Then suddenly there were rumours about the President being ill or possibly even dead; in place of political theology we had political thanatology.[5] The body of the nation was shaken to the core; the political system immediately trembled. And even the return to public view of a younger-looking and wrinkle-free Putin was not taken as being back to normal for the political body: observers commented that the Tsar had been replaced, that this was not the same Putin; he smiles in a rather strange way, rather like the little girl whose mother has tied her plait too tightly. The traumatic experience of the President’s ten-day absence and the rumours about his illness presented Russia with a bald medical fact: Putin’s body had become the body of the nation; it had taken the place of politics. Instead of executive power, we now had Putin’s spine; instead of a work schedule, we had his pancreas; instead of parliamentary debates, we had an analysis of the President’s gait. And so the rumours about his illness instantaneously led to political chaos: in Russia there are no institutions apart from the body of the sovereign, and any hope of political change is inextricably linked to this body. We are all hostages to its fortune. This is exactly how it was in March 1953, when all the inhabitants of the USSR were hostages to Stalin’s body, and again in March 1985 when the whole country became a hostage to the decrepit body of Konstantin Chernenko (and before him to the terminally ill General Secretary Yury Andropov, who had been linked up to an artificial kidney apparatus) – and the country fell apart before our very eyes.
In order to break out from this model from the Middle Ages and to tear up our dependence on the body of the king, we have to do what they did in Europe in the early modern period: replace this body with institutions, to divide the person of the ruler from the function of government, so that Russia can finally become a civil nation and the President an ordinary person made of skin and bone, with illnesses and weaknesses and not a receptacle for abstract ideas and sacred thoughts. Only then will we be able to rid ourselves of the periodic necessity to listen out with holy fear for the Cheyne–Stokes respiration.
THE CONDOM AS A SIGN OF PROTEST
This object was always taboo in Russian culture. When I was a young man it cost two kopecks in the chemist’s, sold in envelopes made of rough, official paper, under the code name, ‘Product No. 2’, and made in the Bakovka Factory for Rubber Products (‘Product No. 1’, of course, was the gas mask). As teenagers, we were too embarrassed to say this word, as if it was a swear word; the sacred word ‘condom’ caused Soviet schoolchildren to catch their breath and speed up their pulse rate; occasionally, we would run to the chemist’s to look at this semi-forbidden fruit tucked away in the corner of the shop window.
We saw a similar flash of discomfort cross the President’s face during his press conference in December 2011 when he was answering a question about the ‘white ribbons’ worn by the opposition movement on their clothes. Faltering, Putin said: ‘To be honest, I think it’s rather inappropriate, but nevertheless I’ll say it: I thought it was publicity for the campaign against AIDS; I thought that they were contraceptives.’ Because of old Soviet habits he, too, couldn’t bring himself to say the taboo word ‘condom’, using instead the neutral euphemism, ‘contraceptive’.
The sanctimonious nature of Soviet culture, in which ‘there was no sex’ (in the famous words of a Soviet woman who was taking part in a tele-bridge between Leningrad and Boston in 1986), is now returning along with other types of Soviet absurdity. The Duma proposed banning advertisements for condoms outside specialized publications. In fact, even without any changes being made, condom adverts have effectively already disappeared from the media and migrated to the Internet. And considering the growth of the campaign in support of having children and promoting the family, almost to the point of introducing high duties for divorce and a suggestion to bring back the Soviet tax on singles and childless families, we cannot exclude the possibility that sooner or later condoms will go the same way as cigarettes: they’ll disappear from open sale at petrol stations and by the checkout in supermarkets and they’ll be hidden away in closed drawers at the chemist’s, where they’ll be available only with special permission. And why not then bring in an age limit for their sale, like for women below forty; or restrict the number of condoms one person can have? If in the new state–church ideology contraception is declared to be a sin, HIV to be God’s punishment and the best way to prevent pregnancy and infection to be self-restraint and marital fidelity, then condoms should be seen as a Western perversion, contradictory to the national traditions of healthy sex; a latex ‘fifth column’, threatening Russia’s demographic security.
Condoms were always considered to be foreign agents in Russia, little French things passed around the aristocracy in the gallant time of Ekaterina, in the period of Voltaire, the Marquis de Sade and Casanova, which, as everyone knows ended with the French Revolution. Two hundred years later in the Russia of the 1990s, they once again became the symbol of liberalization and moral emancipation. Western charities brought them into Russia as humanitarian aid and gave them out to all who wanted them, along with syringes; sex education programmes were introduced in schools and on television; and on Myasnitskaya Street in Moscow a specialized condom boutique opened, offering not the mass-produced condoms you would find in the supermarket, but an individual selection of items. At the same time, a lot of amusing advertisements appeared in the media (such as ‘Come properly to the end of the evening’), which didn’t just sell the product but educated people in their use and quietly got across the idea that you can talk about sex and joke about it, and that sex is fashionable, prestigious and happy.
The condom became as much a part of everyday life as the aspirin or the toothbrush. At the same time, the patriarchal, sanctimonious foundations of post-Soviet society also began to change. According to an All-Russian opinion poll carried out by the Levada Centre in 2012, only 23 per cent of Russians considered premarital sex to be immoral, compared to 29 per cent in 2007 and 42 per cent in 1992. More than half of those asked (55 per cent) considered it acceptable for someone to have more than one partner, while 77 per cent of young people approved of cohabitation, against 30 per cent of the older generation.
Russians’ sexual habits are rather relaxed. According to the annual Global Sex Survey carried out by the research department of the Durex Corporation, Russians have more sexual partners than almost any other country, losing out only to the Austrians. On average, our men will have twenty-eight partners in the course of their lives, while Austrian men will have twenty-nine. Russian women on average have seventeen partners. And 42 per cent of those questioned say that they are totally satisfied with their sex lives, which is higher than in Europe or the USA. Finally, and most importantly, thanks to widespread sexual education and modern methods of contraception, for the last twenty-five years the number of abortions carried out in Russia has been consistently falling (although we still remain the world champions): the annual rate has fallen from six million per year in the 1960s, to four million in 1990, and down to under a million in 2013.