When one considers the extremely crowded living conditions of the typical Russian peasant hut, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the primal scene must have been a banal occurrence for every peasant child, not just Freud’s Russian aristocratic patient. Parents and children did not have the luxury of sleeping in separate rooms of the peasant’s log hut. Rather, sleeping was a communal matter. The whole extended family typically slept together on the “polati,” which was a large raised platform. Normally this sleeping bench extended over the stove, which provided warmth for the sleepers in winter.
The crowded communal apartments of the Soviet period must also have been conducive to primal scene experiences. Even apart from the “kommunalka,” living arrangements in the Soviet period fostered the primal scene experience. According to psychotherapist Valerii Maksimenko it was recommended that the child not be taken out of the parents’ bedroom until the age of three years, while a Western childrearing manual suggested six months.104
Living conditions in Russia have generally fostered a sexualization of the child’s discovery that, as I put it earlier, the master has a master. That is, sleeping arrangements have encouraged a sadomasochistic idea of parental sexuality.
At one point in his discussion Freud says of Pankeev: “He understood now that active was the same as masculine, while passive was the same as feminine.”105 This is not a particularly psychoanalytic idea, but is traceable at least as far back as Aristotle and other ancient thinkers,106 and may be found in Russian theoretical writing about sexuality as well. Thus the early Soviet gynecologist A. V. Nemilov, in his very popular book The Biological Tragedy of Woman, states: “In the specialization of the reproductive process man has been given the active part (just as the male gamete or sperm cell is active and mobile), while to woman has been allotted a more passive role.”107
Certainly this dichotomy is biologically valid in the narrow sense that a male has to have an erection and an ejaculation in order for intercourse to take place (while the female does not even need to have an orgasm). But, in a Russian context at least, the male’s sexual “activeness” may be thought of more broadly, in part because of the widespread primal scene experience, and in part because of the overall high level of violence against women. That is, the “activeness” of the male encompasses both notions of sexuality and violence.
Linguistic examples of this association may be adduced. There is a Russian verb, “trakhat’” (perfective “trakhnut’”) which means “to bang,” “to strike.” This original meaning of the verb clearly refers to violence. But the verb also has a slang meaning, “to fuck.”108 Only a man can perform this action, however (cf. English “Bill banged Jane,” but “Jane banged Bill” is impossible in the sexual sense). Striking a woman is here the lexical equivalent of having sexual intercourse with her.
The common Russian verb “ebat’” (to fuck) also has very aggressive overtones, and cannot normally have a feminine subject.109 A man does it to a woman, but a woman does not do it to a man. A woman who utters the ordinary Russian insult “Eb tvoiu mat’” is using the masculine form, even though she is a woman, for she literally says “I, a man, fucked your mother.”
These linguistic examples are in consonance with the overall cultural expectation that wife beating is normal. The connection of male sexuality with violence is embedded in the Russian culture on more than one level. From the viewpoint of a Russian woman trapped in this culture it is very easy to interpret the connection masochistically, that is, to accept it as an invitation to masochism. A Russian woman is prepared by her cultural experience (including possibly witnessing the primal scene) to expect a certain amount of violence to go along with sexual intercourse, or more generally, to go along with living with a man. If she wants sexual intercourse with a man (and, apart from potential autoerotic and lesbian inclinations, we have to assume she does at least on occasion), she may feel that she has to endure some pain into the bargain. If she wants love from a man as well (and again we have to assume she is perfectly capable of falling in love), she may feel that the only way she can get love is to be on the receiving end of the man’s hatred too, that is, she may reconcile herself with his explosive ambivalence. Finally, if she lives with the chronic, low-level guilt experienced by most Russians (as we saw earlier), she may accept spousal violence as a form of expiation.
In this masochistic reasoning sex and love mean violence, but the direction of the semiosis can also be reversed, so that violence means love and sex. Thus a Russian woman may even come to assume that a man who does not beat her does not love her, and that a man who does not have an underlying contempt for her (and all other women) is sexually impotent (see below, 174).
Impotence was indeed a problem among the Russian peasantry. It is a well-known medical fact that excessive intake of alcohol renders a man temporarily incapable of sexual intercourse. A peasant returning home after a spree in the local tavern might have wanted to have sex with his wife, but he could not if he was too drunk.110 So instead he might beat her (recall Tian-Shanskaia’s observation that the peasant was most likely to beat his wife when drunk). From the wife’s viewpoint there would have been an understandable inclination to interpret her husband’s disgraceful behavior in some positive light, especially if she loved him. When drunk he was incapable of expressing love for her in the normal way, that is, by having sexual intercourse with her. So he only did what he could instead, he beat her. Sex and violence were already in a kind of equivalence class for her, so why not interpret his violent behavior in a positive way? Such an interpretation was of course masochistic in nature, but in some respects it made life easier for her.
There is a revealing expression in Russian: “slave of love.” This can only apply to a woman, however (it is “raba liubvi”—as in the title of Nikita Mikhalkov’s 1976 film—not “rab liubvi”). Similarly, the phrase “slave of the husband” (“raba muzha”) is a commonplace, while “slave of the wife” (“rab zheny”?) does not occur.111 In Russia it is women, not men who are thought of as being enslaved when loving someone of the opposite sex.
Suffering from Equality
In her paper on “The Problem of Feminine Masochism” (1935) psychoanalyst Karen Horney makes a curious statement about women in Russia. Reacting to other psychoanalysts (Helene Deutsch, Sandor Rado) who had made exaggerated claims about the universal presence of masochism in women, Horney emphasizes the role of cultural factors in determining the prevalence of masochism. Under the tsars, she says, women tended to be masochistic, but then a major social upheaval completely altered this attitude:
Masochistic phenomena in women can be detected as a result of directed and sharpened observation, where they might otherwise have passed unnoticed, as in social rencontres with women (entirely outside the field of psychoanalytic practice), in feminine character portrayals in literature, or in examination of women of somewhat foreign mores, such as the Russian peasant woman who does not feel she is loved by her husband unless he beats her. In the face of this evidence, the psychoanalyst concludes that he is here confronted with an ubiquitous phenomenon, functioning on a psychobiological basis with the regularity of a law of nature.