Russia is mainly a northern country with long-lasting cold winter. The food should give us much energy and warmth to survive during the winter time. So, the essential components of Russian cuisine are the ones, which provide more carbohydrates and fat rather than proteins. Fresh fruits and vegetables are rarely used in food. So, the top five components of a Russian meal are:
Potato (boiled, fried, baked, potato chops, potato pancakes, potato soup, smashed potato)
Bread (bread, toasts, bread-crumbs)
Eggs (boiled, fried)
Meat (pork and beef – chops, stakes)
Butter (usually added in all meals and spread on bread)
Also popular: cabbage, milk, sour cream, curds, mushrooms, lard, cucumbers, tomatoes, apples, berries, honey, sugar, salt, garlic, onions.
To cook, you will need vegetable oil, salt, and petter.
Traditional russian dishes:
1. Russian Borstch recipe
Ingredients : 3/1/2c. canned tomatoes , 5or6 med.size potatoes cut in halves ,1 large carrot cut fine, 1 small peeled beet , salt to taste , 1 small onion chopped, butter, 4c. shredded cabbage , 3/4c. sweet cream ,1/2c. fresh green pepper chopped , 2tbs. fresh or dried dill, 1 celery chopped fine , 2/1/2 qts. water, 1/1/2c. diced potatoes, black pepper .
Method:
Put water to boil in large kettle.Add 1/2 c. canned tomatoes. When water is boiling drop in 5 or 6 med. size potatoes,chopped carrot and the beet. While this is cooking add 3 tbs butter in frying pan. When melted add chopped onion,cook tender but do not brown. Add 3c. canned tomatoes and let simmer with onion and butter until a thick sauce. Set to back of stove.
Into a separate frying pan put 2-3 tbs. butter to melt. Add 2c. shredded cabbage and fry.Cook tender but do not brown.Shred another 2c. to add later to the borstch.
When potatoes are tender remove them to a bowl.Add 2tbs. butter, mash well,then add 3/4c. sweet cream and mix well and set aside.
Add 1/1/2c. diced potatoes to the stock and the remainder of the shredded cabbage. When diced potatoes are tender, add the onion-tomato- sauce, then add the cooked cabbage,and the potato-cream mixture. Add 3 tbs. butter to the borstch. Stir well.
Add fresh chopped fine green pepper. Add 3tbs fresh or dried dill. The more fresh dill the better the flavor..Remove beet, one hour later after borstch is ready.
Borstch is ready to serve.Serve hot.Serve with chopped garlic in your soup bowl and a fresh piece of bread and butter... Yummy, enjoy...
2. Potato vareniki recipe:
Ingredients : 2 pounds potatoes, cooked (save water from cooked potatoes) , 2 onions chopped , 1 stick margarine , Salt and pepper , 2 cups flour, 1/2 teaspoon salt
Method:
Cook potatoes in simmering water until soft and put them through a potato ricer. Saute onion in margarine until very soft, add 1/2 of the onions to the potatoes and season with salt and pepper.
Sift flour and salt into a bowl. Add vegetable oil and enough water to make a soft dough and mix until the dough no longer sticks to the hands. Cover dough and let rest for about 15 minutes. Roll out dough on a floured board to a 1/4-inch thickness. Cut dough into small squares and place a dollop of potato mixture in the center of each square. Fold dough, pinch ends to form a triangle. When all are made, put into boiling water and boil for about 10 minutes.
When all are cooked, drain and serve with the remaining sauteed onions on top.
3. Pelmeni recipe
Ingredients: 2 c flour, 1 c milk or water, 1/2 ts salt, 1 tb vegetable oil, 3 eggs, 250 g beef, 250 g pork, 1 onion, salt and pepper to taste.
Method:
1. Grind beef and pork twice in meat chopper. Then add chopped onion, salt, and pepper. To make mincemeat more tender and juicy, add a bit of milk. Reserve.
2. Mix flour with eggs and milk, salt and oil until a soft dough forms. Knead on floured surface until dough is elastic.
3. Take some dough and make a "sausage" (1 inch in diameter). Divide into pieces (1 inch thick). Roll each piece so that each is 1/16 inch thick.
4. Take a glass or a cup (2 inches in diameter) and make rounds with it's help on the dough. Fill each round with 1 teaspoon of the mincemeat, fold into half-moons.
5. Pinch edges together and connect the opposite sides. Pelmeni can be frozen to be cooked later ( you can keep them in the freezer for a long time), or cooked immediately.
6. To cook pelmeni, boil a large amount of water, as they can stick to each other. Salt water. Carefully drop pelmeni into boiling water. Don't forget to stir them from time to time. Boil for 20 minutes.
5. Served with butter, sour cream or vinegar, and ketchup.
4. Shashlik recipe
Ingredients : 3 lb Lamb, cut from leg , 2 sm Onion, finely-minced , 4 lg Garlic, cloves, fine-minced , 2 lg Shallot, minced , 2 tb Parsley, freshly-chopped , 2 1/2 c Pomegranate juice, unsweet, 4 tb Corn oil , 8 ds Cayenne pepper .
Method:
Trim away all fat from meat. Cut into 2" chunks. Place in small bowl together with onion, garlic, shallot, parsley, cayenne pepper and pomegranate juice. Cover and refrigerate overnight. Remove meat from marinade and pat dry. Skewer the meat, using four substantial skewers. Brush with oil. Broil under very high heat, turning often until done. Some prefer it slightly pink (12 minutes). Well done will take about 20 minutes. Remove from skewers and serve on a heated plate with Kasha. VARIATIONS: Include 2 green peppers cut into 12 chunks, 4 tomatoes cut into quarters, and 4 small, white onions, peeled and cut in half. Skewer alternate chunks of vegetable and meat chunks. Proceed according to recipe.
5. Salad Vinegret recipe
Ingredients : 2 ea average beets boiled, 4 ea potatoes boiled , 3 ea pickled cucumbers , 2 ea carrots boiled , 100 g green peas (optional), vegetable oil , mayonnaise (optional) , salt to taste.
Method:
Boil all vegetables. Let them cool down and then peel. Chop beets, potatoes, cucumbers, carrots, cucumbers. Add green peas, if you want. Season with vegetable oil or mayonnaise. Add salt to your taste. Served as an appetizer before main dish.
6. Salad Selyodka pod Shouboy (Dressed Herring) recipe
Ingredients : 2 ea thick salted herrings , 5 ea potatoes , 4 ea carrots , 4 ea beets , 5 ea eggs , 400 gr mayonnaise
Method:
Boil vegetables until they are ready ( you can boil vegetables in 1 pan). Boil eggs hard.
Peel skin from herrings, cut them along the spine. Take all bones away. Cut herring meat into very little pieces and always check for bones. Take a large dish. Put herring meat evenly on the bottom. If you like onion, you can put little pieces of onion on the herring. Then spread mayonnaise evenly (thin layer).Grind potatoes and make the next layer of it. Spread mayonnaise. Use a fork to plane the layers. Then goes carrot (grind, put, spread). Then you do the same with 4 eggs and beets. Spread mayonnaise on the beets and grind 1 egg on it to make the dish beautiful. This salad must look like a cake. Put the dish in the fridge for an hour.
7. Salad "Olivier" recipe
Ingredients : 5 potatoes , 3 carrots , 4 eggs, 1 pound boiled meat, 1/2 pound green peas, 2-3 dill pickles (you can use fresh cucumbers), salt to your taste, 1/2 pound mayonnaise
Method:
Boil potatoes and carrots in skin (it helps to keep vitamins), then cool them down and peel them. Boil eggs and boil meat. Chop potatoes, carrots, eggs, meat dill pickles into 1/2 inches squares. Add green peas and salt. Trust your own taste, everything must be in proportion. Stir mayonnaise only for the part of salad you are going to eat. It will be kept better without it. Mix the salad and refrigerate for a
while. If you want your salad a little tender, mix a part of mayonnaise with an equal part of sour cream. Bon appetit!
12/18/2009
12/12/2009
Smoking Russian Women
Number of Smoking Russian Women Doubles After Soviet Decline
A new research has shown that the number of russian women ( click to view single russian women profiles ) who smoke has doubled after the fall of the Soviet Union.
In 1992, seven per cent of women smoked, compared to almost 15 per cent by 2003. In the same period, the number of men who smoke has risen from 57 per cent to 63 per cent.
The researchers behind the study, published in the journal Tobacco Control, blame the privatization of the previously state owned tobacco industry and the behavior of the transnational tobacco companies (TTCs) for what they describe as a “very worrying increase”.
Between 1992 and 2000, TTCs such as Philip Morris, British American Tobacco and Japan Tobacco International invested approximately US$1.7 billion to gain a 60 per cent share of the privatized Russian tobacco market.
Tobacco advertising had simply not existed in the Soviet era. Yet as soon as the TTCs were there, it was rampant, say researchers. By the mid 1990s it was estimated that half of all billboards in Moscow and three quarters of plastic bags in Russia carried tobacco advertising.
“There can be no doubt that the marketing tactics of Philip Morris, British American Tobacco and the like directly underpin this massive increase in smoking that spells disaster for health in Russia,” said Dr Anna Gilmore from the School for Health at the University of Bath, who carried out the study with academics from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and University College London, and has been researching tobacco control in the region for over seven years.
“Following privatisation of the tobacco industry, TTCs invested heavily in developing the market, promoting smoking as part of the new ‘western lifestyle’.
“They aggressively targeted women, young people and those living in cities with their marketing and distribution strategies. This is now directly reflected in the smoking patterns we are seeing. Until this point women in Russia had simply not smoked.
“The situation was made worse by aggressive industry lobbying to weaken tobacco control legislation.
“The fact that the TTCs have managed to drive up male smoking rates from already high levels is incredibly alarming because at this stage of the epidemic we would expect male smoking rates to be declining.
“There is already a major demographic crisis in Russia and smoking, which already accounts for nearly half of male deaths, is making this far worse.
“The smoking epidemic in women is at a much earlier stage, but with this rapid increase, is set to catch up fast.
“The Russian government needs to wake up to the fact that cigarettes kill one in every two smokers, and unless it takes action urgently, millions more Russians will die from tobacco.”
The study used data on more than 7,000 individuals collected in 10 rounds between 1992 and 2003 as part of the Russia Longitudinal Monitoring Survey.
The findings highlighted that the largest increase in smoking rates has been amongst the least educated, markedly so amongst women.
In a signal that the Russian government may finally be taking action on the tobacco epidemic on the 10th January 2008 it adopted a draft law on joining the World Health Organization’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC). The draft law now goes to the State Duma.
Source-Eurekalert
A new research has shown that the number of russian women ( click to view single russian women profiles ) who smoke has doubled after the fall of the Soviet Union.
In 1992, seven per cent of women smoked, compared to almost 15 per cent by 2003. In the same period, the number of men who smoke has risen from 57 per cent to 63 per cent.
The researchers behind the study, published in the journal Tobacco Control, blame the privatization of the previously state owned tobacco industry and the behavior of the transnational tobacco companies (TTCs) for what they describe as a “very worrying increase”.
Between 1992 and 2000, TTCs such as Philip Morris, British American Tobacco and Japan Tobacco International invested approximately US$1.7 billion to gain a 60 per cent share of the privatized Russian tobacco market.
Tobacco advertising had simply not existed in the Soviet era. Yet as soon as the TTCs were there, it was rampant, say researchers. By the mid 1990s it was estimated that half of all billboards in Moscow and three quarters of plastic bags in Russia carried tobacco advertising.
“There can be no doubt that the marketing tactics of Philip Morris, British American Tobacco and the like directly underpin this massive increase in smoking that spells disaster for health in Russia,” said Dr Anna Gilmore from the School for Health at the University of Bath, who carried out the study with academics from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and University College London, and has been researching tobacco control in the region for over seven years.
“Following privatisation of the tobacco industry, TTCs invested heavily in developing the market, promoting smoking as part of the new ‘western lifestyle’.
“They aggressively targeted women, young people and those living in cities with their marketing and distribution strategies. This is now directly reflected in the smoking patterns we are seeing. Until this point women in Russia had simply not smoked.
“The situation was made worse by aggressive industry lobbying to weaken tobacco control legislation.
“The fact that the TTCs have managed to drive up male smoking rates from already high levels is incredibly alarming because at this stage of the epidemic we would expect male smoking rates to be declining.
“There is already a major demographic crisis in Russia and smoking, which already accounts for nearly half of male deaths, is making this far worse.
“The smoking epidemic in women is at a much earlier stage, but with this rapid increase, is set to catch up fast.
“The Russian government needs to wake up to the fact that cigarettes kill one in every two smokers, and unless it takes action urgently, millions more Russians will die from tobacco.”
The study used data on more than 7,000 individuals collected in 10 rounds between 1992 and 2003 as part of the Russia Longitudinal Monitoring Survey.
The findings highlighted that the largest increase in smoking rates has been amongst the least educated, markedly so amongst women.
In a signal that the Russian government may finally be taking action on the tobacco epidemic on the 10th January 2008 it adopted a draft law on joining the World Health Organization’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC). The draft law now goes to the State Duma.
Source-Eurekalert
12/06/2009
Famous Russian Women
Catherine I
Birth: 15 Apr 1689
Death: 17 May 1727 Sankt-Peterburg
Interred: St.Peter & St.Paul Cathedral, Sankt-Peterburg
Father: Samuil Skawronski
Spouse: Peter I The Great, EMPEROR OF RUSSIA (b. 9.6.1672)
Married: 8 Nov 1707, Warszawa (publicly 1 Mar 1712)
Catherine I, real name MARTA SKAVRONSKAYA (1682?-1727), empress of Russia (1725-27). Of peasant origin, she was born in Jakobstadt (now Jekabpils, Latvia) but was orphaned early in life and reared by a pastor in Marienburg (now Malbork, Poland).
When the Russians captured Marienburg in 1702, she was taken prisoner by the Russian commander, who sold her to Prince Aleksandr Menshikov, a close adviser of Peter the Great. She soon became Peter's mistress and most influential counselor.
Peter, who had divorced his first wife in 1699, married Catherine in 1712. After his son Alexis died, Peter issued an ukaz ("imperial order") declaring his right to name his own successor; he died in 1725 without doing so. Catherine, however, had been crowned empress-consort in 1724, and on Peter's death she was proclaimed his successor; the claims of Alexis's son (later Peter III) were bypassed.
Shrewd and courageous, Catherine defended Peter's advisers against his rages, and in her own reign she established, and concentrated power in, the supreme privy council. Two of her eight children by Peter survived, Anna (mother of Peter III) and Elizabeth Petrovna (empress 1741-62).
Birth: 15 Apr 1689
Death: 17 May 1727 Sankt-Peterburg
Interred: St.Peter & St.Paul Cathedral, Sankt-Peterburg
Father: Samuil Skawronski
Spouse: Peter I The Great, EMPEROR OF RUSSIA (b. 9.6.1672)
Married: 8 Nov 1707, Warszawa (publicly 1 Mar 1712)
Catherine I, real name MARTA SKAVRONSKAYA (1682?-1727), empress of Russia (1725-27). Of peasant origin, she was born in Jakobstadt (now Jekabpils, Latvia) but was orphaned early in life and reared by a pastor in Marienburg (now Malbork, Poland).
When the Russians captured Marienburg in 1702, she was taken prisoner by the Russian commander, who sold her to Prince Aleksandr Menshikov, a close adviser of Peter the Great. She soon became Peter's mistress and most influential counselor.
Peter, who had divorced his first wife in 1699, married Catherine in 1712. After his son Alexis died, Peter issued an ukaz ("imperial order") declaring his right to name his own successor; he died in 1725 without doing so. Catherine, however, had been crowned empress-consort in 1724, and on Peter's death she was proclaimed his successor; the claims of Alexis's son (later Peter III) were bypassed.
Shrewd and courageous, Catherine defended Peter's advisers against his rages, and in her own reign she established, and concentrated power in, the supreme privy council. Two of her eight children by Peter survived, Anna (mother of Peter III) and Elizabeth Petrovna (empress 1741-62).
11/28/2009
russian women in America
many believe that the most beautiful women on the planet are Russian women, sure that could be disputed, but that is the idea of many men who dream about hot beautiful russian women. Other ladies of the world have their merits as well, but it seems that none of them spark the interests like russian women.
Russian women take care of their husbands unlike anything men ever experienced in America. If you're ready for the experience of a lifetime and happiness in abundance, get out there and find yourself an attractive russian girl right away. There are many ways to meet russian women.
If you are currently in America, go to russian stores, russian restaurants, russian churches, those are the easiest places to meet beautiful sometimes single russian women living in America. If you do happen to be in Russia then so much the better, simply start up conversations no matter where you are, possibly inquiring for assistance with your russian. It's easy to get a conversation started and once you are past the first stages of connecting it's really simple to get a phone number.
If you're in America and not up to checking the places where russians get together, then it's different, but still easy. Just browse to one of the russian dating sites catering women living in America. Once you have found a russian girl you find interesting or attractive send her your interest and that's it. It's so easy on these dating sites because the girls are there for the same reason as you, to connect with and possibly marry a foreigner.
russian woman in America
Russian women take care of their husbands unlike anything men ever experienced in America. If you're ready for the experience of a lifetime and happiness in abundance, get out there and find yourself an attractive russian girl right away. There are many ways to meet russian women.
If you are currently in America, go to russian stores, russian restaurants, russian churches, those are the easiest places to meet beautiful sometimes single russian women living in America. If you do happen to be in Russia then so much the better, simply start up conversations no matter where you are, possibly inquiring for assistance with your russian. It's easy to get a conversation started and once you are past the first stages of connecting it's really simple to get a phone number.
If you're in America and not up to checking the places where russians get together, then it's different, but still easy. Just browse to one of the russian dating sites catering women living in America. Once you have found a russian girl you find interesting or attractive send her your interest and that's it. It's so easy on these dating sites because the girls are there for the same reason as you, to connect with and possibly marry a foreigner.
russian women love
russian woman love story
I am already typing but still thinking what to start my story with…
I had been divorced for about 5 years. At that time the feeling of loneliness was too strong. The only thing left from my marriage was a photo album and something else…the feeling of sadness first, that I gave my best years to a person with whom I had nothing in common, second that I’m still loosing joy of this life being alone.
One year passed from that time full of so called “independence”. I dated a little bit…all at local coffee shops so that I would be safe, to figure out whether this someone whom I would be ready to start my new life with, whether this one with whom I would be interested in. But I was unlucky…
Some not long-lasting love affairs and a routine life made me to lose any belief that everything might change for better and I would meet the right person. But it’s a nature of woman to live for somebody. We can’t life just for ourselves. I still believed that everything will be ok in my life, everything will be…soon. My girl friends were spending their holiday abroad in Europe. They told me to try to find some western guy. “Ok, I was looking for a soul mate just in my area for a long time. But I failed. There might be someone abroad who can understand me." Frankly speaking I didn’t believe into internet relationships, I was pretty skeptical about online commitments. But I tried. And that changed my life upside down.
Yes, I found my loving man on luckylovers dating site. One summer day in 2005 I received a response to the profile that I placed on this wonderful dating site. He was really handsome western guy, and he was calling me beautiful Russian girl. He seemed to be gentle, joyful, very nice person. All our letters showed that we had a lot of a common. When I heard his voice first time by phone, I've got a feeling that I've known him for years. His voice was so dear and warm.
So it was right the time for us to meet each other. We agreed to spend this summer vocation together. One month later we met in Turkey during our vacation. There we had the most wonderful days in our lives. We liked each other very much, and the feeling of the first touch was wonderful. I really liked him a lot. He was so kind and such a gentlemen! I wish we could stop the time of our happiness forever. We were sad – because it was impossible. We are going to meet again, and we are impatient. This small experience of being together showed that we want to live together. It doesn't matter to me where we met and where to live. I just want to be with him since I love him very much and we will be the happiest couple!
Now I realize – the faith is a big thing. We are doing strong and we are so much in love.
Alena and Gerard.
11/25/2009
gifts for your Russian Single woman with kids
Single Russian women with kids have many responsibilities between work and home, and very often, little free time. Choosing a gift for the single russian mother is pretty easy, however, if you keep in mind some basic tips. Single mothers who work are often too financially burdened to spend money on a new outfit or nice perfume. Holidays are the perfect time to give a gift that either helps a single working mother with everyday life, or gives the gift of luxury or entertainment.
* Clothing
Russian single women with kinds who work outside the home often need new work clothes. A nice sweater, business suit, or dress that appeals to personal style of the person is a great idea. Single mothers will appreciate the new outfit and feel good about wearing something new to work or when they go out. You can order clothes online in Russian online store like boutique-online.ru or in Ukrainian online store modanadom.com (you will need google web page translator if you do not speak russian)
* Food Baskets
You'd probably be surprised how many working russian single mothers would appreciate a basket of food items. Choose a theme and fill a basket with everyday staples, snack items, or baking products. Including some of the food items that you know are a family and your russian woman favorite, can personalize the gift.
* Luxury Bath & Beauty Gifts
There are some wonderful russian stores online that feature bath and body gifts. Gift baskets filled with scented lotions, shower gels, and bath items are always a great way to show your appreciation and support. A gift basket sent to a single working russian woman mother would be long remembered.
* Clothing
Russian single women with kinds who work outside the home often need new work clothes. A nice sweater, business suit, or dress that appeals to personal style of the person is a great idea. Single mothers will appreciate the new outfit and feel good about wearing something new to work or when they go out. You can order clothes online in Russian online store like boutique-online.ru or in Ukrainian online store modanadom.com (you will need google web page translator if you do not speak russian)
* Food Baskets
You'd probably be surprised how many working russian single mothers would appreciate a basket of food items. Choose a theme and fill a basket with everyday staples, snack items, or baking products. Including some of the food items that you know are a family and your russian woman favorite, can personalize the gift.
* Luxury Bath & Beauty Gifts
There are some wonderful russian stores online that feature bath and body gifts. Gift baskets filled with scented lotions, shower gels, and bath items are always a great way to show your appreciation and support. A gift basket sent to a single working russian woman mother would be long remembered.
11/19/2009
Genuine Intimacy
Americans denote the stage of Genuine Intimacy in a relationship by loss of toilet shyness. In Russian mentality, this would mean “the beginning of the end”. Russian women associate romance at least in the initial stage with certain idealization and self-discipline, aimed to let not familiarity breed contempt.
Russian .. Ukrainian women don’t specify what they are going to do when they leave for a maintenance outage, and furthermore – they commit to spare others from hearing or guessing discharge / emission to happen… even from seeing the traces of life processes on each other’s underwear.
there is one anecdotal story of american guy who came to Kiev to meet his bride for the first time :
Him: “I’ve fallen in love with my wife after our first date, for her big, sparkling, mysteriously tragic eyes of a baby doe.”
Her: “I’ll never forget our first date. It was long and absorbing; so, through all the time we were standing by my home, I nearly cried, my urinary bladder bursting.”
Russian .. Ukrainian women don’t specify what they are going to do when they leave for a maintenance outage, and furthermore – they commit to spare others from hearing or guessing discharge / emission to happen… even from seeing the traces of life processes on each other’s underwear.
there is one anecdotal story of american guy who came to Kiev to meet his bride for the first time :
Him: “I’ve fallen in love with my wife after our first date, for her big, sparkling, mysteriously tragic eyes of a baby doe.”
Her: “I’ll never forget our first date. It was long and absorbing; so, through all the time we were standing by my home, I nearly cried, my urinary bladder bursting.”
11/11/2009
Turn Offs For Russian Women
What is the biggest turn-off for Russian women dating American men? We all know what we’re looking for, when searching for that special someone. Good personality, sense of humor, and so on. But, what exactly is it that women aren’t in the market for?
1 Men who don’t wear enough, or any deodorant
2 Hair overgrowing in a man's ears or nose
3 Long nasty finger or toe nails
4 Spitting all the time
5 Leaving Socks On when making love to her
6 Kissing without disposing of his perpetual chewing gum
7 Chewing with his mouth open
8 Putting your feet on a table
9 Burping
10 Picking nose
sad but true :)) guys watch your manners when dating those young and beautiful Ruski !
1 Men who don’t wear enough, or any deodorant
2 Hair overgrowing in a man's ears or nose
3 Long nasty finger or toe nails
4 Spitting all the time
5 Leaving Socks On when making love to her
6 Kissing without disposing of his perpetual chewing gum
7 Chewing with his mouth open
8 Putting your feet on a table
9 Burping
10 Picking nose
sad but true :)) guys watch your manners when dating those young and beautiful Ruski !
11/07/2009
Famous Russian Women
Maya Plisetskaya, great Russian dancer
For some ballerinas, their legendary status is a given and recording twenty-five curtain calls and reviews most of us would kill for doesn't seem in the least conceited. Maya Plitsetskaya is one of these. Born into post-Revolutionary Russia's greatest dancing family, the Messerers, Plisetskaya seemed destined for a life on the stage. Her uncle, Asaf, was an outstanding teacher whose students make up a roll call of Soviet ballet: Galina Ulanova, Vladimir Vasiliev, Ekaterina Maximova. Her aunt, Sulamif, was a Bolshoi ballerina (as well as swimming champion of Moscow for five consecutive years). At age 91, she still travels the world teaching class.
Born in 1925, Plitsetskaya's early childhood was lived in the shadows of Stalinism. Her father's disappearance in 1937 - confirmed as his death only fifty two years later - and her mother's subsequent imprisonment left her, aged eleven, officially labeled as 'daughter of an enemy of the people'. Her writing, in places, offers a unique personal perspective on the terrors of those years: not the detailed, picking-at-the-bones of an adult mind, but a child's eye view - removed, detached, selfish, even. In a single paragraph, Plisetskaya paints a startling picture of the now famous pre-dawn arrests: the roughness, the search, her pregnant mother's tears, her brother's screams, the inquisitive neighbours. And there observing it all is little Maya: frightened for her father, but unable to separate that fear from her concern that her new dress, sewn by her mother for the impending parade in Red Square, would now never see the light of day.
Unfortunately, not all the writing matches this vivid episode and too much of the book, like many autobiographies, is made up of long lists of names. The inclusion of the Russian patronymic, in addition to the first and last name, seems to add a dozen pages to an already lengthy book. In forty-nine chapters, Plisetskaya weaves through her life, recording the rehearsals and performances interspersed with 'political instruction', the communal apartments, the KGB minders and the mindless bureaucracy that made up the life of a Soviet artist. Her regular brushes with authority are recounted in detail, and few opponents emerge well from the tale.
Throughout it all runs her struggle to shake off the official designation nevyezdnaya - unexportable - that kept her from travelling with the Bolshoi Ballet on their tours abroad. A photograph of a flying leap in 1956 - exactly the year in which Plisetskaya was barred from joining the Bolshoi at Covent Garden - demonstrate the powerful physicality that London was missing.
The ban was finally lifted in 1959, when she was allowed to tour the US, but her absence from that triumphant London visit in 1956 seems to have denied her her rightful place in the British version of ballet history. Here, she is best known for a record number of performances on the gala circuit of Anna Pavlova's Dying Swan, but her repertoire and choreographic endeavours were extensive. She danced Swan Lake over eight hundred times and in the book she lists the world leaders who sat through those performances. If you thought that Prime Minister Gandhi, Presidents Kennedy and Nasser, Emperor Haile Selassie, Marshal Tito, Chairman Mao and Comrade Kruschev had nothing in common, think again. They all saw Maya Plisetskaya dancing a swan.
Maya Plisetskaya's career stretched over sixty years - and counting. Her latest performance was in 1996, at the age of 71, and I certainly wouldn't put money on her hanging up her pointe shoes for good. Her account of that career can be read as a colourful - if highly personal - account of one of the most extraordinary periods in recent history: not only the view from the other side of the curtain, but the view from the other side of the iron curtain, too.
For some ballerinas, their legendary status is a given and recording twenty-five curtain calls and reviews most of us would kill for doesn't seem in the least conceited. Maya Plitsetskaya is one of these. Born into post-Revolutionary Russia's greatest dancing family, the Messerers, Plisetskaya seemed destined for a life on the stage. Her uncle, Asaf, was an outstanding teacher whose students make up a roll call of Soviet ballet: Galina Ulanova, Vladimir Vasiliev, Ekaterina Maximova. Her aunt, Sulamif, was a Bolshoi ballerina (as well as swimming champion of Moscow for five consecutive years). At age 91, she still travels the world teaching class.
Born in 1925, Plitsetskaya's early childhood was lived in the shadows of Stalinism. Her father's disappearance in 1937 - confirmed as his death only fifty two years later - and her mother's subsequent imprisonment left her, aged eleven, officially labeled as 'daughter of an enemy of the people'. Her writing, in places, offers a unique personal perspective on the terrors of those years: not the detailed, picking-at-the-bones of an adult mind, but a child's eye view - removed, detached, selfish, even. In a single paragraph, Plisetskaya paints a startling picture of the now famous pre-dawn arrests: the roughness, the search, her pregnant mother's tears, her brother's screams, the inquisitive neighbours. And there observing it all is little Maya: frightened for her father, but unable to separate that fear from her concern that her new dress, sewn by her mother for the impending parade in Red Square, would now never see the light of day.
Unfortunately, not all the writing matches this vivid episode and too much of the book, like many autobiographies, is made up of long lists of names. The inclusion of the Russian patronymic, in addition to the first and last name, seems to add a dozen pages to an already lengthy book. In forty-nine chapters, Plisetskaya weaves through her life, recording the rehearsals and performances interspersed with 'political instruction', the communal apartments, the KGB minders and the mindless bureaucracy that made up the life of a Soviet artist. Her regular brushes with authority are recounted in detail, and few opponents emerge well from the tale.
Throughout it all runs her struggle to shake off the official designation nevyezdnaya - unexportable - that kept her from travelling with the Bolshoi Ballet on their tours abroad. A photograph of a flying leap in 1956 - exactly the year in which Plisetskaya was barred from joining the Bolshoi at Covent Garden - demonstrate the powerful physicality that London was missing.
The ban was finally lifted in 1959, when she was allowed to tour the US, but her absence from that triumphant London visit in 1956 seems to have denied her her rightful place in the British version of ballet history. Here, she is best known for a record number of performances on the gala circuit of Anna Pavlova's Dying Swan, but her repertoire and choreographic endeavours were extensive. She danced Swan Lake over eight hundred times and in the book she lists the world leaders who sat through those performances. If you thought that Prime Minister Gandhi, Presidents Kennedy and Nasser, Emperor Haile Selassie, Marshal Tito, Chairman Mao and Comrade Kruschev had nothing in common, think again. They all saw Maya Plisetskaya dancing a swan.
Maya Plisetskaya's career stretched over sixty years - and counting. Her latest performance was in 1996, at the age of 71, and I certainly wouldn't put money on her hanging up her pointe shoes for good. Her account of that career can be read as a colourful - if highly personal - account of one of the most extraordinary periods in recent history: not only the view from the other side of the curtain, but the view from the other side of the iron curtain, too.
11/01/2009
Russian Women in FSU
Many Western men considering marriage to a russian woman, somehow look for a bride from Moscow or Saint Petersburg only, Russia is not limited to Moscow and St. Petersburg, Russian women live in many other countries.
here is a quick statistics on population of FSU countries:
Russia - 141,9 million people
is home to as many as 160 different ethnic groups and indigenous peoples. 79.83% of the population (115,889,107 people) is ethnically Russian.
Ukraine - 46.1 million people
Ukrainian 77.8%, Russian 17.3%, Romanian 0.8% (including Moldovan 0.5%), Belarusian/Belarus 0.6%, Crimean Tatar 0.5%, Bulgarian 0.4%, Hungarian 0.3%, Polish 0.3%, Jewish 0.2%, Greeks 0.2% and other 1.6% (including Albanians, otherwise known as Torbesh, old communities of Armenians living on the Sea of Azov, and a microcosm of Gotlander Swedes of Gammalsvenskby)
Belarus - 9.7 million people
Belarusians 81.2%, Russians 11.4%, Poles 3.9%, Ukrainians 2.4%, Jews 0.3%, Armenians 0.1%, Lipka Tatars 0.1%, Ruska Roma 0.1%, Lithuanians 0.1%, Azeris 0.1%,
Kazakhstan - 15.7 million people
there are two dominant ethnic groups in Kazakhstan, ethnic Kazakhs (53.4%) and ethnic Russians (30%) with a wide array of other groups represented, including Ukrainians, Uzbeks, Germans, Chechens, Koreans, and Uyghurs
Uzbekistan - 27.3 million people
Uzbeks comprise a majority (80%) of the total population. Other ethnic groups include Russians 5.5%, Tajiks 5%, Kazakhs 3%, Karakalpaks 2.5%, and Tatars 1.5%
Kyrgyzstan - 5.2 million people
the nation's largest ethnic group are the Kyrgyz, a Turkic people, which comprise 69% of the population . Other ethnic groups include Russians (9.0%) concentrated in the north and Uzbeks (14.5%) living in the south. Small but noticeable minorities include Tatars (1.9%), Uyghurs (1.1%), Tajiks (1.1%), Kazakhs (0.7%) and Ukrainians (0.5%)
Tajikistan - 7,2 million people
Tajik 79.9%, Uzbek 15.3%, Russian 1.1%
Turkmenistan - 5 million people
ethnic composition of Turkmenistan is 85% Turkmen, 5% Uzbek, 4% Russian
Latvia - 2,2 million people
Latvians 59.2%, Russians 28.0%, Belarusians 3.7%, Ukrainians 2.5%, Poles 2.4% , Lithuanians 1.3%
Lithuania - 3.3 million people
83.45% of the population identified themselves as Lithuanians, 6.74% as Poles, 6.31% as Russians, 1.23% as Belorussians
Estonia - 1,3 million people
Estonian 68.6%, Russian 25.6%, Ukrainian 2.1%, Belarusian 1.2%, Finn 0.8%
Armenia - 3.1 million people
Armenia is the only republic of the former Soviet Union that boasts a nearly-homogeneous population. Ethnic minorities include Russians, Assyrians, Ukrainians, Yazidi Kurds, Greeks, Georgians, and Belarusians.
Moldova - 4,3 million people
Moldovan/Romanian 78.2%, Ukrainian 8.4%, Russian 5.8%, Gagauz 4.4%, Bulgarian 1.9%
Georgia - 4,6 million people
Georgians 83.7%, Azerbaijanis 6.5%, Armenians 5.7%, Russians 1.5%
Azerbaijan - 8.6 million people
Azerbaijani 90.6% , Lezgins 2.2% , Russians 1.8% , Armenians 1.5%, Talysh 1.0% Avars 0.6%, Turks 0.5%, Tatars 0.4%, Ukrainians 0.4%, Tsakhurs 0.2%, Georgians 0.2%,
Kurds 0.2%, Jews 0.1% , Udins 0.05%
Yes, Moscow is the easiest place to fly into from everywhere else, but perhaps that's not such a good thing. Think about it!
10/28/2009
Kazakhstan and Kazakhstan women
Kazakhs are descendants of Turkic tribes (Kipchaks or Cumans, Nogais, Qarluqs, Kankalis), Mongol groups (Kiyat,Manghud,Kereis, Naimans, etc.) and Indo-Iranian tribes (Wusun, Sarmatians, Scythians, etc.) which populated the territory between Siberia and the Black Sea and remained in Central Asia when the Turkic and Mongolic groups started to invade and conquer the area between the fifth and thirteenth centuries AD.
a young Kazakhstan woman in national clothes
a young Kazakhstan woman wearing wedding head-dress
a young Kazakhstan woman wearing national dress
a beautiful young Kazakhstan woman trying on a national dress
a young Kazakhstan woman in national clothes
a young Kazakhstan woman wearing wedding head-dress
a young Kazakhstan woman wearing national dress
a beautiful young Kazakhstan woman trying on a national dress
10/24/2009
domestic violenc and rape
Fourteen thousand women die in Russia every year as a result of violence by their husbands or partners, three times as many as the number of soldiers killed in Chechnya since 1999, experts said in the run-up to International Women's Day.
Every day around 36 000 women are beaten by their husband in violence many believe is related to the long-running, brutalising Chechen conflict, according to the human rights group Amnesty International, quoting figures provided by the Russian interior ministry.
The result is that a woman dies as a result of domestic violence every 40 minutes, the figures show.
"The number of women killed in domestic violence every year is roughly the same as the number of Soviet troops killed in Afghanistan in 10 years of war," said Natalia Abubikirova, head of the Russian non-government organisation Association of Distress Centres.
Marina Regentova, an official with the organisation that provides counselling and legal advice to women, says that "the Chechen conflict is one of the main causes of domestic violence, along with poverty, unemployment and alcoholism."
Troops returning from the war-torn southern republic "return traumatised by what they have seen and done," she said.
Since 1979, when the Soviet Union sent its troops into Afghanistan, "Russia has been a society at war, with only brief interludes of peace," Regentova said, stressing that "it's always the women who pay the price for these wars, a price that men prefer to forget, or hide."
The Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989 was followed by the tumultuous years of the collapse of the Soviet Union and then the Chechen conflict which began in December 1994 and continues today, with only a three-year break from 1996 to 1999.
"For the authorities, domestic violence does not exist. It's seen as a purely family affair. It often happens that neighbours, alarmed by the shouting they hear, call in the police but the police do nothing," Regentova said.
Amnesty International has called on the Russian authorities to criminalise domestic violence as a "crime against women," offering them the possibility of taking legal action.
Moscow, a city of more than 10 million inhabitants, has not a single home for beaten women. Elsewhere in the country, "you can count the number of homes of this kind on the figures of one hand," Regentova said.
"The present social insecurity, resulting from the break-up of the Soviet Union, has seen a return to patriarchal values," she noted, an observation confirmed by an opinion poll published this week indicating that 78 percent of Russians believe a woman's place is in the home.
Tatyana Masatkina, of the human rights group Memorial, said that in Chechnya women are raped "with impunity, as the subject is taboo in Muslim society, and the situation is not much better in Russia."
She cited the case of a young woman of 17 who was raped in the street by the friend of a girlfriend and has been seeking legal redress.
"She stands almost no chance. Police told her parents that according to a medical examination she was not a virgin at the time of the rape. That's their way of saying that in their view the girl is a slut and had it coming to her," Masatkina said.
However the situation appears to be "changing slowly," Regentova said.
"The wall of silence surrounding domestic violence and rape is gradually coming down," she said, urging women to assume a greater role in society.
Every day around 36 000 women are beaten by their husband in violence many believe is related to the long-running, brutalising Chechen conflict, according to the human rights group Amnesty International, quoting figures provided by the Russian interior ministry.
The result is that a woman dies as a result of domestic violence every 40 minutes, the figures show.
"The number of women killed in domestic violence every year is roughly the same as the number of Soviet troops killed in Afghanistan in 10 years of war," said Natalia Abubikirova, head of the Russian non-government organisation Association of Distress Centres.
Marina Regentova, an official with the organisation that provides counselling and legal advice to women, says that "the Chechen conflict is one of the main causes of domestic violence, along with poverty, unemployment and alcoholism."
Troops returning from the war-torn southern republic "return traumatised by what they have seen and done," she said.
Since 1979, when the Soviet Union sent its troops into Afghanistan, "Russia has been a society at war, with only brief interludes of peace," Regentova said, stressing that "it's always the women who pay the price for these wars, a price that men prefer to forget, or hide."
The Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989 was followed by the tumultuous years of the collapse of the Soviet Union and then the Chechen conflict which began in December 1994 and continues today, with only a three-year break from 1996 to 1999.
"For the authorities, domestic violence does not exist. It's seen as a purely family affair. It often happens that neighbours, alarmed by the shouting they hear, call in the police but the police do nothing," Regentova said.
Amnesty International has called on the Russian authorities to criminalise domestic violence as a "crime against women," offering them the possibility of taking legal action.
Moscow, a city of more than 10 million inhabitants, has not a single home for beaten women. Elsewhere in the country, "you can count the number of homes of this kind on the figures of one hand," Regentova said.
"The present social insecurity, resulting from the break-up of the Soviet Union, has seen a return to patriarchal values," she noted, an observation confirmed by an opinion poll published this week indicating that 78 percent of Russians believe a woman's place is in the home.
Tatyana Masatkina, of the human rights group Memorial, said that in Chechnya women are raped "with impunity, as the subject is taboo in Muslim society, and the situation is not much better in Russia."
She cited the case of a young woman of 17 who was raped in the street by the friend of a girlfriend and has been seeking legal redress.
"She stands almost no chance. Police told her parents that according to a medical examination she was not a virgin at the time of the rape. That's their way of saying that in their view the girl is a slut and had it coming to her," Masatkina said.
However the situation appears to be "changing slowly," Regentova said.
"The wall of silence surrounding domestic violence and rape is gradually coming down," she said, urging women to assume a greater role in society.
10/18/2009
dangerous jobs for Russian women
In Russia, there are 460 jobs that are legally off limits to women -- like driving trains and fighting fires.
In the United States women can do anything they want -- well at least legally they have the right to hold any job. But in Russia there's a list of job that women can't do. Jobs that are considered too dangerous and physically grueling. One Russian woman recently tried to challenge the list. She filed a discrimination claim after being denied a job as a metro train operator. But this month Russian's Supreme Court ruled against her.
"The World" correspondent Jessica Golloher files this report from Moscow on the jobs women can't do in Russia.
In Moscow the metro is the easiest way to get around. Officials tout the metro as an on-time, well-run service with very competent workers. But if you're a woman and want to drive a train you're out of luck. The only job a woman can do on the train is as an announcer.
Russia's constitution guarantees men and women equal employment but the country's labor code states women shouldn't do hard, physical labor or jobs that entail harmful or dangerous conditions. And the code lists 460 jobs off limits to women. Jobs like chimney sweep, fire fighter, blacksmith, steel worker, and metro train operator. But women here can drive buses, trams, and trolleys.
Irina Vasanova is a teacher in her late 50s. She says it's ironic the list of jobs deemed too hard for women was established in the Soviet era [through translator]: "In Soviet times often Soviet women would repair the roads in the city and also the railways. During maintenance they would do very hard, manly, heavy work."
But this list of no-can-do jobs for women isn't just as Soviet relic. In 2000 Russian president Vladimir Putin signed off on the latest list.
Evgenny Nasonov says the restrictions still make sense. Nasonov is with the Kremlin-aligned Young Russian Foundation which promotes Russian family values [through translator]: "I think there are several jobs and professions that women shouldn't do, for instance defend their country. Men should protect the homeland, not women. Women should stay at home and take care of the children and the family."
And that’s a common view here.
Mascha Lipman is with the Carnegie Center, a think tank based here in Moscow: "I think we can say with certainty that there is not much interest and this is an overstatement. There is no interest in gender issues at large in Russia.
"The Bolshevik state imposed the concept of gender equality and as anything imposed from above it only went so deep. And when the Soviet Union collapsed the conservative aptitudes came to the fore."
Russian teacher Irina Vasanova agrees. She says many Russian women don't care about the restrictions because they don't want to do what are considered manly jobs [through translator]: "Russian women often want to appear weak. They like that men think that they are weak. Russian women don't think about discrimination."
So you probably shouldn't expect to see female freight handlers or train operators any time soon.
In the United States women can do anything they want -- well at least legally they have the right to hold any job. But in Russia there's a list of job that women can't do. Jobs that are considered too dangerous and physically grueling. One Russian woman recently tried to challenge the list. She filed a discrimination claim after being denied a job as a metro train operator. But this month Russian's Supreme Court ruled against her.
"The World" correspondent Jessica Golloher files this report from Moscow on the jobs women can't do in Russia.
In Moscow the metro is the easiest way to get around. Officials tout the metro as an on-time, well-run service with very competent workers. But if you're a woman and want to drive a train you're out of luck. The only job a woman can do on the train is as an announcer.
Russia's constitution guarantees men and women equal employment but the country's labor code states women shouldn't do hard, physical labor or jobs that entail harmful or dangerous conditions. And the code lists 460 jobs off limits to women. Jobs like chimney sweep, fire fighter, blacksmith, steel worker, and metro train operator. But women here can drive buses, trams, and trolleys.
Irina Vasanova is a teacher in her late 50s. She says it's ironic the list of jobs deemed too hard for women was established in the Soviet era [through translator]: "In Soviet times often Soviet women would repair the roads in the city and also the railways. During maintenance they would do very hard, manly, heavy work."
But this list of no-can-do jobs for women isn't just as Soviet relic. In 2000 Russian president Vladimir Putin signed off on the latest list.
Evgenny Nasonov says the restrictions still make sense. Nasonov is with the Kremlin-aligned Young Russian Foundation which promotes Russian family values [through translator]: "I think there are several jobs and professions that women shouldn't do, for instance defend their country. Men should protect the homeland, not women. Women should stay at home and take care of the children and the family."
And that’s a common view here.
Mascha Lipman is with the Carnegie Center, a think tank based here in Moscow: "I think we can say with certainty that there is not much interest and this is an overstatement. There is no interest in gender issues at large in Russia.
"The Bolshevik state imposed the concept of gender equality and as anything imposed from above it only went so deep. And when the Soviet Union collapsed the conservative aptitudes came to the fore."
Russian teacher Irina Vasanova agrees. She says many Russian women don't care about the restrictions because they don't want to do what are considered manly jobs [through translator]: "Russian women often want to appear weak. They like that men think that they are weak. Russian women don't think about discrimination."
So you probably shouldn't expect to see female freight handlers or train operators any time soon.
10/14/2009
internet dating
So Masha and I met online through this internet dating site. I saw her first and made a request. Nothing special just normal and frank words: I like you. She responded at the same day and day after day, our relationship developed over the months. At first we became good friends with each other, shared our thoughts and ideas in the moments of loneliness. She loved my aussie humour and thanks God she was so quick-witted and it was addictive! She has broken serious relationship not far ago and did not want to start again at least so soon. She was also learning to use the net and we had great fun teaching and learning these all.
But then it happened that we became very much in love with each other. Understanding of this came nearly after six months and simultaneously. In November I flew to Minsk, Belarus to meet the woman I had fallen in love with and we spent wonderful week experiencing life together. I returned again in three months for another two weeks with Masha. At that time we both knew we were right to each other and spent these days going out more, getting know her friends and relatives. The only problem was with her mother, she could not believe this was everything for real and she thought I was just playing around. It appeared later that Masha did not tell her about our first meeting, because she knew the reaction. Actually that was the worst in our dating experience but later we’ve managed to overcome her mom unwillingness to let her daughter go somewhere who knows where. I’ll be a bit ahead and tell you that now she is my great friend and always is on my side on our little arguments.
It takes a lot to bring Masha to Australia but at last she saw her new home and her new land. During this period we knew we had to be together for all our lives. It was really hot day, that day I asked her to marry me and she accepted my proposal. We married in church in Belarus, and so here we are, me, Jeff from Australia and my Belarusian girl, Masha, more than a year passed when we met online and everything still going on exactly the same as it was during our first meeting.
Internet dating is a very different way to get to know someone but I feel this has been the best thing we could have done for all of us. It’s like anything if you have to work hard for it you seem to appreciate it more! Internet dating gave us this opportunity and we appreciate it so much! Jeff and Masha.
But then it happened that we became very much in love with each other. Understanding of this came nearly after six months and simultaneously. In November I flew to Minsk, Belarus to meet the woman I had fallen in love with and we spent wonderful week experiencing life together. I returned again in three months for another two weeks with Masha. At that time we both knew we were right to each other and spent these days going out more, getting know her friends and relatives. The only problem was with her mother, she could not believe this was everything for real and she thought I was just playing around. It appeared later that Masha did not tell her about our first meeting, because she knew the reaction. Actually that was the worst in our dating experience but later we’ve managed to overcome her mom unwillingness to let her daughter go somewhere who knows where. I’ll be a bit ahead and tell you that now she is my great friend and always is on my side on our little arguments.
It takes a lot to bring Masha to Australia but at last she saw her new home and her new land. During this period we knew we had to be together for all our lives. It was really hot day, that day I asked her to marry me and she accepted my proposal. We married in church in Belarus, and so here we are, me, Jeff from Australia and my Belarusian girl, Masha, more than a year passed when we met online and everything still going on exactly the same as it was during our first meeting.
Internet dating is a very different way to get to know someone but I feel this has been the best thing we could have done for all of us. It’s like anything if you have to work hard for it you seem to appreciate it more! Internet dating gave us this opportunity and we appreciate it so much! Jeff and Masha.
10/11/2009
do americans hate russians and russian women?
Mark: Americans do not hate russians, especially russian women. I really don't think the American people on the street, hate the Russian people on the street. Never have never will. Our governments are another story.
Paolo: Personally, I've never met a Russian I didn't like. Every single one of them have been polite and kind spoken now the Russian government is something totally different. Putin used to be KGB and I think he still has a lot of communist in him. USA has always hated Communism and its practices.
do you hate Russians?
Paolo: Personally, I've never met a Russian I didn't like. Every single one of them have been polite and kind spoken now the Russian government is something totally different. Putin used to be KGB and I think he still has a lot of communist in him. USA has always hated Communism and its practices.
do you hate Russians?
10/10/2009
do russian women hate America?
opinion of two russian women below reflects opinion of many:
1 Elena, Moscow, Russia : I think that Russians have a lot of sympathy for American people and when I travel to the States, I see all the time that it's a mutual feeling. There's a lot of great things about the U.S. as a country. Our countries have a lot of potential for partnership.
But we do not like to be surrounded by the NATO bases, and neither do we like to be provoked into conflicts, something that myopic Bush administration is known for doing and guiding our countries back into Cold War. Hope the new administration will be smarter and easier to work with.
2. Matasha, Samara, Russia: We think you are just people like us and have nothing to do with your Government. I personally don't like that the politicians are trying to expand NATO and build the Missile defense system around Russia. I feel it's very threatening to us, but I think that the majority of Americans are very nice people and have very much in common with Russians. It is sad that dirty politicians who are ruling the world are trying to make enemies of us.
do you hate America?
10/05/2009
Famous Russian Women
Galina Ulanova, great Russian dancer
Ulanova wrote a small book, The Making of a Ballerina, and it was translated from the Russian by S. Rosenberg in 1950. The first paragraph reads, "I did not really wish to be a ballet dancer. True, my first visit to the theatre fired my imagination, but I was not swept off my feet by that strong impulse for a stage career which precipitated so many to the footlights."
The first performance she saw was, of course, a ballet. Ulanova's father, Serge Ulanov regisseur of the Imperial Maryinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, took her to see Sleeping Beauty. At the first appearance of the Lilac Fairy she screamed out, "That's mama, my mama!" Ulanova's mother, Maria Romanova, was a dancer and a teacher at the Imperial School.
After the 1917 Revolution life was difficult for all. Ulanova's parents had to perform three times a day for film audiences as the films were being rewound, in addition to their performances at the Maryinsky.
Ulanova wept bitterly when she was taken by strangers to the Petrograd School of Choreography as a boarding student. Her parents found it necessary because their rehearsing, performing and teaching schedule did not give them the opportunity to care for her. At the school her mother was her first teacher, but Galina didn't want to dance. She had a clear picture of her mother changing from clumsy felt boots to her toe shoes, wearing a crisp tarlatan tutu and performing with a smile. The smile didn't deceive her, "I saw clearly how fatigued mother was and the strain it cost her to dance."
At Ulanova's first lesson at the school she pleaded with her mother to take her home, but her mother told her if she would stay until the New Year she could then come home. The New Year arrived, but since Ulanova had made friends at the school, she decided to stay. She also was making extraordinary progress in her classes. She was invited to perform at the Academic Opera as a little bug in Riccardo Drigo's Caprices of a Butterfly. This debut gave her her first performing experience onstage. It also gave her joy at the thought that, "thank goodness," she had made no mistates. Her next role was that of a bird in Rimsky-Korsakov's Snow Maiden.
She danced the lead in Chopinana at her graduation performance -- and her debut in the theatre was Princess Florine in the Blue Bird variation. At the age of eighteen, four months after her debut, Ulanova danced the leading role of Odette-Odile in Swan Lake. Ulanova said of her early performances: "I danced without deeply understanding the characters I impersonated."
After her studies in the school under her mother's directions, Aggripina Vaganova took over her training. Vaganova was significant in her development as a dancer.
Eventually, Ulanova started to have a social life with the intellectuals of her time. After performances they would gather at a someone's home and discuss all the arts. She was fascinated by the theories of Konstantin Sergeyevich Stanislavsky and applied his ideas to her dancing. She claimed that she had danced Swan Lake a hundred times before she understood the ballet beyond the steps.
Ulanova was much admired for the poetry and dramatic projection of her dancing. But she was also a hard worker. She said, "A dancer must be a hard plodder. Daily practice is the meat and drink and it must never cease, not even during summer holidays." She also danced often at the Bolshoi in Moscow and in 1944 left the Kirov to become the Prima Ballerina of the Bolshoi Ballet. Besides the classical repertory, she created roles in: Fountain of Bakhchisaray (1933), Lost Illusion (1935), and Romeo and Juliet (1940), Tao-Hoa in a revised version of the Red Poppy (1949) and Katrina in the Stone Flower (1954).
In 1945, she danced her first appearance in the West in Vienna. Because of her close connection with the Communist party she danced in Rome in 1949, and Florence and Venice in 1951. Russia at the time had the Iron Curtain and very few artists were allowed in the West. With the Bolshoi Ballet she danced in London (1956) and New York (1959). I was fortunate to have seen her dance in America.
Those who did not have the chance to see her in person could have seen her films in the Art Houses of the West: excerpts from Swan Lake and The Fountain of Bakhchisaray (1953), Romeo and Juliet (1957), and Giselle (her Dying Swan was added as an extra) (1957).
Arnold L. Haskell, dance educator, wrote about Ulanova, "My memories of Ulanova are, to me, a part of life itself, bringing a total enrichment of experience. To me, hers are not theatrical miracles but triumphs of human spirit. Where Pavlova was supremely conscious of her audience and could play upon its emotions as upon an instrument, Ulanova is remote in a world of her own -- which we are privileged to penetrate. She is so completely identified with the character she impersonates that nothing outside exists."
Ulanova retired from the stage in 1962 but continued to work at the Bolshoi Ballet as ballet mistress. Joseph Stalin awarded her the Stalin Prize in 1941, 1946, 1947 and 1951; People's Artist of R.S.F.S.R. (1951); and the Lenin Order (1974).
Ulanova wrote a small book, The Making of a Ballerina, and it was translated from the Russian by S. Rosenberg in 1950. The first paragraph reads, "I did not really wish to be a ballet dancer. True, my first visit to the theatre fired my imagination, but I was not swept off my feet by that strong impulse for a stage career which precipitated so many to the footlights."
The first performance she saw was, of course, a ballet. Ulanova's father, Serge Ulanov regisseur of the Imperial Maryinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, took her to see Sleeping Beauty. At the first appearance of the Lilac Fairy she screamed out, "That's mama, my mama!" Ulanova's mother, Maria Romanova, was a dancer and a teacher at the Imperial School.
After the 1917 Revolution life was difficult for all. Ulanova's parents had to perform three times a day for film audiences as the films were being rewound, in addition to their performances at the Maryinsky.
Ulanova wept bitterly when she was taken by strangers to the Petrograd School of Choreography as a boarding student. Her parents found it necessary because their rehearsing, performing and teaching schedule did not give them the opportunity to care for her. At the school her mother was her first teacher, but Galina didn't want to dance. She had a clear picture of her mother changing from clumsy felt boots to her toe shoes, wearing a crisp tarlatan tutu and performing with a smile. The smile didn't deceive her, "I saw clearly how fatigued mother was and the strain it cost her to dance."
At Ulanova's first lesson at the school she pleaded with her mother to take her home, but her mother told her if she would stay until the New Year she could then come home. The New Year arrived, but since Ulanova had made friends at the school, she decided to stay. She also was making extraordinary progress in her classes. She was invited to perform at the Academic Opera as a little bug in Riccardo Drigo's Caprices of a Butterfly. This debut gave her her first performing experience onstage. It also gave her joy at the thought that, "thank goodness," she had made no mistates. Her next role was that of a bird in Rimsky-Korsakov's Snow Maiden.
She danced the lead in Chopinana at her graduation performance -- and her debut in the theatre was Princess Florine in the Blue Bird variation. At the age of eighteen, four months after her debut, Ulanova danced the leading role of Odette-Odile in Swan Lake. Ulanova said of her early performances: "I danced without deeply understanding the characters I impersonated."
After her studies in the school under her mother's directions, Aggripina Vaganova took over her training. Vaganova was significant in her development as a dancer.
Eventually, Ulanova started to have a social life with the intellectuals of her time. After performances they would gather at a someone's home and discuss all the arts. She was fascinated by the theories of Konstantin Sergeyevich Stanislavsky and applied his ideas to her dancing. She claimed that she had danced Swan Lake a hundred times before she understood the ballet beyond the steps.
Ulanova was much admired for the poetry and dramatic projection of her dancing. But she was also a hard worker. She said, "A dancer must be a hard plodder. Daily practice is the meat and drink and it must never cease, not even during summer holidays." She also danced often at the Bolshoi in Moscow and in 1944 left the Kirov to become the Prima Ballerina of the Bolshoi Ballet. Besides the classical repertory, she created roles in: Fountain of Bakhchisaray (1933), Lost Illusion (1935), and Romeo and Juliet (1940), Tao-Hoa in a revised version of the Red Poppy (1949) and Katrina in the Stone Flower (1954).
In 1945, she danced her first appearance in the West in Vienna. Because of her close connection with the Communist party she danced in Rome in 1949, and Florence and Venice in 1951. Russia at the time had the Iron Curtain and very few artists were allowed in the West. With the Bolshoi Ballet she danced in London (1956) and New York (1959). I was fortunate to have seen her dance in America.
Those who did not have the chance to see her in person could have seen her films in the Art Houses of the West: excerpts from Swan Lake and The Fountain of Bakhchisaray (1953), Romeo and Juliet (1957), and Giselle (her Dying Swan was added as an extra) (1957).
Arnold L. Haskell, dance educator, wrote about Ulanova, "My memories of Ulanova are, to me, a part of life itself, bringing a total enrichment of experience. To me, hers are not theatrical miracles but triumphs of human spirit. Where Pavlova was supremely conscious of her audience and could play upon its emotions as upon an instrument, Ulanova is remote in a world of her own -- which we are privileged to penetrate. She is so completely identified with the character she impersonates that nothing outside exists."
Ulanova retired from the stage in 1962 but continued to work at the Bolshoi Ballet as ballet mistress. Joseph Stalin awarded her the Stalin Prize in 1941, 1946, 1947 and 1951; People's Artist of R.S.F.S.R. (1951); and the Lenin Order (1974).
10/01/2009
marriage is slowly going out of style?
Everyone knows that the rising proportion of women who bear and raise children out of wedlock has greatly weakened the American family system. This phenomenon, once thought limited to African Americans, now affects whites as well, so much so that the rate at which white children are born to an unmarried mother is now as high as the rate for black children in the mid-1960s, when Daniel Patrick Moynihan issued his famous report on the Negro family. For whites the rate is one-fifth; for blacks it is over one-half.
Almost everyone—a few retrograde scholars excepted—agrees that children in mother-only homes suffer harmful consequences: the best studies show that these youngsters are more likely than those in two-parent families to be suspended from school, have emotional problems, become delinquent, suffer from abuse, and take drugs. Some of these problems may arise from the economic circumstances of these one-parent families, but the best studies, such as those by Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandefur, show that low income can explain, at most, about half of the differences between single-parent and two-parent families. The rest of the difference is explained by a mother living without a husband.
And even the income explanation is a bit misleading, because single moms, by virtue of being single, are more likely to be poor than are married moms. Now that our social security and pension systems have dramatically reduced poverty among the elderly, growing up with only one parent has dramatically increased poverty among children. In this country we have managed to shift poverty from old folks to young folks. Former Clinton advisor William Galston sums up the matter this way: you need only do three things in this country to avoid poverty—finish high school, marry before having a child, and marry after the age of 20. Only 8 percent of the families who do this are poor; 79 percent of those who fail to do this are poor.
This pattern of children being raised by single parents is now a leading feature of the social life of almost all English-speaking countries and some European ones. The illegitimacy ratio in the late 1990s was 33 percent for the United States, 31 percent for Canada, and 38 percent for the United Kingdom.
Now, not all children born out of wedlock are raised by a single mother. Some, especially in Sweden, are raised by a man and woman who, though living together, are not married; others are raised by a mother who gets married shortly after the birth. Nevertheless, there has been a sharp increase in children who are not only born out of wedlock but are raised without a father. In the United States, the percentage of children living with an unmarried mother has tripled since 1960 and more than doubled since 1970. In England, 22 percent of all children under the age of 16 are living with only one parent, a rate three times higher than in 1971.
Why has this happened? There are two possible explanations to consider: money and culture.
Money readily comes to mind. If a welfare system pays unmarried mothers enough to have their own apartment, some women will prefer babies to husbands. When government subsidizes something, we get more of it. But for many years, American scholars discounted this possibility. Since the amount of welfare paid per mother had declined in inflation-adjusted terms, and since the amount paid in each state showed no correlation with each state’s illegitimacy rate, surely money could not have caused the increase in out-of-wedlock births.
This view dominated scholarly discussions until the 1990s. But there are three arguments against it. First, the inflation-adjusted value of welfare benefits was not the key factor. What counted was the inflation-adjusted value of all the benefits an unmarried mother might receive—not only welfare, but also food stamps, public housing, and Medicaid. By adding these in, welfare kept up with inflation.
Second, what counted was not how much money each state paid out, but how much it paid compared with the cost of living in that state. As Charles Murray pointed out, the benefits for a woman in New Orleans ($654 a month) and those for one in San Francisco ($867 a month) made nearly identical contributions to the cost of living, because in New Orleans it cost about two-thirds as much to live as it did in San Francisco.
Third, comparing single-parent families and average spending levels neglects the real issue: how attractive is welfare to a low-income unmarried woman in a given locality? When economist Mark Rosenzweig asked this question of women who are part of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth—a panel study of people that has been going on since 1979—he found that a 10 percent increase in welfare benefits made the chances that a poor young woman would have a baby out of wedlock before the age of 22 go up by 12 percent. And this was true for whites as well as blacks. Soon other scholars were confirming Rosenzweig’s findings. Welfare made a difference.
But how big a difference? AFDC began in 1935, but by 1960 only 4 percent of the children getting welfare had a mother who had never been married; the rest had mothers who were widows or had been separated from their husbands. By 1996 that had changed dramatically: now approximately two-thirds of welfare children had an unmarried mom, and hardly any were the offspring of widows.
Why this change? At least for blacks, one well-known explanation has been offered: men did not marry because there were no jobs for them in the big cities. As manufacturing employment sharply declined in the central cities, William Julius Wilson has argued, blacks were unable to move to the suburbs as fast as the jobs. The unemployed males left behind are not very attractive as prospective husbands to the women they know, and so more and more black women do without marriage.
The argument has not withstood scholarly criticism. First, Mexican Americans, especially illegal immigrants, live in the central city also, but the absence of good jobs has not mattered, even though many Mexicans are poorer than blacks, speak English badly, and if undocumented cannot get good jobs. Nevertheless, the rate of out-of-wedlock births is much lower among these immigrants than it is among African Americans, as W. J. Wilson acknowledges.
Second, Christopher Jencks has shown that there has been as sharp a decline in marriage among employed black men as among unemployed ones, and that the supply of employed blacks is large enough to provide husbands for almost all unmarried black mothers. For these people, as Jencks concludes, “marriage must . . . have been losing its charms for non-economic reasons.”
Moreover, the argument that single-parent families have increased because black men have not been able to move to wherever factory jobs can be found does not explain why such families have grown so rapidly among whites, for whom moving around a city should be no problem. For these whites—and I suspect for many blacks as well—there must be another explanation.
To explain the staggering increase in unmarried mothers, we must turn to culture. In this context, what I mean by culture is simply that being an unmarried mother and living on welfare has lost its stigma. At one time living on the dole was shameful; now it is much less so. As this may not be obvious to some people, let me add some facts that will support it.
Women in rural communities who go on welfare leave it much sooner than the same kind of women who take welfare in big cities, and this is true for both whites and blacks and regardless of the size of their families. The studies that show this outcome offer a simple explanation for it. In a small town, everyone knows who is on welfare, and welfare recipients do not have many friends in the same situation with whom they can associate. But in a big city, welfare recipients are not known to everyone, and each one can easily associate with other women living the same way. In the small town, welfare recipients tell interviewers the same story: “I always felt like I was being watched”; “they treat us like welfare cattle”; people “make nasty comments.” But in a big city, recipients had a different story: Everyone “is in the same boat I am”; people “don’t look down on you.”
American courts have made clear that welfare laws cannot be used to enforce stigma. When Alabama tried in 1960 to deny welfare to an unmarried woman who was living with a man who was not her husband, the U.S. Supreme Court objected. Immorality, it implied, was an outdated notion. The states have no right to limit welfare to a “worthy person,” and welfare belongs to the child, not the mother. If the state is concerned about immorality, it will have to rehabilitate the women by other means.
How did stigma get weakened by practice and undercut by law, when Americans—no less than Brits, Canadians, and Australians—favor marriage and are skeptical of welfare?
Let me suggest that beneath the popular support for marriage there has slowly developed, almost unnoticed, a subversion of it, which can be summarized this way: whereas marriage was once thought to be about a social union, it is now about personal preferences. Formerly, law and opinion enforced the desirability of marriage without asking what went on in that union; today, law and opinion enforce the desirability of personal happiness without worrying much about maintaining a formal relationship. Marriage was once a sacrament, then it became a contract, and now it is an arrangement. Once religion provided the sacrament, then the law enforced the contract, and now personal preferences define the arrangement.
The cultural change that made this happen was the same one that gave us science, technology, freedom, and capitalism: the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment—that extraordinary intellectual development that began in eighteenth-century England, Scotland, Holland, and Germany—made human reason the measure of all things, throwing off ancient rules if they fell short. What the king once ordered, what bishops once enforced, what tradition once required was to be set aside in the name of scientific knowledge and personal self-discovery. The Enlightenment’s great spokesmen were David Hume, Adam Smith, and Immanuel Kant; its greatest accomplishment was the creation of the United States of America.
I am a great admirer of the Enlightenment. But it entailed costs. I take great pride in the vast expansion in human freedom that the Enlightenment conferred on so many people, but I also know that the Enlightenment spent little time worrying about those cultural habits that make freedom meaningful and constructive. The family was one of these.
It was in the world most affected by the Enlightenment that we find both its good and bad legacies. There we encounter both remarkable science and personal self-indulgence. There we find human freedom and high rates of crime. There we find democratic governments and frequent divorces. There we find regimes concerned about the poor and a proliferation of single-parent families.
Single-parent families are most common in those nations—England, America, Canada, Australia, France, the Netherlands—where the Enlightenment had its greatest effect. Such families are far less common in Italy, Spain, Eastern Europe, Russia, the Middle East, China, and Japan. It was in the enlightened nations that nuclear rather than extended families became common, that individual consent and not clan control was the basis of a marriage contract, and that divorce first became legal.
But why did the Enlightenment have its greatest effect on the English-speaking world and on northwestern Europe? I think it was because life in those countries had for so long been arranged in ways that provided fertile ground in which human reason and personal freedom could take root and prosper. Alan Macfarlane, the great English anthropologist, has shown that land in England was individually owned as far back as the thirteenth century and possibly even earlier. There, and in similar countries in northwestern Europe, land ownership had established the basis for a slow assertion of human rights and legal defenses. If you own the land, you have a right to keep, sell, or bequeath it, and you have access to courts that will defend those rights and, in defending them, will slowly add more rights.
Marriage depended on land. Until a young man inherited or bought a piece of property, he was in no position to take a wife. The rule was: no land, no marriage. As a result, English men and women married at a much older age than was true elsewhere. But with the rise of cities and the growth of industrialism, that began to change. Now a man and a woman, already defined by rights that were centuries old, could marry on an income, not on a farm, and so they married at a younger age.
English couples could get married on the basis of their individual consent, without obtaining the formal approval of their parents, though parents still might try to influence these decisions, and among the landed aristocracy such influence was often decisive. But for most people, the old rule of the Roman Catholic church was in force: no marriage was legitimate unless the man and woman freely consented. That rule found its widest observance in countries like England, where individual land ownership and personal rights reinforced it.
In Eastern Europe, to say nothing of the Middle and Far East, a different culture had been created out of a different system for owning land. In many parts of these regions, land lay in the control of families and clans. No individual owned it, and no individual could sell or bequeath it. One man might run the farm, but he did so not on the basis of ownership, but because of his seniority or skill, with the land itself remaining the property of an extended family.
In these places—where courts, unimportant in matters of real estate, tended to be unimportant in other respects as well—human rights were less likely to develop. In clan-based regimes, families often decided what man a woman might marry, and, since family labor worked family-owned land, men and women married at a young age, in hopes of adding many children to the common labor force.
The Enlightenment did not change the family immediately, because everyone took family life for granted. The most important Enlightenment thinkers assumed marriage and denounced divorce. That assumption—and in time that denunciation—slowly lost force, as people gradually experienced the widening of human freedom.
The laws, until well into the twentieth century, made it crystal clear that, though a child might be conceived by an unmarried couple, once born it had to have two parents. There was no provision for the state to pay for a single-parent child, and public opinion strongly and unanimously endorsed that policy.
But by the end of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth, policies changed, and then, slowly, opinion changed. Two things precipitated the change: first, a compassionate desire to help needy children; and second, a determination to end the legal burdens under which women suffered. The first was a powerful force, especially since the aid to needy children was designed to help those who had lost their fathers owing to wars or accidents, as so many did as a consequence of the First World War and of industrial or mining accidents. Slowly, however, a needy child was redefined to include those of any mother without a husband, and not just any who had become a widow.
The emancipation of women was also a desirable process. In America and England, nineteenth-century women already had more rights than those in most of Europe, but when married they still could not easily own property, file for a divorce, or conduct their own affairs. By the 1920s most of these restrictions had ended, and once women got the vote, there was no chance of these limitations ever being reinstated.
We should therefore not be surprised that the twenties were an enthusiastic display of unchaperoned dating, provocative dress, and exhibitionist behavior. Had it not been for a time-out imposed by the Great Depression and the Second World War, we would no longer be referring to the sixties as an era of self-indulgence; we would be talking about the legacy of the twenties.
The sixties reinstated trends begun half a century earlier, but now without effective opposition. No-fault divorce laws were passed throughout most of the West, the pill and liberalized abortion laws dramatically reduced the chances of unwanted pregnancies, and popular entertainment focused on pleasing the young.
As a result, family law, in Carl Schneider’s term, lost its moral basis. It was easier to get out of a marriage than a mortgage. This change in culture was made crystal clear by court decisions. At the end of the nineteenth century, the Supreme Court referred to marriage as a “holy estate” and a “sacred obligation.” By 1965 the same court described marriage as “an association of two individuals.”
People still value marriage; but it is only that value—and very little social pressure or legal obligation—that sustains it.
But there is another part of the cultural argument, and it goes to the question of why African Americans have such high rates of mother-only families. When black scholars addressed this question, as did W. E. B. DuBois in 1908 and E. Franklin Frazier in 1939, they argued that slavery had weakened the black family. When Daniel Patrick Moynihan repeated this argument in 1965, he was denounced for “blaming the victim.”
An intense scholarly effort to show that slavery did little harm to African-American families followed that denunciation; instead, what really hurt them was migrating to big cities where they encountered racism and oppression.
It was an astonishing argument. Slavery, a vast and cruel system of organized repression that, for over two centuries, denied to blacks the right to marry, vote, sue, own property, or take an oath; that withheld from them the proceeds of their own labor; that sold them and their children on the auction block; that exposed them to brutal and unjust punishment: all this misery had little or no effect on family life, but moving as free people to a big city did. To state the argument is to refute it.
But since some people take academic nonsense seriously, let me add that we now know, thanks to such scholars as Orlando Patterson, Steven Ruggles, and Brenda E. Stevenson, that this argument was empirically wrong. The scholars who made it committed some errors. In calculating what percentage of black mothers had husbands, they accepted many women’s claims that they were widows, when we now know that such claims were often lies, designed to conceal that the respondents had never been married. In figuring out what proportion of slaves were married, these scholars focused on large plantations, where the chance of having a spouse was high, instead of on small ones, where most slaves lived, and where the chance of having a spouse was low. On these small farms, only about one-fifth of the slaves lived in a nuclear household.
After slavery ended, sharecropping took its place. For the family, this was often no great improvement. It meant that it was very difficult for a black man to own property and thus hard for him to provide for the progress of his children or bequeath to them a financial start in life. Being a tenant farmer also meant that he needed help on the land, and so he often had many children, despite the fact that, without owning the land, he could not provide for their future.
The legacy of this sad history is twofold. First, generations of slaves grew up without having a family, or without having one that had any social and cultural meaning. Second, black boys grew up aware that their fathers were often absent or were sexually active with other women, giving the boys poor role models for marriage. Today, studies show that the African-American boys most likely to find jobs are those who reject, rather than emulate, their fathers; whereas for white boys, those most likely to find work are those who admire their fathers.
What is astonishing today is that so many African Americans are married and lead happy and productive lives. This is an extraordinary accomplishment, of which everyone should be proud. But it is an accomplishment limited to only about half of all black families, and white families seem to be working hard to catch up.
But there remains at least one more puzzle to solve. Culture has shaped how we produce and raise children, but that culture surely had its greatest impact on how educated people think. Yet the problem of weak, single-parent families is greatest among the least educated people. Why should a culture that is so powerfully shaped by upper-middle-class beliefs have so profound an effect on poor people? If some intellectuals have devalued marriage, why should ordinary people do so? If white culture has weakened marriage, why should black culture follow suit?
I suspect that the answer may be found in Myron Magnet’s book The Dream and the Nightmare. When the haves remake a culture, the people who pay the price are the have-nots. Let me restate his argument with my own metaphor. Imagine a game of crack-the-whip, in which a line of children, holding hands, starts running in a circle. The first few children have no problem keeping up, but near the end of the line the last few must run so fast that many fall down. Those children who did not begin the turning suffer most from the turn.
There are countless examples of our cultural crack-the-whip. Heroin and cocaine use started among elites and then spread down the social scale. When the elites wanted to stop, they could hire doctors and therapists; when the poor wanted to stop, they could not hire anybody. The elites endorsed community-based centers to treat mental illness, and so mental hospitals were closed down. The elites hired psychiatrists; the poor slept on the streets. People who practiced contraception endorsed loose sexuality in writing and movies; the poor practiced loose sexuality without contraception. Divorce is more common among the affluent than the poor. The latter, who can’t afford divorce, deal with unhappy marriages by not getting married in the first place. My only trivial quarrel with Magnet is that I believe these changes began a century ago and even then built on more profound changes that date back centuries.
Now you probably expect me to tell you what we can do about this, but if you believe, as I do, in the power of culture, you will realize that there is very little one can do. As a University of Chicago professor once put it, if you succeed in explaining why something is so, you have probably succeeded in explaining why it must be so. He implied what is in fact often the case: change is very hard.
The remarkable fact is that today so many Americans value marriage, get married, and want their children to marry. Many often cohabit, but when a child arrives most get married. The ones who don’t make their children suffer. But to many people the future means more cohabitation—more “relationships”—and fewer marriages. Their goal is Sweden, where marriage is slowly going out of style.
The difficulty with cohabitation as opposed to marriage has been brilliantly laid out by Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher in their book The Case for Marriage. In it they show that married people, especially men, benefit greatly from marriage: they are healthier, live longer, and are less depressed. But many young men today have not absorbed that lesson. They act as if sex is more important than marriage, worry more about scoring than dating, and are rewarded by their buddies when they can make it with a lot of young women. To them, marriage is at best a long-term benefit, while sex is an immediate preoccupation. This fact supplies us with a sober lesson: the sexual revolution—one that began nearly a century ago but was greatly hastened by the 1960s—was supposed to help make men and women equal. Instead it has helped men, while leaving many women unmarried spectators watching Sex and the City on HBO.
One could imagine an effort to change our culture, but one must recognize that there are many aspects of it that no one, least of all I, wants to change. We do not want fewer freedoms or less democracy. Most of us, myself included, do not want to change any of the gains women have made in establishing their moral and legal standing as independent actors with all the rights that men once enjoyed alone. We can talk about tighter divorce laws, but it is not easy to design one that both protects people from ending a marriage too quickly with an easy divorce and at the same time makes divorce for a good cause readily available.
The right and best way for a culture to restore itself is for it to be rebuilt, not from the top down by government policies, but from the bottom up by personal decisions. On the side of that effort, we can find churches—or at least many of them—and the common experience of adults that the essence of marriage is not sex, or money, or even children: it is commitment.
By James Q. Wilson
Almost everyone—a few retrograde scholars excepted—agrees that children in mother-only homes suffer harmful consequences: the best studies show that these youngsters are more likely than those in two-parent families to be suspended from school, have emotional problems, become delinquent, suffer from abuse, and take drugs. Some of these problems may arise from the economic circumstances of these one-parent families, but the best studies, such as those by Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandefur, show that low income can explain, at most, about half of the differences between single-parent and two-parent families. The rest of the difference is explained by a mother living without a husband.
And even the income explanation is a bit misleading, because single moms, by virtue of being single, are more likely to be poor than are married moms. Now that our social security and pension systems have dramatically reduced poverty among the elderly, growing up with only one parent has dramatically increased poverty among children. In this country we have managed to shift poverty from old folks to young folks. Former Clinton advisor William Galston sums up the matter this way: you need only do three things in this country to avoid poverty—finish high school, marry before having a child, and marry after the age of 20. Only 8 percent of the families who do this are poor; 79 percent of those who fail to do this are poor.
This pattern of children being raised by single parents is now a leading feature of the social life of almost all English-speaking countries and some European ones. The illegitimacy ratio in the late 1990s was 33 percent for the United States, 31 percent for Canada, and 38 percent for the United Kingdom.
Now, not all children born out of wedlock are raised by a single mother. Some, especially in Sweden, are raised by a man and woman who, though living together, are not married; others are raised by a mother who gets married shortly after the birth. Nevertheless, there has been a sharp increase in children who are not only born out of wedlock but are raised without a father. In the United States, the percentage of children living with an unmarried mother has tripled since 1960 and more than doubled since 1970. In England, 22 percent of all children under the age of 16 are living with only one parent, a rate three times higher than in 1971.
Why has this happened? There are two possible explanations to consider: money and culture.
Money readily comes to mind. If a welfare system pays unmarried mothers enough to have their own apartment, some women will prefer babies to husbands. When government subsidizes something, we get more of it. But for many years, American scholars discounted this possibility. Since the amount of welfare paid per mother had declined in inflation-adjusted terms, and since the amount paid in each state showed no correlation with each state’s illegitimacy rate, surely money could not have caused the increase in out-of-wedlock births.
This view dominated scholarly discussions until the 1990s. But there are three arguments against it. First, the inflation-adjusted value of welfare benefits was not the key factor. What counted was the inflation-adjusted value of all the benefits an unmarried mother might receive—not only welfare, but also food stamps, public housing, and Medicaid. By adding these in, welfare kept up with inflation.
Second, what counted was not how much money each state paid out, but how much it paid compared with the cost of living in that state. As Charles Murray pointed out, the benefits for a woman in New Orleans ($654 a month) and those for one in San Francisco ($867 a month) made nearly identical contributions to the cost of living, because in New Orleans it cost about two-thirds as much to live as it did in San Francisco.
Third, comparing single-parent families and average spending levels neglects the real issue: how attractive is welfare to a low-income unmarried woman in a given locality? When economist Mark Rosenzweig asked this question of women who are part of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth—a panel study of people that has been going on since 1979—he found that a 10 percent increase in welfare benefits made the chances that a poor young woman would have a baby out of wedlock before the age of 22 go up by 12 percent. And this was true for whites as well as blacks. Soon other scholars were confirming Rosenzweig’s findings. Welfare made a difference.
But how big a difference? AFDC began in 1935, but by 1960 only 4 percent of the children getting welfare had a mother who had never been married; the rest had mothers who were widows or had been separated from their husbands. By 1996 that had changed dramatically: now approximately two-thirds of welfare children had an unmarried mom, and hardly any were the offspring of widows.
Why this change? At least for blacks, one well-known explanation has been offered: men did not marry because there were no jobs for them in the big cities. As manufacturing employment sharply declined in the central cities, William Julius Wilson has argued, blacks were unable to move to the suburbs as fast as the jobs. The unemployed males left behind are not very attractive as prospective husbands to the women they know, and so more and more black women do without marriage.
The argument has not withstood scholarly criticism. First, Mexican Americans, especially illegal immigrants, live in the central city also, but the absence of good jobs has not mattered, even though many Mexicans are poorer than blacks, speak English badly, and if undocumented cannot get good jobs. Nevertheless, the rate of out-of-wedlock births is much lower among these immigrants than it is among African Americans, as W. J. Wilson acknowledges.
Second, Christopher Jencks has shown that there has been as sharp a decline in marriage among employed black men as among unemployed ones, and that the supply of employed blacks is large enough to provide husbands for almost all unmarried black mothers. For these people, as Jencks concludes, “marriage must . . . have been losing its charms for non-economic reasons.”
Moreover, the argument that single-parent families have increased because black men have not been able to move to wherever factory jobs can be found does not explain why such families have grown so rapidly among whites, for whom moving around a city should be no problem. For these whites—and I suspect for many blacks as well—there must be another explanation.
To explain the staggering increase in unmarried mothers, we must turn to culture. In this context, what I mean by culture is simply that being an unmarried mother and living on welfare has lost its stigma. At one time living on the dole was shameful; now it is much less so. As this may not be obvious to some people, let me add some facts that will support it.
Women in rural communities who go on welfare leave it much sooner than the same kind of women who take welfare in big cities, and this is true for both whites and blacks and regardless of the size of their families. The studies that show this outcome offer a simple explanation for it. In a small town, everyone knows who is on welfare, and welfare recipients do not have many friends in the same situation with whom they can associate. But in a big city, welfare recipients are not known to everyone, and each one can easily associate with other women living the same way. In the small town, welfare recipients tell interviewers the same story: “I always felt like I was being watched”; “they treat us like welfare cattle”; people “make nasty comments.” But in a big city, recipients had a different story: Everyone “is in the same boat I am”; people “don’t look down on you.”
American courts have made clear that welfare laws cannot be used to enforce stigma. When Alabama tried in 1960 to deny welfare to an unmarried woman who was living with a man who was not her husband, the U.S. Supreme Court objected. Immorality, it implied, was an outdated notion. The states have no right to limit welfare to a “worthy person,” and welfare belongs to the child, not the mother. If the state is concerned about immorality, it will have to rehabilitate the women by other means.
How did stigma get weakened by practice and undercut by law, when Americans—no less than Brits, Canadians, and Australians—favor marriage and are skeptical of welfare?
Let me suggest that beneath the popular support for marriage there has slowly developed, almost unnoticed, a subversion of it, which can be summarized this way: whereas marriage was once thought to be about a social union, it is now about personal preferences. Formerly, law and opinion enforced the desirability of marriage without asking what went on in that union; today, law and opinion enforce the desirability of personal happiness without worrying much about maintaining a formal relationship. Marriage was once a sacrament, then it became a contract, and now it is an arrangement. Once religion provided the sacrament, then the law enforced the contract, and now personal preferences define the arrangement.
The cultural change that made this happen was the same one that gave us science, technology, freedom, and capitalism: the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment—that extraordinary intellectual development that began in eighteenth-century England, Scotland, Holland, and Germany—made human reason the measure of all things, throwing off ancient rules if they fell short. What the king once ordered, what bishops once enforced, what tradition once required was to be set aside in the name of scientific knowledge and personal self-discovery. The Enlightenment’s great spokesmen were David Hume, Adam Smith, and Immanuel Kant; its greatest accomplishment was the creation of the United States of America.
I am a great admirer of the Enlightenment. But it entailed costs. I take great pride in the vast expansion in human freedom that the Enlightenment conferred on so many people, but I also know that the Enlightenment spent little time worrying about those cultural habits that make freedom meaningful and constructive. The family was one of these.
It was in the world most affected by the Enlightenment that we find both its good and bad legacies. There we encounter both remarkable science and personal self-indulgence. There we find human freedom and high rates of crime. There we find democratic governments and frequent divorces. There we find regimes concerned about the poor and a proliferation of single-parent families.
Single-parent families are most common in those nations—England, America, Canada, Australia, France, the Netherlands—where the Enlightenment had its greatest effect. Such families are far less common in Italy, Spain, Eastern Europe, Russia, the Middle East, China, and Japan. It was in the enlightened nations that nuclear rather than extended families became common, that individual consent and not clan control was the basis of a marriage contract, and that divorce first became legal.
But why did the Enlightenment have its greatest effect on the English-speaking world and on northwestern Europe? I think it was because life in those countries had for so long been arranged in ways that provided fertile ground in which human reason and personal freedom could take root and prosper. Alan Macfarlane, the great English anthropologist, has shown that land in England was individually owned as far back as the thirteenth century and possibly even earlier. There, and in similar countries in northwestern Europe, land ownership had established the basis for a slow assertion of human rights and legal defenses. If you own the land, you have a right to keep, sell, or bequeath it, and you have access to courts that will defend those rights and, in defending them, will slowly add more rights.
Marriage depended on land. Until a young man inherited or bought a piece of property, he was in no position to take a wife. The rule was: no land, no marriage. As a result, English men and women married at a much older age than was true elsewhere. But with the rise of cities and the growth of industrialism, that began to change. Now a man and a woman, already defined by rights that were centuries old, could marry on an income, not on a farm, and so they married at a younger age.
English couples could get married on the basis of their individual consent, without obtaining the formal approval of their parents, though parents still might try to influence these decisions, and among the landed aristocracy such influence was often decisive. But for most people, the old rule of the Roman Catholic church was in force: no marriage was legitimate unless the man and woman freely consented. That rule found its widest observance in countries like England, where individual land ownership and personal rights reinforced it.
In Eastern Europe, to say nothing of the Middle and Far East, a different culture had been created out of a different system for owning land. In many parts of these regions, land lay in the control of families and clans. No individual owned it, and no individual could sell or bequeath it. One man might run the farm, but he did so not on the basis of ownership, but because of his seniority or skill, with the land itself remaining the property of an extended family.
In these places—where courts, unimportant in matters of real estate, tended to be unimportant in other respects as well—human rights were less likely to develop. In clan-based regimes, families often decided what man a woman might marry, and, since family labor worked family-owned land, men and women married at a young age, in hopes of adding many children to the common labor force.
The Enlightenment did not change the family immediately, because everyone took family life for granted. The most important Enlightenment thinkers assumed marriage and denounced divorce. That assumption—and in time that denunciation—slowly lost force, as people gradually experienced the widening of human freedom.
The laws, until well into the twentieth century, made it crystal clear that, though a child might be conceived by an unmarried couple, once born it had to have two parents. There was no provision for the state to pay for a single-parent child, and public opinion strongly and unanimously endorsed that policy.
But by the end of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth, policies changed, and then, slowly, opinion changed. Two things precipitated the change: first, a compassionate desire to help needy children; and second, a determination to end the legal burdens under which women suffered. The first was a powerful force, especially since the aid to needy children was designed to help those who had lost their fathers owing to wars or accidents, as so many did as a consequence of the First World War and of industrial or mining accidents. Slowly, however, a needy child was redefined to include those of any mother without a husband, and not just any who had become a widow.
The emancipation of women was also a desirable process. In America and England, nineteenth-century women already had more rights than those in most of Europe, but when married they still could not easily own property, file for a divorce, or conduct their own affairs. By the 1920s most of these restrictions had ended, and once women got the vote, there was no chance of these limitations ever being reinstated.
We should therefore not be surprised that the twenties were an enthusiastic display of unchaperoned dating, provocative dress, and exhibitionist behavior. Had it not been for a time-out imposed by the Great Depression and the Second World War, we would no longer be referring to the sixties as an era of self-indulgence; we would be talking about the legacy of the twenties.
The sixties reinstated trends begun half a century earlier, but now without effective opposition. No-fault divorce laws were passed throughout most of the West, the pill and liberalized abortion laws dramatically reduced the chances of unwanted pregnancies, and popular entertainment focused on pleasing the young.
As a result, family law, in Carl Schneider’s term, lost its moral basis. It was easier to get out of a marriage than a mortgage. This change in culture was made crystal clear by court decisions. At the end of the nineteenth century, the Supreme Court referred to marriage as a “holy estate” and a “sacred obligation.” By 1965 the same court described marriage as “an association of two individuals.”
People still value marriage; but it is only that value—and very little social pressure or legal obligation—that sustains it.
But there is another part of the cultural argument, and it goes to the question of why African Americans have such high rates of mother-only families. When black scholars addressed this question, as did W. E. B. DuBois in 1908 and E. Franklin Frazier in 1939, they argued that slavery had weakened the black family. When Daniel Patrick Moynihan repeated this argument in 1965, he was denounced for “blaming the victim.”
An intense scholarly effort to show that slavery did little harm to African-American families followed that denunciation; instead, what really hurt them was migrating to big cities where they encountered racism and oppression.
It was an astonishing argument. Slavery, a vast and cruel system of organized repression that, for over two centuries, denied to blacks the right to marry, vote, sue, own property, or take an oath; that withheld from them the proceeds of their own labor; that sold them and their children on the auction block; that exposed them to brutal and unjust punishment: all this misery had little or no effect on family life, but moving as free people to a big city did. To state the argument is to refute it.
But since some people take academic nonsense seriously, let me add that we now know, thanks to such scholars as Orlando Patterson, Steven Ruggles, and Brenda E. Stevenson, that this argument was empirically wrong. The scholars who made it committed some errors. In calculating what percentage of black mothers had husbands, they accepted many women’s claims that they were widows, when we now know that such claims were often lies, designed to conceal that the respondents had never been married. In figuring out what proportion of slaves were married, these scholars focused on large plantations, where the chance of having a spouse was high, instead of on small ones, where most slaves lived, and where the chance of having a spouse was low. On these small farms, only about one-fifth of the slaves lived in a nuclear household.
After slavery ended, sharecropping took its place. For the family, this was often no great improvement. It meant that it was very difficult for a black man to own property and thus hard for him to provide for the progress of his children or bequeath to them a financial start in life. Being a tenant farmer also meant that he needed help on the land, and so he often had many children, despite the fact that, without owning the land, he could not provide for their future.
The legacy of this sad history is twofold. First, generations of slaves grew up without having a family, or without having one that had any social and cultural meaning. Second, black boys grew up aware that their fathers were often absent or were sexually active with other women, giving the boys poor role models for marriage. Today, studies show that the African-American boys most likely to find jobs are those who reject, rather than emulate, their fathers; whereas for white boys, those most likely to find work are those who admire their fathers.
What is astonishing today is that so many African Americans are married and lead happy and productive lives. This is an extraordinary accomplishment, of which everyone should be proud. But it is an accomplishment limited to only about half of all black families, and white families seem to be working hard to catch up.
But there remains at least one more puzzle to solve. Culture has shaped how we produce and raise children, but that culture surely had its greatest impact on how educated people think. Yet the problem of weak, single-parent families is greatest among the least educated people. Why should a culture that is so powerfully shaped by upper-middle-class beliefs have so profound an effect on poor people? If some intellectuals have devalued marriage, why should ordinary people do so? If white culture has weakened marriage, why should black culture follow suit?
I suspect that the answer may be found in Myron Magnet’s book The Dream and the Nightmare. When the haves remake a culture, the people who pay the price are the have-nots. Let me restate his argument with my own metaphor. Imagine a game of crack-the-whip, in which a line of children, holding hands, starts running in a circle. The first few children have no problem keeping up, but near the end of the line the last few must run so fast that many fall down. Those children who did not begin the turning suffer most from the turn.
There are countless examples of our cultural crack-the-whip. Heroin and cocaine use started among elites and then spread down the social scale. When the elites wanted to stop, they could hire doctors and therapists; when the poor wanted to stop, they could not hire anybody. The elites endorsed community-based centers to treat mental illness, and so mental hospitals were closed down. The elites hired psychiatrists; the poor slept on the streets. People who practiced contraception endorsed loose sexuality in writing and movies; the poor practiced loose sexuality without contraception. Divorce is more common among the affluent than the poor. The latter, who can’t afford divorce, deal with unhappy marriages by not getting married in the first place. My only trivial quarrel with Magnet is that I believe these changes began a century ago and even then built on more profound changes that date back centuries.
Now you probably expect me to tell you what we can do about this, but if you believe, as I do, in the power of culture, you will realize that there is very little one can do. As a University of Chicago professor once put it, if you succeed in explaining why something is so, you have probably succeeded in explaining why it must be so. He implied what is in fact often the case: change is very hard.
The remarkable fact is that today so many Americans value marriage, get married, and want their children to marry. Many often cohabit, but when a child arrives most get married. The ones who don’t make their children suffer. But to many people the future means more cohabitation—more “relationships”—and fewer marriages. Their goal is Sweden, where marriage is slowly going out of style.
The difficulty with cohabitation as opposed to marriage has been brilliantly laid out by Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher in their book The Case for Marriage. In it they show that married people, especially men, benefit greatly from marriage: they are healthier, live longer, and are less depressed. But many young men today have not absorbed that lesson. They act as if sex is more important than marriage, worry more about scoring than dating, and are rewarded by their buddies when they can make it with a lot of young women. To them, marriage is at best a long-term benefit, while sex is an immediate preoccupation. This fact supplies us with a sober lesson: the sexual revolution—one that began nearly a century ago but was greatly hastened by the 1960s—was supposed to help make men and women equal. Instead it has helped men, while leaving many women unmarried spectators watching Sex and the City on HBO.
One could imagine an effort to change our culture, but one must recognize that there are many aspects of it that no one, least of all I, wants to change. We do not want fewer freedoms or less democracy. Most of us, myself included, do not want to change any of the gains women have made in establishing their moral and legal standing as independent actors with all the rights that men once enjoyed alone. We can talk about tighter divorce laws, but it is not easy to design one that both protects people from ending a marriage too quickly with an easy divorce and at the same time makes divorce for a good cause readily available.
The right and best way for a culture to restore itself is for it to be rebuilt, not from the top down by government policies, but from the bottom up by personal decisions. On the side of that effort, we can find churches—or at least many of them—and the common experience of adults that the essence of marriage is not sex, or money, or even children: it is commitment.
By James Q. Wilson
9/27/2009
russian woman married to a man from Egypt
Do you really know who you're doing business with? Do You Know his background, Do you really know if your relationship on love or scam, Do you know the Egyptian Family Law and the wife rights?
story of a russian woman married to a man from Egypt:
not necessary your marriage with a man from Egypt will end up the same way, but the difference in mentality and culture could be a serious barrier, do your research!
story of a russian woman married to a man from Egypt:
I'm Christian and he is Muslim. He believes what he's been taught about Islam (way of life and traditional/religious practices), but has not done much research of his own... We have been together since 2001 (before the terror attacks) and married since 2003. His family is very religious and they all live in Egypt. His mother has been to visit twice since we've been together (at our expense).
Financially, I have been supporting us 100%-75% since mid 2002 and he's gotten lazy and has not had a real job since early 2002. I think the only way he would be motivated to succeed in something is for me to quit my job. But I do not want to do this b/c he doesn't have a college degree or trade (mainly retail experience).
I can not remember a series of perfect moments in our relationship. It seems it has been one trail after another. First battling his previously hidden addictions to heavy alcohol and imported tobacco and then supporting and investing in his slothful entrepreneurial experiments. I even broke it off with him several times before...but felt bad b/c he was so needy and I was a bit lonely. Even now, I found myself lost and unsure at times...falling in and out of love at moments. I guess suppressed anger is a dark cloud that rains down on me at times. Often, I am unhappy
The specific dilemma...his family knows he doesn't support our household, but they expect and demand money at times. They live a lavish life style compared to the live we struggle (I work hard) for daily. And we don't even get to enjoy it fully. I tried to educate his mother about some of America's social economics b/c they believe that all Americans are rich and money comes very easy and that poverty does not exist here. This upsets me. I don't know what to do about them always asking or looking for money from our household.
not necessary your marriage with a man from Egypt will end up the same way, but the difference in mentality and culture could be a serious barrier, do your research!
9/24/2009
skinny women
A study of a French research scientist revealed that Austrian girls are one of the most slender ones in Europe. Only girls from France and Italy are slimmer. French girls have a body mass index of 23,2 and are the winners of the analyis.
The results were published in the new issue of the professional journal called “Population & Societes”. Russian, German, Danes , and Luxembourgers can be found behind the Austrian ladies. Women from those countries have a body mass index of 24.
British girls have the highest body mass index, and occupied the last place. Their body mass index (26,2) is even higher as the one from British men (26).
Also girls from the Netherlands and Greece are one of the most corpulent females in Europe. The most plump men can be found in Greece and Finland. Their body mass index is over 26.Interesting detail of the survey: Austrian girls are more satisfied with their weight as the more slender girls from France.
The body mass index is weight divided by the squared body height. Example: body height is 170 cm and weight is 90 kg (90/(1,70 x 1,70) = 31).
9/18/2009
Famous Russian Women
Anna Pavlova, great Russian dancer
by Eliza Minden
"Leave acrobatics to others, Anna...It is positively more than I can bear to see the pressure such steps put upon your delicate muscles and the arch of your foot...I beg you never to try again to imitate those who are physically stronger than you. You must realize that your daintiness and fragility are your greatest assets. You should always do the kind of dancing which brings out your own rare qualities instead of trying to win praise by mere acrobatic tricks."
Thus was young Anna Pavlova admonished by her teacher, Pavel Gerdt.1 She followed this good advice and became a legend - indisputably one of the great ballerinas of the twentieth century and also one of ballet's most influential ambassadors. Pavlova's emotional, expressive, ecstatic style thrilled audiences all over the world, despite its lack of showy, virtuosic technique. In fact Pavlova didn't have a lot of technique; her famous feet were actually quite weak. But she had passion, a complete commitment to her art and the power to communicate through movement.
At a time when fouettes were fashionable but Romanticism was not, when strong, meaty Italian ballerinas were favored and thin, dainty Russian girls weren't, Pavlova resurrected the ethereal, delicate qualities of the Romantic ballerina and combined them with her enormously expressive style. Then she took it on the road. No dancer, before or since, traveled as extensively: 350,000 miles in fifteen years - and this was long before people used airplanes for traveling. She introduced ballet to remote crevices of the world and inspired balletomania thousands of miles from her native Russia. Sir Frederick Ashton, the brilliant choreographer and director of England's Royal Ballet, became a dancer because he was smitten by the performances he saw Pavlova give when he was a boy - in Lima, Peru.2
Anna Pavlova was born on January 31, 1881 in a suburb of St. Petersburg. Her mother took little Anna to a performance of The Sleeping Beauty at the Maryinsky Theatre (home of the Kirov Ballet) and the child resolved that some day she herself would be the beautiful Princess Aurora. She had to wait several years before the Imperial School of the Maryinsky Ballet would accept her, and even then her weak feet, poor turn-out, scrawny body and bad placement made her ballet career seem dubious. Pavlova was also said to be shy, unsociable, introverted and therefore without many friends.3
She graduated form the Maryinsky School not long after the invasion of the virtuoso Italian ballerinas - Legnani, Zucchi et al. had mastered multiple fouettes and other technical "tricks" that diminished the public's desire for lyrical Romanticism and created a demand for the muscular Italian style. Pavlova hadn't the strength for it; her delicate, highly arched feet were too weak for the flamboyant pointework coming into vogue.
But ultimately Pavlova made such a virtue of her over-arched feet that critics said they represented the yearnings of the Russian soul.4 She cleverly devised a shank and platform for her pointe shoes that conserved her energy and let her balance in arabesque until the audience was breathless. She took advantage of what she did have: extension, ballon, a pliable torso, feminine delicacy, tremendous expressiveness and she worked extremely hard, studying with Gerdt, Christian Johannsen, Nicholas Legat, Catarina Beretta and the great Petipa himself. In the end she triumphed.
Pavlova excelled in the repertory at the Maryinsky, especially in La Bayadere, Giselle, Le Corsaire and Don Quixote but dancing the choreography of Mikhail Fokine is what made her immortal. Les Sylphides (also known as Chopiniana), showcased Pavlova's exquisite Romantic-style lyricism. The Dying Swan went even further. Quickly choreographed as a piece d' occasion, The Dying Swan is technically just a matter or bourres and highly stylized port-de-bras meant to evoke the last moments in the life of a swan. The dancer, alone on stage in her spotlight, bourres forward and back, torso bending expressively, arms extended in a non-stop, soft-elbowed bird-like fluttering until she gracefully expires - usually in a seated pose with one leg outstretched and her upper body bent over it. The Dying Swan is an easy target for satire - campy, sentimental, even melodramatic - but when done well it has the power to be very moving.
By 1907 Pavlova had become a star at the Maryinsky, but that was just the prelude. Her need for artistic independence, the freedom to pursue her very individual style and to dance new and different work, as well as her need to have the spotlight all to herself led her to a solo touring career that lasted twenty years and took her all over the world. She danced with Diaghilev's Ballets Russes but not for long. She may have had doubts that the company could succeed, she may have been unable to bear Diaghilev's notorious authoritarianism or she may have hated sharing the glory with the famous Nijinsky, the male star of the troupe.5
She lived most of her life on trains and in hotels. Toward the end she had to compromise by cutting difficult sections and performing only the less demanding pieces. One of her methods for conserving stamina was to modify her pointe shoe to make it easier to balance. It was considered cheating at the time, but actually it was the first modern pointe shoe and no ballerina today would even attempt toe-work without its equivalent. Pavlova took soft pointe shoes that were too big, inserted a piece of leather under the metatarsal for support and pounded down the platform to make it bigger and flatter. She would then darn it so it would hold its shape. However, the always image-conscious Pavlova wanted to appear as if daintily dancing on only the tiniest little pointed tip of a slipper, so she scrupulously retouched all photographs of herself to remove the broad platform of the shoe.
In 1931 she contracted pleurisy. Doctors could have saved her life with an operation that would have damaged her ribs and left her unable to perform. Pavlova chose to die rather than give up dancing. As she lay dying she is reported to have opened her eyes, raised her hand and uttered these last words: "Get my swan costume ready."6
A few days later, at show time at the theater where she was to have performed The Dying Swan, the house lights dimmed, the curtain rose, and while the orchestra played Saint-Saens familiar score, a spotlight moved around the empty stage as if searching in the places where Pavlova would have been.
In her own words: "What exactly is success? For me it is to be found not in applause, but in the satisfaction of feeling that one is realizing one's ideal. When, a small child rambling over there by the fir trees, I thought that success spelled happiness. I was wrong. Happiness is like a butterfly which appears and delights us for one brief moment, but soon flits away."7
by Eliza Minden
"Leave acrobatics to others, Anna...It is positively more than I can bear to see the pressure such steps put upon your delicate muscles and the arch of your foot...I beg you never to try again to imitate those who are physically stronger than you. You must realize that your daintiness and fragility are your greatest assets. You should always do the kind of dancing which brings out your own rare qualities instead of trying to win praise by mere acrobatic tricks."
Thus was young Anna Pavlova admonished by her teacher, Pavel Gerdt.1 She followed this good advice and became a legend - indisputably one of the great ballerinas of the twentieth century and also one of ballet's most influential ambassadors. Pavlova's emotional, expressive, ecstatic style thrilled audiences all over the world, despite its lack of showy, virtuosic technique. In fact Pavlova didn't have a lot of technique; her famous feet were actually quite weak. But she had passion, a complete commitment to her art and the power to communicate through movement.
At a time when fouettes were fashionable but Romanticism was not, when strong, meaty Italian ballerinas were favored and thin, dainty Russian girls weren't, Pavlova resurrected the ethereal, delicate qualities of the Romantic ballerina and combined them with her enormously expressive style. Then she took it on the road. No dancer, before or since, traveled as extensively: 350,000 miles in fifteen years - and this was long before people used airplanes for traveling. She introduced ballet to remote crevices of the world and inspired balletomania thousands of miles from her native Russia. Sir Frederick Ashton, the brilliant choreographer and director of England's Royal Ballet, became a dancer because he was smitten by the performances he saw Pavlova give when he was a boy - in Lima, Peru.2
Anna Pavlova was born on January 31, 1881 in a suburb of St. Petersburg. Her mother took little Anna to a performance of The Sleeping Beauty at the Maryinsky Theatre (home of the Kirov Ballet) and the child resolved that some day she herself would be the beautiful Princess Aurora. She had to wait several years before the Imperial School of the Maryinsky Ballet would accept her, and even then her weak feet, poor turn-out, scrawny body and bad placement made her ballet career seem dubious. Pavlova was also said to be shy, unsociable, introverted and therefore without many friends.3
She graduated form the Maryinsky School not long after the invasion of the virtuoso Italian ballerinas - Legnani, Zucchi et al. had mastered multiple fouettes and other technical "tricks" that diminished the public's desire for lyrical Romanticism and created a demand for the muscular Italian style. Pavlova hadn't the strength for it; her delicate, highly arched feet were too weak for the flamboyant pointework coming into vogue.
But ultimately Pavlova made such a virtue of her over-arched feet that critics said they represented the yearnings of the Russian soul.4 She cleverly devised a shank and platform for her pointe shoes that conserved her energy and let her balance in arabesque until the audience was breathless. She took advantage of what she did have: extension, ballon, a pliable torso, feminine delicacy, tremendous expressiveness and she worked extremely hard, studying with Gerdt, Christian Johannsen, Nicholas Legat, Catarina Beretta and the great Petipa himself. In the end she triumphed.
Pavlova excelled in the repertory at the Maryinsky, especially in La Bayadere, Giselle, Le Corsaire and Don Quixote but dancing the choreography of Mikhail Fokine is what made her immortal. Les Sylphides (also known as Chopiniana), showcased Pavlova's exquisite Romantic-style lyricism. The Dying Swan went even further. Quickly choreographed as a piece d' occasion, The Dying Swan is technically just a matter or bourres and highly stylized port-de-bras meant to evoke the last moments in the life of a swan. The dancer, alone on stage in her spotlight, bourres forward and back, torso bending expressively, arms extended in a non-stop, soft-elbowed bird-like fluttering until she gracefully expires - usually in a seated pose with one leg outstretched and her upper body bent over it. The Dying Swan is an easy target for satire - campy, sentimental, even melodramatic - but when done well it has the power to be very moving.
By 1907 Pavlova had become a star at the Maryinsky, but that was just the prelude. Her need for artistic independence, the freedom to pursue her very individual style and to dance new and different work, as well as her need to have the spotlight all to herself led her to a solo touring career that lasted twenty years and took her all over the world. She danced with Diaghilev's Ballets Russes but not for long. She may have had doubts that the company could succeed, she may have been unable to bear Diaghilev's notorious authoritarianism or she may have hated sharing the glory with the famous Nijinsky, the male star of the troupe.5
She lived most of her life on trains and in hotels. Toward the end she had to compromise by cutting difficult sections and performing only the less demanding pieces. One of her methods for conserving stamina was to modify her pointe shoe to make it easier to balance. It was considered cheating at the time, but actually it was the first modern pointe shoe and no ballerina today would even attempt toe-work without its equivalent. Pavlova took soft pointe shoes that were too big, inserted a piece of leather under the metatarsal for support and pounded down the platform to make it bigger and flatter. She would then darn it so it would hold its shape. However, the always image-conscious Pavlova wanted to appear as if daintily dancing on only the tiniest little pointed tip of a slipper, so she scrupulously retouched all photographs of herself to remove the broad platform of the shoe.
In 1931 she contracted pleurisy. Doctors could have saved her life with an operation that would have damaged her ribs and left her unable to perform. Pavlova chose to die rather than give up dancing. As she lay dying she is reported to have opened her eyes, raised her hand and uttered these last words: "Get my swan costume ready."6
A few days later, at show time at the theater where she was to have performed The Dying Swan, the house lights dimmed, the curtain rose, and while the orchestra played Saint-Saens familiar score, a spotlight moved around the empty stage as if searching in the places where Pavlova would have been.
In her own words: "What exactly is success? For me it is to be found not in applause, but in the satisfaction of feeling that one is realizing one's ideal. When, a small child rambling over there by the fir trees, I thought that success spelled happiness. I was wrong. Happiness is like a butterfly which appears and delights us for one brief moment, but soon flits away."7
9/14/2009
Australians consider Russian Women
Sean and Elena Durkin were married on January 8. Sean, a 41-year-old programmer from Sydney, was divorced with three children. "I found it hard to meet suitable women in Australia. The women I met were either really self-centered and they weren't family focused or they were already married."
Thirty-three-year-old Elena was divorced, with an 11-year-old son, living in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. "It's a Muslim area so there were not so many men I could meet there," she says.
Durkin started writing to women in Russia three years ago and even went overseas to visit several, before writing to Elena. "I'd been writing to Elena for about seven months until I went to visit her in Uzbekistan in June 2003. When we met, I knew right away that she was the right person for me. After that, we wrote daily and I went back again in December 2003."
Durkin found out later that at the same time there was another Sydney programmer in Tashkent meeting another Elena. "I think we were the only Australians to visit Uzbekistan in years." The couples have since met in Sydney and the two Elenas have become close friends.
It was a difficult exercise, Durkin says. "If you fall in love with someone from the former USSR and you want to marry, it's a nightmare. It takes two months just to get all the paperwork together and then you have to apply and wait for processing."
Elena and her son finally arrived in October 2004.
Durkin recommends that any Australian man sick of the local dating scene consider a Russian woman bride. "Ladies from the former USSR are looking for reliability, kindness and gentility in a man."
and what about Australian women - are Australian women commitment-shy? Perhaps that would explain the lure of Russian women?
Durkin fell silent. "If I knew the answer to that," he said eventually, "I wouldn't be married to a Russian woman."
9/12/2009
beautiful Russian girl found her true love
I am already typing but still thinking what to start my story with…
I had been divorced for about 5 years. At that time the feeling of loneliness was too strong. The only thing left from my marriage was a photo album and something else…the feeling of sadness first, that I gave my best years to a person with whom I had nothing in common, second that I’m still loosing joy of this life being alone.
One year passed from that time full of so called “independence”. I dated a little bit…all at local coffee shops so that I would be safe, to figure out whether this someone whom I would be ready to start my new life with, whether this one with whom I would be interested in. But I was unlucky…
Some not long-lasting love affairs and a routine life made me to lose any belief that everything might change for better and I would meet the right person. But it’s a nature of woman to live for somebody. We can’t life just for ourselves. I still believed that everything will be ok in my life, everything will be…soon. My girl friends were spending their holiday abroad in Europe. They told me to try to find some western guy. “Ok, I was looking for a soul mate just in my area for a long time. But I failed. There might be someone abroad who can understand me." Frankly speaking I didn’t believe into internet relationships, I was pretty skeptical about online commitments. But I tried. And that changed my life upside down.
Yes, I found my loving man on luckylovers dating site . One summer day in 2005 I received a response to the profile that I placed on this wonderful dating site. He was really handsome western guy, and he was calling me beautiful Russian girl. He seemed to be gentle, joyful, very nice person. All our letters showed that we had a lot of a common. When I heard his voice first time by phone, I've got a feeling that I've known him for years. His voice was so dear and warm.
So it was right the time for us to meet each other. We agreed to spend this summer vocation together. One month later we met in Turkey during our vacation. There we had the most wonderful days in our lives. We liked each other very much, and the feeling of the first touch was wonderful. I really liked him a lot. He was so kind and such a gentlemen! I wish we could stop the time of our happiness forever. We were sad – because it was impossible. We are going to meet again, and we are impatient. This small experience of being together showed that we want to live together. It doesn't matter to me where we met and where to live. I just want to be with him since I love him very much and we will be the happiest couple!
Now I realize – the faith is a big thing. We are doing strong and we are so much in love.
9/09/2009
Famous Russian Women
Catherine the Great
Catherine the Great (1729-96), empress of Russia (1762-96), the second of that name, who continued the process of Westernization begun by Peter the Great and made Russia a European power. Originally named Sophie Fredericke Auguste von Anhalt-Zerbst, Catherine was born in Stettin (now Szczecin, Poland) on May 2, 1729, the daughter of a minor German prince. In 1745, she married Grand Duke Peter of Holstein, heir to the Russian throne. The marriage was an unhappy one, but the intelligent and ambitious Catherine soon managed to build up a circle of supporters in Saint Petersburg. In 1754 she gave birth to a son, the future emperor Paul. Catherine's husband succeeded to the throne as Peter III in 1762. Erratic, unstable, and contemptuous of his Russian subjects, he soon alienated several important groups in Russian society. On July 9, 1762, following a pattern well established in 18th-century Russia, the Imperial Guards overthrew him and placed Catherine on the throne in his stead.
Catherine and the Enlightenment Catherine was well acquainted with the literature of the French Enlightenment, which was an important influence on her own political thinking. She corresponded extensively with Voltaire and Denis Diderot, gave financial support to them and a number of other French writers, and played host to Diderot at her court in 1773. Although this activity was partly aimed at creating a favorable image in Western Europe, she was probably sincere in her interest and her hope to apply some of the ideas of the Enlightenment to rationalize and reform the administration of the Russian Empire. Despite her interest in legal reform, however, the commission she appointed for that purpose in 1767 failed to accomplish its goals. Among Catherine's more benevolent achievements were the foundation of the first Russian schools for girls and of a medical college to provide health care for her subjects. In the early years of her reign, Catherine sought to win the support of the Russian gentry, and, in particular, of a small group of nobles. She confirmed Peter III's emancipation of the gentry from compulsory military service, granted them many other privileges, and showered her supporters with titles, offices, state lands, and serfs to work their fields. Thus, despite a professed abhorrence for serfdom, she did much to expand that institution by transferring state-owned serfs to private landowners, extending serfdom to newly acquired territories, and greatly increasing the legal control of the gentry over their serfs.
Later Conservatism Peasant unrest culminated in a great revolt (1773-75), led by the cossack Yemelyan Pugachov, that raged over much of the Volga River Basin and the Urals before it was finally crushed by military force. The revolt marked a turn toward a more reactionary internal policy. The cossack army was disbanded, and other cossacks were granted special privileges in an effort to transform them into loyal supporters of the autocracy. In 1775 a major reform of provincial administration was undertaken in an effort to ensure better control of the empire. A major reform of urban administration was also promulgated. The French Revolution increased Catherine's hostility toward liberal ideas. Several outspoken critics of serfdom such as Nikolay I. Novikov and Aleksandr N. Radishchev, were imprisoned, and Catherine seems to have been planning to join a European coalition against France when she died on November 17, 1796, in St. Petersburg. Under Catherine, the territory of the Russian Empire was greatly expanded. As a result of two wars against the Ottoman Empire (1768-74 and 1787-91) and the annexation of the Crimea (1783), Russia gained control of the northern coast of the Black Sea. Russian control over Poland-Lithuania was also greatly extended, culminating in the annexation of large tracts of territory in the three partitions of Poland (1772, 1793, 1795).
Character of the Reign One characteristic of Catherine's reign was the important role played by her lovers, or favorites. Ten men occupied this semiofficial position, and at least two, Grigory Orlov and Grigory Potemkin, were important in formulating foreign and domestic policy. Although assessments of Catherine vary, she undoubtedly played a key role in the development of Russia as a modern state.
Catherine the Great (1729-96), empress of Russia (1762-96), the second of that name, who continued the process of Westernization begun by Peter the Great and made Russia a European power. Originally named Sophie Fredericke Auguste von Anhalt-Zerbst, Catherine was born in Stettin (now Szczecin, Poland) on May 2, 1729, the daughter of a minor German prince. In 1745, she married Grand Duke Peter of Holstein, heir to the Russian throne. The marriage was an unhappy one, but the intelligent and ambitious Catherine soon managed to build up a circle of supporters in Saint Petersburg. In 1754 she gave birth to a son, the future emperor Paul. Catherine's husband succeeded to the throne as Peter III in 1762. Erratic, unstable, and contemptuous of his Russian subjects, he soon alienated several important groups in Russian society. On July 9, 1762, following a pattern well established in 18th-century Russia, the Imperial Guards overthrew him and placed Catherine on the throne in his stead.
Catherine and the Enlightenment Catherine was well acquainted with the literature of the French Enlightenment, which was an important influence on her own political thinking. She corresponded extensively with Voltaire and Denis Diderot, gave financial support to them and a number of other French writers, and played host to Diderot at her court in 1773. Although this activity was partly aimed at creating a favorable image in Western Europe, she was probably sincere in her interest and her hope to apply some of the ideas of the Enlightenment to rationalize and reform the administration of the Russian Empire. Despite her interest in legal reform, however, the commission she appointed for that purpose in 1767 failed to accomplish its goals. Among Catherine's more benevolent achievements were the foundation of the first Russian schools for girls and of a medical college to provide health care for her subjects. In the early years of her reign, Catherine sought to win the support of the Russian gentry, and, in particular, of a small group of nobles. She confirmed Peter III's emancipation of the gentry from compulsory military service, granted them many other privileges, and showered her supporters with titles, offices, state lands, and serfs to work their fields. Thus, despite a professed abhorrence for serfdom, she did much to expand that institution by transferring state-owned serfs to private landowners, extending serfdom to newly acquired territories, and greatly increasing the legal control of the gentry over their serfs.
Later Conservatism Peasant unrest culminated in a great revolt (1773-75), led by the cossack Yemelyan Pugachov, that raged over much of the Volga River Basin and the Urals before it was finally crushed by military force. The revolt marked a turn toward a more reactionary internal policy. The cossack army was disbanded, and other cossacks were granted special privileges in an effort to transform them into loyal supporters of the autocracy. In 1775 a major reform of provincial administration was undertaken in an effort to ensure better control of the empire. A major reform of urban administration was also promulgated. The French Revolution increased Catherine's hostility toward liberal ideas. Several outspoken critics of serfdom such as Nikolay I. Novikov and Aleksandr N. Radishchev, were imprisoned, and Catherine seems to have been planning to join a European coalition against France when she died on November 17, 1796, in St. Petersburg. Under Catherine, the territory of the Russian Empire was greatly expanded. As a result of two wars against the Ottoman Empire (1768-74 and 1787-91) and the annexation of the Crimea (1783), Russia gained control of the northern coast of the Black Sea. Russian control over Poland-Lithuania was also greatly extended, culminating in the annexation of large tracts of territory in the three partitions of Poland (1772, 1793, 1795).
Character of the Reign One characteristic of Catherine's reign was the important role played by her lovers, or favorites. Ten men occupied this semiofficial position, and at least two, Grigory Orlov and Grigory Potemkin, were important in formulating foreign and domestic policy. Although assessments of Catherine vary, she undoubtedly played a key role in the development of Russia as a modern state.
American women vs Russian women
Tyra Banks, some kind of talk show host, does a show on international marriages entitled "I Bought My Bride". She goes over the top, like famous man-hating kneejerk feminist Bonnie Erbe, and grossly denigrates the Russian women and the American men she invites on the show, asking rude questions and even rolling her eyes in disgust at some of their sincere responses to her.
Then, the aftermath. Apparently she grossly misjudged the sentiments of her audlence, which seems to be mostly married women judging from hundreds of angry posts running about 40:1 against her for her rude, dismissive treatment of her guests.
Would you agree to leave your country and marry a man you’ve never met face-to-face? Tyra met couples that have given up on traditional methods of dating and turned to the world of international dating services to find their mates! What are your thoughts on this dating alternative?
[from a Russian woman]
I liked today's show. I am also Russian, and I am married to an American guy. The fact is(and you, american women should take it to consideration)that YOU are MATERIALISTIC AND MONEY HUNGRY, ALSO FRIKIN' JEALOUS OF US, RUSSIAN GIRLS! I did not stay here because my country sucks, but because of my husband. If it was not for him, I would return home.I LOVE MY COUNTRY! We went to Russia together many times, he loved it very much. He said that Russian women are better, because we are not as materialistic as you guys. So, girls, change yourself, or ALL our girls are going to take over. You are just jealous of us, cos we are THE HOTTEST WOMEN ON EARTH, EVEN MY HUSBAND SAYS THAT.
[from a Hungarian woman]
I'm REALLY disappointed in you Tyra!I am sick and tired of americans think that everyone just dieing to come to this country, becouse we are "unfortunate,poor,lower level"citizens of other countries.What is the "american dream" anyway?Ther is no such thing!Is that so hard to understand that women of other countries are looking for love and NOT money?Just becouse that's what is important to you , don't speak for other women!!Why do you think you have the right to embarrass those women and call them "mail-ordered brides"??I believe if guys try to find their brides overseas there is a reason for that.And not only sick reasons.Women in this country should do a reality check.I've been in this country for 6 years now and have never met a woman, who didn't think the size of their engagement ring wasn't more important than anything else.Poor guys don't even have chance if they don't drive an expensive car etc.I met my husband(he is american, I am PROUD to be hungarian) here after I'd been here for over 3 years already.After 1.5 years he'd proposed to me.We've been married for over 2 years now.I've never been happier!!Believe it or not my husband had told me after months of dating,he had really thought about going over to Europe and see how the girls are there, becouse he got tired of superficial, materialistic american girls.If you don't want us to "steal"your men,maybe you should put love,respect,family etc values before money. Really Tyra you should feel ashamed of yourself!I loved your shows, but after today I think you have one less viewer and fan.Let me say I'm sorry for all Russian women for being treated that way on national television.
[from a Polish woman]
So why go over seas? Why met at the supermarket? why met at church? why met at school? why marry a childhood sweatheart? one looks for love. Is it about control? My ex would say no, then again don't ask my ex- she always disagreed with me, even if I agreed with her-
It's just another place to meet women, or women meet men. As for me, I'm shy, I like accents and this is terrifying, going to a country you can not read or write, some perfer to fall in love at a parachute jump, others go to a foreign country.
[from an American woman]
This is actually my first time posting and I'm sorry to say that the only thing that drew me to your site so quickly was your vulgar show on mail-order brides. Yes some take advantage of the situation, Yes some are in just for money, Yes some are fakes BUT AMERICAN WOMEN DO THE SAME AS WELL. Some of these women see a new life with a great education and opportunity , some see love and adore these men because they can save them. You know Russia is tough and some1 giving them and opportunity to come to America and have a better life can make them fall in love just by that alone. Honestly i love your show, Americas next top model ... watch it all the time but that was an all time low for you. American women are gold diggers as well. Today you betrayed Russian women and you betrayed many of your fans. You always speak of powerful and independent women. Today you were no better than the abusive men all over America. You did in an hour show what many abusive men do over a period of time. You lost another fan Tyra I'm sorry many women will never look at you the same
[from an American woman]
Tyra, I don't know if you read these postings or not, I at least hope somebody does. Todays show disgusted me, which is a first. I was not offended by the topic but more by Tyra's behavior. Personal judgmental feelings by Tyra were apparent. I was horrified for the women and the men that had to endure your show today. Tyra's attitude was crude and personally ugly.Be-littling the men and degrading the women was immature and beyond rude no matter the topic. For the first time I stopped watching the show. I rarely get to catch your show because I am running around but the few times I do I enjoy them. This was horrible. On a side note two other neighbors all stated the same reaction. Offensive and unprofessional today Tyra. Think about if you can keep your personal opinions and feelings in check next time before you cover an issue you can't keep yourself in line about in front of the world. The world already has judges.
[from an American woman]
Tyra,
Re: mail order brides...you implied today that men look to mail order brides since U.S. women are more "advanced" than foreign women because of feminism. You should remember that a woman's choice to work or stay at home for her sake and her family's is her CHOICE. It doesn't mean that she is uneducated or controlled by her husband or has no sense of self. The ability to make THAT CHOICE was the point of the "Feminist Movement," not to FORCE all mothers to work and then have their own children raised by strangers in daycare/etc. Another point of feminism was to educate so that all women can make personal choices with their life without JUDGEMENT by other women LIKE YOU. Adjust your attitude, Tyra!
[from russian woman]
to barbara and tyra,
i think you need to be informed that we "mail order brides" although we don't like being called mail order brides are not really bought by our husbands as you think.yes they paid some amount of money to be a member of some matchmaking websites but it's just like paying a monthly bill to have access on the telephone.they pay to have access on the website.no one owns us and nowhere did they pay to have us.we spent a lot of time talking on the phone and chatting on the internet.seeing each other on the webcam just to know each other and build our relationship.you don't know what american-couple have been through so you don't have the right to judge us.we are far more happier couples than a lot of american couples who are jumping from one marriage to another without thinking the effects to their children.
[from Ukrainian woman]
I am diaspora Ukrainian now married to a Ukrainian man for 15 years. I lived in Russia and Ukraine for 10 years. If you think American women are tough, you know nothing about Russian or Ukrainian women. Divorce rates are as high, or higher in these countries than in the US. MOB sites will cite the high rate of alcoholism as the major factor when in fact, it is much more complex, and in that society, nobody believes marriage is something to be worked at. Promiscuity is rampant and prostitution and stripping are viewed as ordinary work. Those are the "family values" you will encounter if you live abroad for any period.
Then, the aftermath. Apparently she grossly misjudged the sentiments of her audlence, which seems to be mostly married women judging from hundreds of angry posts running about 40:1 against her for her rude, dismissive treatment of her guests.
A Revealing Look At the Mail Order Bride Industry
Would you agree to leave your country and marry a man you’ve never met face-to-face? Tyra met couples that have given up on traditional methods of dating and turned to the world of international dating services to find their mates! What are your thoughts on this dating alternative?
[from a Russian woman]
I liked today's show. I am also Russian, and I am married to an American guy. The fact is(and you, american women should take it to consideration)that YOU are MATERIALISTIC AND MONEY HUNGRY, ALSO FRIKIN' JEALOUS OF US, RUSSIAN GIRLS! I did not stay here because my country sucks, but because of my husband. If it was not for him, I would return home.I LOVE MY COUNTRY! We went to Russia together many times, he loved it very much. He said that Russian women are better, because we are not as materialistic as you guys. So, girls, change yourself, or ALL our girls are going to take over. You are just jealous of us, cos we are THE HOTTEST WOMEN ON EARTH, EVEN MY HUSBAND SAYS THAT.
[from a Hungarian woman]
I'm REALLY disappointed in you Tyra!I am sick and tired of americans think that everyone just dieing to come to this country, becouse we are "unfortunate,poor,lower level"citizens of other countries.What is the "american dream" anyway?Ther is no such thing!Is that so hard to understand that women of other countries are looking for love and NOT money?Just becouse that's what is important to you , don't speak for other women!!Why do you think you have the right to embarrass those women and call them "mail-ordered brides"??I believe if guys try to find their brides overseas there is a reason for that.And not only sick reasons.Women in this country should do a reality check.I've been in this country for 6 years now and have never met a woman, who didn't think the size of their engagement ring wasn't more important than anything else.Poor guys don't even have chance if they don't drive an expensive car etc.I met my husband(he is american, I am PROUD to be hungarian) here after I'd been here for over 3 years already.After 1.5 years he'd proposed to me.We've been married for over 2 years now.I've never been happier!!Believe it or not my husband had told me after months of dating,he had really thought about going over to Europe and see how the girls are there, becouse he got tired of superficial, materialistic american girls.If you don't want us to "steal"your men,maybe you should put love,respect,family etc values before money. Really Tyra you should feel ashamed of yourself!I loved your shows, but after today I think you have one less viewer and fan.Let me say I'm sorry for all Russian women for being treated that way on national television.
[from a Polish woman]
So why go over seas? Why met at the supermarket? why met at church? why met at school? why marry a childhood sweatheart? one looks for love. Is it about control? My ex would say no, then again don't ask my ex- she always disagreed with me, even if I agreed with her-
It's just another place to meet women, or women meet men. As for me, I'm shy, I like accents and this is terrifying, going to a country you can not read or write, some perfer to fall in love at a parachute jump, others go to a foreign country.
[from an American woman]
This is actually my first time posting and I'm sorry to say that the only thing that drew me to your site so quickly was your vulgar show on mail-order brides. Yes some take advantage of the situation, Yes some are in just for money, Yes some are fakes BUT AMERICAN WOMEN DO THE SAME AS WELL. Some of these women see a new life with a great education and opportunity , some see love and adore these men because they can save them. You know Russia is tough and some1 giving them and opportunity to come to America and have a better life can make them fall in love just by that alone. Honestly i love your show, Americas next top model ... watch it all the time but that was an all time low for you. American women are gold diggers as well. Today you betrayed Russian women and you betrayed many of your fans. You always speak of powerful and independent women. Today you were no better than the abusive men all over America. You did in an hour show what many abusive men do over a period of time. You lost another fan Tyra I'm sorry many women will never look at you the same
[from an American woman]
Tyra, I don't know if you read these postings or not, I at least hope somebody does. Todays show disgusted me, which is a first. I was not offended by the topic but more by Tyra's behavior. Personal judgmental feelings by Tyra were apparent. I was horrified for the women and the men that had to endure your show today. Tyra's attitude was crude and personally ugly.Be-littling the men and degrading the women was immature and beyond rude no matter the topic. For the first time I stopped watching the show. I rarely get to catch your show because I am running around but the few times I do I enjoy them. This was horrible. On a side note two other neighbors all stated the same reaction. Offensive and unprofessional today Tyra. Think about if you can keep your personal opinions and feelings in check next time before you cover an issue you can't keep yourself in line about in front of the world. The world already has judges.
[from an American woman]
Tyra,
Re: mail order brides...you implied today that men look to mail order brides since U.S. women are more "advanced" than foreign women because of feminism. You should remember that a woman's choice to work or stay at home for her sake and her family's is her CHOICE. It doesn't mean that she is uneducated or controlled by her husband or has no sense of self. The ability to make THAT CHOICE was the point of the "Feminist Movement," not to FORCE all mothers to work and then have their own children raised by strangers in daycare/etc. Another point of feminism was to educate so that all women can make personal choices with their life without JUDGEMENT by other women LIKE YOU. Adjust your attitude, Tyra!
[from russian woman]
to barbara and tyra,
i think you need to be informed that we "mail order brides" although we don't like being called mail order brides are not really bought by our husbands as you think.yes they paid some amount of money to be a member of some matchmaking websites but it's just like paying a monthly bill to have access on the telephone.they pay to have access on the website.no one owns us and nowhere did they pay to have us.we spent a lot of time talking on the phone and chatting on the internet.seeing each other on the webcam just to know each other and build our relationship.you don't know what american-couple have been through so you don't have the right to judge us.we are far more happier couples than a lot of american couples who are jumping from one marriage to another without thinking the effects to their children.
[from Ukrainian woman]
I am diaspora Ukrainian now married to a Ukrainian man for 15 years. I lived in Russia and Ukraine for 10 years. If you think American women are tough, you know nothing about Russian or Ukrainian women. Divorce rates are as high, or higher in these countries than in the US. MOB sites will cite the high rate of alcoholism as the major factor when in fact, it is much more complex, and in that society, nobody believes marriage is something to be worked at. Promiscuity is rampant and prostitution and stripping are viewed as ordinary work. Those are the "family values" you will encounter if you live abroad for any period.
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