The great tragic history of the emasculation of men during the twentieth century is yet to be told, but for at least one hundred years women have been the stronger sex, when it counts, in Russia. To them the idea that lipsticks and heels are tools of oppression sounds desperately foreign. For decades it was the very absence of such items from Russian stores, and the resulting need to hunt far and wide for them or to go without, that women found oppressive. They fought back and they improvised, just like freedom fighters do. In the 1950s women in the provinces substituted tooth powder for scarce face powder, petroleum jelly for lipstick, sunflower oil for mascara. And even when cosmetics became more widely available behind the Iron Curtain, the Soviet version was an inferior copy of the Western ideal. For many years eyeshadow came without a brush, and women learned to apply the colour expertly with their fingertips. And not all mascaras were created equal, as Herta Müller’s novel The Land of Green Plums, set in Communist Romania, describes:
Under the pillows in the beds were six pots of mascara. Six girls spat into the pots and stirred the soot with toothpicks until the black paste grew sticky. Then they opened their eyes wide. The toothpicks scraped against their eyelids, their lashes grew black and thick. But an hour later gray gaps began to crack open in the eyelashes. The saliva dried up and the soot crumbled onto their cheeks.
In her utterly unsentimental memoirs, Nadezhda Mandelstam, the wife of the poet Osip Mandelstam, remembers what it was like to be a woman in the early Soviet period:
We all were crazy about stockings. Flimsy – made from real silk, partially rotten – they tore on the second day and so, swallowing tears, we learned to lift stitches. And who of us did not cry with real tears when the damned heel would get broken on our only pair of favourite, beloved, silly ‘pumps’?…
Ascetic by nature, not given to frivolities or easy tears, judged by most of her contemporaries to be truly hardcore, Mandelstam nonetheless did not dismiss torn stockings or broken heels as the trivial woes of small-minded females. She understood early on that the world of phantom gender neutrality into which women were forced, if not by ideology then by the sheer absence of basic consumer goods, was yet another way in which her country was being turned into a giant prison.
In seven decades of grey, impoverished Soviet fashion, the only colour of note – red – was so poisoned with ideological hyperbole that to most eyes it looked the greyest of greys. Soviet fashion also tirelessly emphasised equality between the sexes, suspicious of anything feminine, curve-hugging, revealing or bright. So the eye-catching, often overstated clothes on our women now is like a big, fat ‘Finally!’ The Taliban, so to speak, has left town. Viva la gender différence!
Wherever you live, clothes are never just about clothes, and in Russia and Ukraine you can peer into the recent history of fashion as into a deep mirror in which history, politics, culture, demographics and economics, all thoroughly intertwined, are reflected back at you. I find it remarkable, for example, that Nicholay Uskov, the editor of GQ, Russia’s foremost glossy magazine for men, is a historian and a former lecturer at the Moscow State University. This well-groomed, highly educated man with a very serious IQ is one of the main Russian exponents of a universal idea – glamour.
The word means slightly different things in different places: in Britain, ‘glamour’ denotes charisma; in America taste, beauty and class. In Russia, ‘glamur’ has come to stand for the total triumph of materialistic existence in a way that is directly and deliberately antithetical to the Communist ideology of collectivistic, asexual, ego-mortifying, flesh-denying and gender-eschewing ideology. Uskov is a particularly interesting figure to watch in action because, unlike the real zealots, he has the ironic detachment of someone who knows all too well the difference between glamour and glamur. Accused of promoting conspicuous consumption as an ideology, Uskov answered, ‘In Europe when they say it was glamorous [glamurno], they do not mean that someone was bathing prostitutes in three-hundred-euro-a-bottle champagne… In Russia it is altogether different. We have a society hungry for dolce vita, and I find it difficult to condemn people who throw themselves with such abandon into consumption.’
A man with a vivid historiographical imagination, Uskov has clearly traced back the Russian elites’ hunger for glamur to a need to erase from their minds and their bodies every last vestige of the communal flats, stinking toilets, grey sacks masquerading as clothing, and identical Yugoslavian furniture sets – everything denoting the shared past they have come to despise. And so to forget the taste of the old factory sausages, Uskov explains, people may need to eat, as quickly as they can, more dozens of oysters than the Duke of Westminster might swallow in his entire life. In this scenario, consuming your way out of your past is a Utopian idea.
Glamur is one of the defining themes of post-Soviet Russia, its rise could be traced back to the penetration of the Western glossies into the Russian market in the early 1990s, in an era when there was almost no Russian ‘lifestyle’ market to speak of. In the early 1990s, there was a famous kiosk in Moscow where you could buy with roubles (no scarce dollars required) coveted issues of Elle or Cosmopolitan, several months old. Here, suddenly, were magazines for women containing no ‘practical advice’ on sewing a skirt out of a curtain or making a feast out of three potatoes, no ‘prose of life’ that reminded women that they were expected to dedicate themselves to the job of ‘making do’. Instead, the glossies were populated by ethereal beings with white teeth, glowing skin and slender silhouettes.
A contemporary Russian writer Tatyana Tolstaya defined the glamur embodied by these magazines not simply as an ideology of conspicuous consumption but as a transcendental way of being: ‘In glamur there are no pimples, no ingrown nails, no intestinal colic… All of this has been overcome at an earlier stage of development, halfway through the transformation from a swine to a seraph, in the down-market glossies for “receptionists”.’ If the reader is fortunate enough, they could prove to be another Natalya Vodyanova, the fruit vendor from a provincial Russian market who became a supermodel and married an English lord, Justin Portman, emerging, in the words of journalist Anastasia Chastitsyna, as ‘the first Russian Cinderella of international significance’.
But glamour is a two-way street: inevitably, the long tentacles of its Russian variant have reached back into the Western world. What began as a desperate and crude rip-off of Western consumerism is now making serious inroads into the parent culture; which is, I guess, to be expected. And so we hear on the news that billionaire Roman Abramovich has bought the Chelsea Football Club; that Rustam Tariko, the owner of Russian Standard Vodka and the Russian Standard Bank, has thrown a party for a thousand people at the foot of the Statue of Liberty; that another Russian billionaire imports glamur in force at his New Year’s Eve party, with guest performances by Robbie Williams, Mariah Carey and Ricky Martin. (Surely just one of them would more than suffice!) Of course, any form of decadence, whatever its official name, inevitably has a use-by date written all over it. It represents a moment in time, already doomed, but a moment that speaks with unexpected clarity and eloquence about the society in front of us – where it comes from, what it wants to forget, what kinds of obstacle courses it erects between its new elites and its mere mortals. This is the society Billie and I are about to plunge into – and what a pair of glamur virgins we are. Glamur separates the country I left twenty years ago from the country I am about to re-enter, just as much as all the new borders, new currencies and new political superstructures.