Soviet Presswatch/Tolstaya City
Young, Cathy
Tolstaya City by Cathy Young Apage one cartoon in Komsomolskaya Pravda shows a bug-eyed, disheveled demonstrator with a banner that reads, NICHEVO NE PONIMAYU!—best translated as, WHAT THE HELL IS...
...This being the (ex-) Soviet Union, shouldn't a customer worry that her new mammary glands might end up on her back or waist...
...ets, the troupe headed by Jacqueline Stallone (Sly's mom), in late October...
...I am going to issue decrees and everyone is going to obey them...
...A September issue of the Moscow weekly Stolitsa carries an interview with Tatiana Tolstaya, currently teaching in the United States and a frequent contributor to the New Republic and the New York Review of Books...
...Tolstaya City by Cathy Young Apage one cartoon in Komsomolskaya Pravda shows a bug-eyed, disheveled demonstrator with a banner that reads, NICHEVO NE PONIMAYU!—best translated as, WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON...
...You are going to listen for as long as I am going to speak...
...And that's how it is The American Spectator January 1992 61...
...The Independent Gazette (September 11) reports that sales of their tapes are behind those of Zhirinovsky's stump speeches...
...There is, however, one dictum of American origin that Tolstaya has clearly taken to heart: Emerson's "a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds...
...Sample: "Once I'm elected President, you won't be smiling anymore...
...An item in Komsomolskaya Pravda, entitled "Don't Get Into the Ring When a Woman's Fighting," noted that "women's wrestling is especially widespread in countries where women's liberation is winning...
...Suffering from underdevelopment of the mammary glands...
...In the middle of the interview, we learn that she is going to return to stupid, boring America for at least another year...
...The problem with the Soviet system, the patriot explains, is not that it was socialist but that, run by "the anti-Russian Communist party team," it worked for "alien and usually hostile interests...
...Here's another sign that the long-suffering Russian woman has really arrived...
...A friend in Moscow tells me the doomand-gloom mood in the media is so pervasive that when pleasant news—a fashion show or a jazz festival—is reported on TV, it is usually prefaced with remarks along the lines of, "One might say that in our troubled days, there is no time for fun and frivolity...
...Lost your feminine attractiveness after an operation...
...Khatyushin's 60 The American Spectator January 1992 breakthrough discovery is that capitalist democracy ("the unfree, unequal, unfraternal power of commerce and of the golden calf, the god of the Jews") survived the Great Depression by exploiting Russia through "Stalin's five-year plans...
...WE CAN HELP...
...You see, "first you rack your brains: What is more to your advantage, to buy or rent a house or apartment...
...Here] you're like a hamster on a treadmill, running around till you drop...
...You have to patiently elucidate to them things that every first-grader knows in our country...
...These interests even got to Solzhenitsyn: in his essay "How to Rebuild Russia," Khatyushin complains indignantly, the writer said not a word about the role of "Zionist capital" and "Zionization" in Russia's plight: To really rebuild Russia, the last thing we should do is join the "world market...
...But, like everything else, it costs money...
...Every second your air conditioner works, you physically feel your money oozing away...
...As a recent (1988) college graduate, I can attest that things may not be good but they're not nearly as awful...
...And then there are all the grocery coupons one has to clip, because how can you pass up an opportunity to save five bucks on your monthly grocery shopping...
...Khatyushin explains that the integration of Russia into Europe is nothing but a Jewish plot to turn Russians into a slave labor force for world capitalism—a plot in which the October Revolution itself was but one link...
...Are we having fun yet...
...What kind of creative work can you do in such conditions...
...he got about seven percent of the vote in the republic's presidential race last May and is now running for the Soviet presidency...
...And encountering that product brings you no joy at all...
...And only then can we start thinking about what we are going to sell, to whom, and for how much...
...Furthermore: "Let's take heating...
...Tolstaya laments: "It's so boring...
...We must start by outlawing any financial activity by the agents of that "capital" in our territory...
...For serious fun, there is politics...
...Uncle Joe, the American agent...
...All flow of raw materials abroad must be sealed off until Russia is really rebuilt...
...Well, how about female wrestling...
...I don't know if Dr...
...They also adore watching commercials...
...Some of the things Tolstaya enumerates are at least partly true, but in her enervated state she can discern no shades of gray: I simply cannot describe the extent to which American students are naive, simple-minded, ignorant, uneducated—and indifferent...
...They can just sit there for days going snip, snip, snip...
...And I used to think Allan Bloom was a grouch...
...Apparently, she prefers freezing as the only option—which may be the case for her compatriots in the coming winter...
...Russia has its drunkards, but at least they're not litigious...
...Fun...
...If you own or rent a home, you need liability insurance in case "some drunk" slips and falls in front of your door and winds up suing you...
...Besides Estonians, Poles, Finns, and Russian liberals, there is someone else Zhirinovsky may be making nervous: Russian stand-up comedians...
...Take Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who wants to restore the borders of the old Russian empire (including "the Baltic province" and parts of Finland and Estonia) and lower the price of vodka...
...Experienced surgeons give consultations and perform plastic surgery using silicone implants...
...You have a boiler in the basement—all you have to do is press a button...
...At least she, as a Russian, is sufficiently spiritual to hate herself for such avarice: "Americans simply adore these coupons...
...An ad in the weekly Kultura (known, until September, as Sovetskaya Kultura), featuring a coyly smiling buxom Venus by Titian, shouts: WOMEN...
...The Russian writer further reveals that she has to spend inordinate amounts of time sorting through junk mail: "I have to read it all, analyze it, see if I really need any of these offers...
...0 The tumult at home has not made all Russians turn a kinder eye to the United States...
...And not at the world cabal's prices but at ones beneficial and profitable to us...
...Of course it's much easier and much more fun over here...
...But the ad copy could use a zippy punchline, something like: "We can't give you full shops, but we'll give you a full figure...
...But perhaps we could use some fun in our lives...
...She says, for example, that if you want to buy a house, you can't pay the entire price at once even if you've got the money, "because that's not profitable for the banks": they won't let you put more than 20 percent down...
...Emerson did say foolish consistency...
...Catharine MacKinnon would concur...
...We are a world unto ourselves . . . we have all we need for a wonderful, well-organized, full life without any hard currency or imports, for our own ruble to become the world's number one currency...
...Thirty Soviet wrestlers and boxers of the no-longer-gentle sex appeared in the Moscow show put on by Stallone's RockCathy Young is the author of Growing Up in Moscow (Ticknor & Fields...
...The money you spend will bring back beauty and confidence...
...Here's someone who makes Zhirinovsky look like a moderate: writer Valery Khatyushin, whose lengthy essay entitled "Chattels for the European Backyard...
...and, as someone who attended school in the Soviet Union, I have reasons to suspect that the intellect of the Soviet first-grader is vastly exaggerated...
...with every trifle...
...What a wonderful choice: freeze or pay up...
...And getting a tremendous kick out of it...
...Tolstaya makes a discovery to match Khatyushin's: everyday life in America is no better than in Russia...
...Over there, we don't have enough money, but here we have zero...
...The average Russian woman—who increasingly finds no surprises awaiting her at all at the store—can surely empathize...
...appears in the August issue of the always entertaining National Bolshevist journal Molodaya Gvardiya (Young Guard...
...Your beauty is up to YOU...
...Wile Tolstaya also sneers at the silly misconceptions many Americans have about life in Russia, she has some fairly strange notionsabout American practices—and she's been here for all of one year...
...However, the company that does the implants is a joint venture with the Germans, which inspires a certain amount of confidence...
...You go to a store, and there are no surprises awaiting you: you know exactly on what shelf in that store this or that product can be found...
Vol. 25 • January 1992 • No. 1
