It lead to an influx of very good-looking Russian women:
There was a particular historical moment, round about 1995 or so, when anyone entering a well-appointed drawing room, dining room, or restaurant in London was sure to encounter a beautiful Russian woman. Though the word beautiful doesn’t really capture the phenomenon. The women I’m remembering were extraordinarily, unbelievably, stunningly gorgeous.
These women were half-Kazakh or half-Tartar with Mongolian ancestors and perfect skin; dressed in the most tasteful, most expensive clothes; shod in soft leather boots; and perfectly coiffed. They were usually accompanied by an older man, sometimes much older, to whom they were perhaps married, or more likely not. They spoke in low, alluringly accented voices and towered over the lesser mortals in the room. I distinctly remember gazing upon one such creature while in the company of a friend, an old Russia hand who’d spent much of the previous decade in the Soviet Union. He stared, shook his head, and whispered, “But where were they all before?”
When you think about it, it’s a pretty good question. In the days of the Soviet Union the typical image of a Russian woman in the West was the babushka-glad grandmother, now the typical image is more like Anna Kournikova.
So where did all these beautiful women come from ?
Well, basically you can thank capitalism:
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 TV series depended upon 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.
When the Soviet Union collapsed though, that changed completely and the Western world was greeted with the likes of Kournikova and Maria Sharapova, but the forces that allowed that to happen also allow people with other talents to share those talents with the world, and that’s a good thing:
So, cheer up 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.
Ain’t capitalism great ?
H/T: Club For Growth
