Beauty in the USSR

Where were all the beautiful Russian women before 1989, asks Anne Appelbaum:

This is a fairly frivolous question (okay, extremely frivolous), but I am convinced it has an interesting answer. To put it bluntly, in the Soviet Union there was no market for female beauty. No fashion magazines featured beautiful women, since there weren't any fashion magazines. No television series depended on beautiful women for high ratings, since there weren't any ratings. There weren't many men rich enough to seek out beautiful women and marry them, and foreign men couldn't get the right sort of visa. There were a few film stars, of course, but some of the most famous -- I'm thinking of Lyubov Orlova, alleged to be Stalin's favorite actress -- were wholesome and cheerful rather than sultry and stunning. Unusual beauty, like unusual genius, was considered highly suspicious in the Soviet Union and its satellite People's Republics.

This doesn't mean there weren't any beautiful women, of course, just that they didn't have the clothes or cosmetics to enhance their looks, and, far more important, they couldn't use their faces to launch international careers. Instead of gracing London drawing rooms, they stayed in Minsk, Omsk or Alma-Ata. Instead of couture, they wore cheap polyester. They could become assembly-line foremen, Communist Party bosses, even local femmes fatales, but not Vogue cover girls. They didn't even dream of becoming Vogue cover girls, since very few had ever seen an edition of Vogue.

[...]

Ultimately, what goes for the fashion world goes for other spheres of human activity. In the past, if you were born in the East Bloc, you had to play chess or be a champion gymnast to come to international attention -- chess and competitive team sports figuring among the few party-approved export industries. Nowadays, stars in fields previously unsanctioned by the party -- crime novelists, conceptual artists, computer whizzes -- from Russia, Hungary or Uzbekistan have a shot at fame and fortune, too. As for talented entrepreneurs, the sky is the limit.

Beauty is a matter of luck, but the same could be said of many other talents. And what open markets do for beautiful women, they also do for other sorts of genius. So, cheer up the next time you see a Siberian blonde dominating male attention at the far end of the table: The same mechanisms that brought her to your dinner party might one day bring you the Ukrainian doctor who cures your cancer, or the Polish stockbroker who makes your fortune, too.

Actually, they did have cosmetics and fashion in the USSR. Not sure they helped much, though...

Damian P.

Posted by damian at January 29, 2008 07:12 AM