Men and women

Any person spending time in Russia will not fail to notice the curious fact that the country is in fact largely run by women.

There seems to be an imbalance between the sexes. Men are spoilt, very free, often weak-willed and live within a world created by women. This is not about individual personalities, it is not about some women having a powerful character that crushes the man (that's something different), it is simply that the female will collectively is stronger and envelops totally. Like the mother figure that contains all the remaining ones, including the father, in the Russian doll depicted above.

The special complicity one seems to find amongst women has the smooth coherence of a woven rug and covers most of the country. Male bonds, meanwhile are a more rag-tag affair, whose power is compromised from the outset by the very thing that helps cement it - massive booze consumption.

It may have always been a bit like that. It's hard to really say. De Custine in the 1830s mentions that women could be relied on to deal with money matters with the utmost probity, while less was to be expected from men. From what I can make out WW2 exacerbated a preexisting tendency. When men came home from the war they were exhausted, traumatised and greatly reduced in numbers. Women during that time had been working hard and conscientiously, developing ttheir collaborative approach to life in the absence of men, and when the men came back from the front, women spoilt them rotten, indulging their every whim. Thus it became something of a habit amongst men that was passed on to subsequent generations.

I think also Communism had  had a belittling effect on males as individuals, made their personal efforts seem pitiful,  while for women Communism was perhaps a more positive environment as it protected and met basic needs. Under the stewardship of consumerism the sisterhood has received something of a mauling. There has been nothing like "compete" and "compare" to shred its subtle bonds. The machinery of turning people into consumers is only beginning to gather pace.

Doomsayers, historians and foreign observers seem to miss in their dismal analysis of Russia the marked contrast between the public and the personal spheres, where one sphere has a tendency to be a world of men and the other a world of women. People looking at Russia from the outside, and thus seeing predominantly the public sphere, cast a disparaging eye on the world of men: conniving, chaotic, doggedly inventive, lazy and, despite being interspersed with flashes of incredible courage or brilliance - often useless.

But the mistake is to see one side and mistake it for the whole. In the world of women there is an entirely different atmosphere: it is imbued with a strong sense of responsibility. Go into any space that is controlled by women, be it a room in an office, a home or a public space, and there is a heightened feeling of calm, order and serenity the likes of which you rarely see in other countries. There is not only a sense of safety and reassurance but a sense of collective intelligence, of know-how and complicity. The public sphere may seem brutal and bordering on inhuman, but the woman's sphere underpins all this. The severe and jarring outside world is one people step out into, it is not the world in which children are raised, in which old people end their days and men stumble back into at night. The West in fact mostly lacks this cushioned layer beneath the surface.

That Russia is a place of extremes is abundantly illustrated by this dichotomy. If one were to add the often negative aspects of external life to the more positive aspects of the private sphere, I wonder if the sum would be much lesser than the same sum made in countries more accommodating to the statistician.

I wonder how the bleak view of Russian history would be adjusted if we gave more weight and emphasis to the woman's side of life. But the poles are likely to narrow: commercialism is not only likely to break up the power of women by making them more competitive and self-centred but men will become more outwardly slick and less erratic by trying to live up to western conventions and also be reined in by what really formats the behaviour of Westerners - the discipline required to pay for credit card bills, mortgages etc.

A French guy once said to me something to the effect that Russian womanhood was like a skilfully made rug from which men fired themselves off like little rockets, tracing different arcs in the sky, sometimes sumptuous, but often with the feeble trajectory of a firecracker - a brief erratic fizzle, forced down by the imperturbable laws of gravity that each tries in vain to defy. Perhaps this ill-considered audacity is aided by the certainty of a soft landing.