Russian women have long been known for their beauty. Edvard Radzinsky at the Wall Street Journal talks about the new wave of pretties that are coming out of Rus. Interesting stuff. And it makes Eric look forward to seeing his parents' vacation pictures. As he types this, they are cruising the Volga. Link. Excerpts:
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. . .
"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." . . .
The role of the Tennis Lolita, of the Beauteous Champion, is but Russian womanhood's most public face. Miss Sharapova, or those new little beauties who are now to be found in every corner of boundless Russia, have discovered a road to the fairytale. The Russian Invasion of the tennis Klondike is in full swing. But there is a world beyond tennis, and they will have it, too. The Russian girls are coming. They don't want to change the world. They want to conquer it.
