business delegation leader.
Sly agencies advertise, “Be the first to meet her!” Yes, the first man of your kind. What they omit is that, in her environment, she is still facing men considerably-to-abysmally inferior to your qualities. What are the implications?
- Low threshold of acceptance (“a man slightly better than a devil is a god”) that lets her welcome males of any character, attitude, achievement, etc. If she could cheat on you not only with “a better deal”, but also with someone less worthy but feeling “home” to her, isn’t there more competitors? See further explanation on instinctive behavior, below.
- Strife for compensation, that moves her to look upper and upper since she’s got accustomed at her new husband’s stage.
- Seasoned grit, better trained at hunting men, than in scruples.
“Whereas a Western girl would claim a contract first, a Russian one would do anything however long for a freaking million dollars… Time ago you could seduce a chick with a block of Marlboro from a Paris supermarket. Now you offer her a house, and she is biting for a half in your company!” – Listerman again
Western men, you are not alone. The unfortunate husbands of visa scammers are an international example of what frustrates crowds of Russian marriages. Criminology has such a term as “victimity”. Could apply it to women who believe that All Men Are Jerks. We know the consequence: they keep attracting jerks, or, like Circe in the Greek mythology, keep making decent men turn into pigs (”goats”, in the Russian slang) so as to fit the woman’s expectations. Vice versa, men stand victims of their own self-fulfilling prophecies. Each is given by the measure of one’s faith.
Nothing mystical. A city guy with low confidence (may well be an achiever with undisputable physique, – fundamentally he just espouses the Phobia of Being Let Down) follows the tale of the Backward Reserve of Virtues. The gal he’s finally chosen overgrows the initial piety at the face of luck she’s always thought she deserves (otherwise she couldn’t dare think a man of his scale into her life, won’t make herself noticeable to him, and would likely have settled for the second-best offer). Then she starts paying attention to his self-doubts that virtually beg for her critical attitude.
She might have apprehended his insecurity yet at the beginning of their story – by bits of information in his manners, speech, nervous reactions, even hormones affected by emotions; in this way dogs can sense human fear (between people, a language barrier may increase intuitive perception of non-verbal signals).
Anyway, she realizes that she can be mean, unfaithful, manipulative; that she can leave him because he doesn’t really appear worth being with. The guy gets another proof of his stance that “women can’t be trusted”.
A life of hardship stimulates instinctive reasoning above rational thinking.
Conversely, a secure society demands primal instincts just at minimum, but encourages and cultivates awareness. We blame civilization for artifice, yet being “close to nature” is not always positive. Instincts may, the stronger, the more often, lead people to obsessive feelings and sudden acts they can’t even explain to themselves. What would govern your woman’s behavior? Conscience or something else?
Procreation instinct. You are hearing that a Russian woman’s life is void without a man, whatever she does. This may be a poetic hyperbole for the natural, ideologically unrestricted need for togetherness, but may be a warning against a neurotic affection case.
Imagine someone clinging to you so as interrupting your work ten times a day; jealous for every female creature within gunshot; struggling with your friends and hobbies; constantly intruding on your private space and time, even on your identity that doesn’t fit her ideal picture. “My only source of happiness is you” – so happiness is never enough – “so it means you don’t love me as much, you just use me and make fun of me, so it means I’m so bad, and you’re so bad, so you’re going to leave me, and I can’t live without you, so I’ll never let you go…” She takes every measure to possess you, and when you try to avoid smothering, a new vicious circle is started.
Worse, though, if this instinct is turned on by a different man. Still pondering on the riddle Why Girls Fall for Bad Guys, and even mature women may? Or why so many jokes about lords, wives and butlers? The answer is traced back to the cave age. In the childhood of humanity, what male image was imprinted as an epitome of strong breeder, hunter and protector? Exactly: a proverbial “mighty, fierce and hairy beast”. He is reincarnated in a bold, rugged, self-hyping, offish or jealous, at times cruel macho. “He plays with my heart, he trifles with my soul, he speaks of love as if of a car, he tells me lies but I believe everything” (Patricia Kaas is still a favorite singer in Russia).
Such guys reap heaps of girls, while “nerds” are inheriting the world. So what? Mind tells a woman to choose a sensitive, truthful, caring man – biology prods to compete for a playboy. The head votes for the budding banker – the womb ranks the biker higher. And your times of trouble make oscillations on her subconscious man’ometer.
Now, comparing the length of the new social history to that of the preceding eras, consider also the difference between your and her background… Is the order for an unsophisticated bubbly female still in force, Sir?
Gregarious instinct. “The deeper into the wood, the more timber is growing”; “children remain children while parents are alive”. Small communities, Eurasian rural traditions, low dynamic and high difficulty enforce clanship. It may be scary to realize how extended and close-knit a Russian or Ukrainian family may turn out.
So, how about your bride’s comprehensive consultations with friends and relatives – or lifetime mind control by the mother-in-law, her zealous attorney and your jealous prosecutor by default, seasoned in the struggle with the hostile world full of “goats”? How about your wife’s restless anxiety about the Parents Left Over There – who indulgingly break her heart over the phone so it takes her a day to recover, and who give everything / everyone a piece of their mind when they visit, so it takes your whole family four months to come back to senses after this “international diplomatic scandal”? How about gradual reunion of the whole kin in your country, only to sustain each other in insulated confrontation with the strange environment?..
*********
…Studying Donald Trump’s business recommendations, I’m amazed how they fit a romantic quest. Could quote his entire pages substituting “matrimonial decisions” in place of “long-term buying / selling a home or an office”.
The bottom line is: with so many technical complications and hidden costs – involve a reliable broker, Gentlemen ;)
In progress of building such service,
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