The Real Housewives of Moscow

A trained observer of psychology, Alina had made careful note of the strategies that seemed to work for these gazelle-like young women. For example: “A man values a woman a lot more if she is constantly dragging presents out of him,” she said, “and he values her a lot more than the woman who says, ‘No, no, no, I don’t need anything.’ ” Alina cradled her teacup, half awestruck. “They get everything this way,” she said. “I think that these things should be explained to girls in childhood. It’s very important. And it doesn’t matter if the girl is smart or not, because you can have a girl who goes to university and gets a Ph.D. and is tremendously accomplished but then loses to these pretty young things who will take away her husband before she can count to three.”

Feeling superior to these women, Alina warned me, was a fool’s comfort. “Everyone makes fun of them because they’re walking around with designer bags with diamond clasps, but things are working out just fine for them,” she said, shaking her head. “They’re geniuses. Absolute geniuses.”

A few months later, on a cool evening in September, I sat cross-legged with a dozen women on the floor of the Academy of Private Life, just off Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Street. Our teacher was Olga Kopylova, a middle-aged psychologist with a blond bob. “A man doesn’t go where he is nagged, he doesn’t go where he is put down, but where he is told that he is exceptional, the god-emperor, the light in the window,” Kopylova said. The Academy of Private Life was holding an open house, and Kopylova and her fellow-instructors were here to explain how these busy Moscow women might find happiness in their personal lives.

It was no small task. During the Second World War, some twenty-seven million Soviets were killed, most of them men in prime reproductive age. Hoping to rebuild and repopulate the country, Nikita Khrushchev encouraged women to get married and have as many babies as possible, but there were no men left to marry. Those who had managed to return from the war often came back wounded, both physically and psychologically. These men, too, were encouraged to get married—and stay married. Divorce became much more difficult to obtain. As a result, millions of women had to settle for having children with men who were married to other women—something that the state endorsed. By the twenty-first century, the male population had long since recovered, but there was still a sense, bordering on panic, that good men—single, decent, with well-paying jobs—were an endangered species. As one Russian girlfriend told me, “Men are like public toilets: either taken or shat in.”

Many Russian women felt time keenly, as if they knew to the second how long they had until their physical beauty—their main aktiv, one’s chief asset—would cease to be competitive in a cutthroat market. Until then, they capitalized on what nature had given them, investing as much as they could in clothing, makeup, and beauty procedures. (I was often asked by women in Moscow why their American counterparts “didn’t take care of themselves.”) During the financial crisis of 2008, Russia was the G-20 country hit hardest by the economic collapse, and yet cosmetics sales didn’t budge. Russian politicians, usually male, frequently touted Russian women as the most beautiful in the world, as if they were, like oil and gas, another natural resource to be exploited in the country’s march back to superpower status.

Among themselves, Russian women competed fiercely for male commitment—a commodity even rarer than the actual men. Expecting a man to be faithful in a marriage was seen as puritanical and unrealistic; infidelity was just men’s nature, women said, implying that, in this country that had once diverted wild rivers and dried up whole seas, a man’s nature was immutable. If anything, having mistresses was a status symbol: How many women (and love children) could a man afford to maintain? One Moscow banker I knew, who was on his third marriage at thirty-six, told me about a real-estate project that his bank was thinking of financing: an élite gated community with ten-million-dollar homes in the center, for the wives and legitimate children, surrounded by a ring of smaller, humbler homes, worth around two million each, for the mistresses and their illegitimate kids. This would be more convenient for everybody, explained the banker, who told me he always vacationed with his wife, two ex-wives, and all their children, even though each successive wife had started out as a mistress.