No Country for R&B

Leslie Loftis requested “that heaping scorn” on account of Vladimir Putin’s hiring of Boyz II Men to combat Russia’s sub-European birth rates.  I’ll try to not disappoint.

The R’n'B band is to play some sort of a part in Russian state’s ongoing effort to convince ordinary men and women to be fruitful and multiply:

The story comes from the Moscow Times, which writes: “The stylish trio of Boyz II Men, the most successful R&B group of all time, is coming to Moscow on Feb 6. The group will perform a selection of their classic and new romantic ballads, hopefully giving Russian men some inspiration ahead of St. Valentine’s Day.” The Times insists that the band will be lending their “powerful voices” to Putin’s fertility campaign. Whether or not the Russian kingpin personally got on the phone, tracked down their agent and demanded that they “do the show right here” is pure speculation on the newspaper’s part. It’s a little hard to believe … but it’s also not impossible to imagine. [My guess is Boyz have no clue about Europe's demographic woes.  Russian newspapers, however, are prone to overstatements. -- ed.]

For Putin has declared war on empty cots with classic Putin bravado. He’s often insisted that having lots of babies is key to Russia’s internal security, to Russia becoming more “influential” on the world state. Why have a great democracy or a flourishing economy when you can simply outnumber everyone else? Putin puts the desirable figure at three babies per household and, in 2007, one province helped things along by declaring a Day of Conception. The idea was that if Russians got the day off work then they might stay at home, put on some Boyz II Men, close the curtains and help bring back the good old days of Soviet hegemony. Women who gave birth 9 months later could win a refrigerator.

Which makes sense.   I can’t think of another top 40 band that’s all soft light and kitchen counters.

Boyz’s 1994 hit “I’ll Make Love to You”

If you, my reader, are a snob like me, you probably spend countless Friday nights complaining about the current sorry state of American popular music.  I hope you realize that much of today’s American pop sells very well abroad, and that even if Americans suddenly abandoned their music idols, many performers would do just fine.  Truth be told, American pop in decline does not sound that bad compare to what musicians around the world have to offer.

Russia one horrid example of horrid taste in horrid popular music.  The country’s President is a noted connoisseur of “popsa” (Russian slang for particularly annoying tunes).  Remember his inspirationally sexed-up 2012 Presidential campaign?  Well, in 2007/2008 it was Putin copying Obama, not the other way around.  Shortly after Obama girl went viral, Putin lent his likeness to a video with two babes who singing ditties about him:

A few years ago I went on a facebook-like Russian site where I found some old friends and made a few new ones.  Most of them were Russian-speaking Ukrainian women, about my age, college educated, either gainfully employed or with a husband providing for the family, and with a kid or two.  Often times our conversation turned to the little ones; specifically they wanted to know how much does the United States government pay to have a baby.  I got the impression that their sole reason for striking a conversation with an American woman was to pose that particular question.

Turns out, all Ukrainian women are promised a one-time stipend for each child — “promised” is the operative word here because in their experience the money doesn’t always materialize.  They were bitter, which was understandable.  I’m not sure how much sense it makes for the state to beguile its citizens short term.  Our government is also making promises on which it’s not going to deliver (think Social Security), but those are long term promises.  By the time the the populace realizes that its been had, the politicians who designed the system are long dead and buried.  Anyhow, Russia touts fertility measures similar to Ukraine’s, with second baby currently worth 9K.  Russian women find it equally easy to discuss such prizes.

Now, I’m all for people being practical about breeding.  People other than myself that is (I got pregnant with my first while on our honeymoon).  It’s just that on the surface of it, at least, the women in Russia and Ukraine do not appear to be practical enough.  I had to explained that in the US children are seen mainly as expenses.  It costs upwards of a half a mil to raise a child, which dwarfs any tax write off a middle class American family can possibly take advantage of.  Kitchen appliances are a sorry compensation when you have another mouth to feed.

What is interesting is when middle class American women think “how can I afford it”, their Russian speaking counterparts think “who pays better”.  That’s the difference between freedom and personal responsibility on the one hand and slavery and hand outs on the other.  Arguably, American fertility subsidies are obscured through our tax code.  We still have subsidies (as we should as long as the government provides for retirement), they are just not obvious.  Yet I don’t know a single family that would calculate exemptions prior to trying to conceive.

The fertility rate in Russia is up from under 1.2 child per woman at its 1999 low to about one and a half child for each woman of childbearing age.  The rate of population decline is down, and Putin is claiming victory.  I remember Russians here, in Cali, being surprised by that Russian style baby boom, and quipping that maybe it’s caused by mothers too drunk to get themselves to abortion clinics.  They were not too far off.  Then there is the argument that the uptake in fertility is partially caused by the increase in the number of ethnic minorities and the calls for awarding “maternal capital” to ethnic Russians only.  Still, the current fertility uptake is partially caused by the women born during the 1980s mini-boom now reaching peak childbearing age.  Once they age, Russia is due for another bust.

From Putin’s point of view it must be now or never.  He really does need to get as many children as he can out of Russian women today because, he must realize, there is no tomorrow.  The generous sums of money offered to moms at the time when state revenues are declining are really a sign of desperation.  Putin bought off Russia’s middle class with petroleum money, but with development of new technologies of oil and gas extraction, the world is not willing to pay top dollar for Russia’s resources.  Russian mothers might be looking for another owner.

Putin’s goal is to encourage every Russian woman to have three children, and this billboard, photographed in Moscow metro, is a part of the state’s natalist campaign. “Your country needs your heroic achievements,” reads the top. “Every minute, three people are born in Russia”. I don’t see Russians reacting to this poster with anything but laughter.  The talk of “heroic accomplishments” is reminiscent of the Soviet era mythical mother-heroines who gave birth to a large number of children.  Ordinary Soviet people didn’t know anyone like that.

And Putin might do better if he had a whole different population of women to work with.  Russian-speaking women are just not that into large families.  I personally know of five Russian-speaking women of my generation who had more than two kids, and by more than two I mean three.  Two of them live in Israel (one is an ethnic Russian), one is in New Jersey, but spent several years in Israel.  Another is in the Bay Area, and her third child was an accident.  And, by the way, had she stayed in Belarus, the boy would had been summarily aborted, and so would had been several of his siblings.  Only one lives (and has always lived) in Ukraine, but she was always a bit odd. Not that there is anything wrong with being odd.

It’s not just that tough economic times drove families to postpone parenting.  Russians have an easy attitude about divorce and out-of-wedlock birth.  A sizable number of Russian women would rather stay single than marry Russian bachelors.  Even those who marry and stay married simply don’t want large families.  One or two kids were a norm for generations, and it’s hard to imagine that this norm can change in the near future.

Depardieu To Adopt An Orphanage

Kidding.  I’m sure everyone heard about Gerard Depardieu’s decision to renounce his French citizenship and move — first to Belgium, and now to Russia.  For one, Russians offer a better tax deal:

If Mr. Depardieu chooses to take up Russian citizenship, he would potentially trade steep French income tax rates, which he said now claim 85 percent of his income, and even Belgian rates of 60 percent or higher, for Russia’s flat 13 percent income tax. The value-added tax, a sales tax on goods and services, is 18 percent in Russia compared with nearly 20 percent in France, while Russian social security taxes are 30 percent compared with 50 percent in France.

On its way out of communism Russia, like many other former Eastern Block countries, had adopted a flat tax. And if Gospodin Gepardieu thinks that 13% is too high, no worries — few Russians pay income taxes to begin with, and the country relies heavily on its oil and gas revenue.  Sure, Mihkail Khordokovsky is doing time for tax evasion, or so we are told, but given how the actor was caught admiring Putin’s foray into popular culture, I don’t think he needs to worry about such things:

If it’s the low flat tax rate that interests Depardieu, why not chose Georgia or the Czech Republic?  Putin continued:

But aside from tax savings, Mr. Putin suggested that French officials were too brusque in their response to Mr. Depardieu’s complaints and that he might find that Russians simply understand him better as an artist. “Actors, musicians and artists are people with a special, delicate psychological makeup and, as we say in Russia, the artist is easily offended,” Mr. Putin said at the news conference on Dec. 20. “So I understand Mr. Depardieu’s feelings.”

I assume he understands Pussy Riot as well.  Not to say that Pussy Riot is anywhere near Depardieu’s talent, but we are talking bohemian sensibility here, not talent.  Then again, perhaps Putin does know something about artists, many of whom, like our former Frenchman, like dictators.

Depardieu might want to review Russian ideas about immigration.  If a Russian is to renounce his citizenship, he’ll be seen as a traitor by many of his ex compatriots.  Actually, in that part of the world one doesn’t need to leave the country to rise to the status of Benedict Arnold.  When I was growing up in the Soviet Union, virtually any activity that involves moving from one group of people to another, like switching places of employment, was considered treasonous.  Things changed in the 90s, at least for a short time, but it looks like today’s popular opinion is back to the Soviet assumptions.

After the Pussy Riot “trial” last year, I was looking through Russian chatrooms.  The general consensus there was that the young women had it coming, and that in other countries the punishment for their performance would be even harsher.  One individual opined that Pussy Riot are traitors to their motherland, and that in the US they would be put to death for [high] treason.  It was a well-liked opinion.  Last November Putin broadened the legal definition of treason, giving himself a green light to go after dissenters.

Regardless the Russian views on dissent and treason, the new arrival will get to keep more of his money.  How will he show his gratitude?  Russians don’t have the tradition of charitable giving akin to the one we have in America.  When we arrived to the US, we were moved to see people donating their money, time and possessions to help us settle in the new country.  It was all new to us.  Perhaps Gerard Depardieu, a Westerner, knows how charity is done.

The Russian population of parent-less children is now greater than it was at the end of World War 2.  There are children starving in Russian orphanages, and now, because Putin is playing politics with their lives, they can not be adopted by American families.   Surely an actor known for creating humane characters can not remain indifferent.  He should contribute to an overhaul of the Russian orphanage system and perhaps adopt a kid or two.

Russian Grrrls Infiltrate IKEA

There was that old rumor that IKEA doesn’t know how to do business in Russia — you see, they have no experience in bribing.  And now IKEA website published a picture of women in colored balaclavas, like that of the imprisoned dissident rockers Pussy Riot, and angered the country’s owners.

The caption, which reads “New life at home”, was provided by IKEA.  Not planed by the grrrls, but just perfect in terms of delivering the message.  The casual yet menacing posture of the models is excellent too

The offending picture was entered the contest for a new catalog cover by somebody who goes by “Starovoitova” in Yekaterinburg.  After nearly a month online, the picture was replaced with the message “Photo removed.  IKEA is a commercial company and acts outside politics and religion.  We cannot allow our advertizing to be highjacked for propaganda of any kind.”  Oh, I don’t know about that “any kind” bit.  I think the good Swedes would allow some political and religious content.

Anyhow, this is what the contest page looks like now:

As you can see, the Pussy Riot photo was winning, although as of today it’s likely to be overtaken Klechko on lower left, who is doing some sort of fun dress up gimmick.  They were previously in 4th place, but now boasting 1407 “likes”

Good luck to “Starovoitova”.

Somebody Please Explain To This Blogger What is the Point of Being a Riot Grrrl in Russia

In the West Grrrls get to behave like men — play loud music, make suggestive gestures on stage, so on.  They get to fancy themselves feminist revolutionaries and keep distance from the second wave party-poppers.

There isn’t much in the way of an authentic feminist movement in Russia.  In the Soviet time, women and men alike were required to participate in mock elections, so at the time real elections took place in the early 1990s, nobody was outraged by the site of both both sexes heading to the voting booths.  Broad majorities of Russian women worked hard outside the house.  It was true through Russian history, and because in the Soviet period specifically it was virtually impossible for an ordinary Russian man to support his family, wives and mothers were all not-so-gainfully employed.  Although housewifery was a distant dream, women typically controlled the purse strings.

Babushkas and physical labor: a typical Soviet city scene of the 70s and 80s. The soberer sex performing grueling tasks, often jobs rejected by men, was a fact of our lives. In the height of Perestroika Russian press lamented the fact that Soviet society treated its women so poorly, but when I talk about it to my American neighbors, many are wowed

An American woman can distinguish herself as a sex-positive feminist, but in Russia all women are expected to be “sex-positive”.   On one hand, because of the low life expectancy for men, the men to women ratio in Russia is the lowest in the world; Russian women put enormous effort to get and keep a mate.  On the other hand, Russia was never really a thoroughly Christian country.  Nominally it was Christian, of course, but its vast stretches were never properly converted, and the priests allowed peasantry to carry on with their pagan beliefs and traditions.  Russian peasant societies were patriarchal, to be sure, and the straying female was risking her reputation.  Communal bonds turned obsolete in late 19th century when with abolition of serfdom and industrialization women and men alike flocked to the cities.  About a quarter of births in the late Russian Empire were out of wedlock.

Soviets were shy to talk about sex.  In the late 80′s a middle age matron proclaimed on national television: “There is no sex in our country [only love]“, but the millions of abortions performed each year tell a different story.  Towards the late 80′s public culture became sexualized.  I wrote about sex and politics in Russia before.  In fact, groups like Femen or, in the article linked above, Pussy Riot are not doing anything radically different from Putin, style-wise.

When asked about their musical influences and ideology, Pussy Riot explained:

The difference is that Bikini Kill [a Riot Grrrl ban, -ed.] performed at specific music venues, while we hold unsanctioned concerts. [Enormous artistic difference, of course.  Pussy Riot must be learning from Femen, -- ed.] On the whole, Riot Grrrl was closely linked to Western cultural institutions, whose equivalents don’t exist in Russia.

Why do revolutionaries always have to sound like bores?  Anyhow, musically Pussy Riot is a standard example of the genre (NSFW, particularly around Russian-speaking co-workers):

The translatable portion of the song demands a Russian Tahrir, and concerned commentators certainly fear that that is where events in Moscow might be heading.

The Moscow Times article points out that Pussy Riot got a lot of comments on their YouTube video, and they did.  The more recent gushing comments are in English.  Most of the earlier remarks are the irate, typically America-hating viewers, and the band trying to outdo each other in their use of profanities (Russians consider their profanities high art).  Few point out that the video is too produced for Punk., and I agree.

Russian nationalists long resented their countrymen adopting Western ways.  The nationalists are mostly wrong, but not when it comes to Pussy Riot.  Maybe there is a point of being a Riot Grrrl in Russia, it’s just that it comes across as inauthentic.  One of the viewers checked out the band’s November 2011 interview and noted that he sees two cultured girls from good families.  Where is the hard core?  I get the impression that the ladies are copying Punk because it’s cool, but their ideology is not reality-checked.

The ladies claim to be lefties, and in America Riot Grrrls are lefties.  But ideologically the Russian left is different.  In fact, it’s naturally aligned with the American conservatism — pro-individual liberty, free market, pro-Israel and is opposed to tyranies.  Riot Grrrls and other anarchist-affiliated Western subcultures want handouts and are “anti-war”.

In a country where dissidents are punished it certainly takes guts to be in Pussy Riot.  The masks might be a bit too much given that since they’ve been arrested the police obviously knows who they are.  In that 2011 video interview they claim that their phones are bugged.  I don’t question the girls’ courage, I question their relevance.  Russia is a patriarchal country where men don’t fare very well, and where women have a lot to be upset about.  One reason Russian women are eager to marry foreigners is because Western men treat them better.  Anyhwo, Riot Grrrls seem to ring hollow for Russia… unless the true goal is to increase the prospects of marriage to a Western man.

Sex in Politics in Russia

The upcoming Russian election is promising to be a nail-biter.   Is it going to be Putin… or Putin?  The autocrat’s campaign is in high gear,  hitting on all important issues.

Remember when Russians wrote operas?  Now they have techno.

Rouge Operator describes the video as Putin’s lets f*** Russia campaign.

Russians got a bit sex-obsessed in the wake of Perestroika (which kind of explains the failure of the whole democratic experiment there, considering that unlike debauchery, democracy requires hard work and self-restraint).  For instance, the recently installed shopping windows in one of the Moscow’s top malls feature robots doing the dirty.  Evidently that was an homage to Bjork.  High art, you know.

What Russia lacks is the natural outcome of having sex, namely the children.  The Russian population is shrinking, but there is  good and bad news on that front.  The good news: the Russian fertility rate is up.  The bad news: it’s up to 1.5 children per woman, well below replacement, and it is likely to be remain stagnant.  Like many European governments, Russians are desperate to promote childbearing.  Hence Putin’s recent visit to a Kaliningrad hospital where, he alleges, the 7 billionth Earthling was born (via Capitol Commentary):

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin hailed a two-day old Russian boy as the world’s seven billionth person Wednesday, weighing into a bizarre scramble to claim a title that is almost impossible to verify.

Russia’s Pyotr Nikolayev was born on Oct 31, two minutes after midnight in a maternity hospital in Russia’s Western exclave of Kaliningrad, wedged between Poland and the Baltic Sea.

“How did you manage to do it on the very 7 billion mark?” Putin, who is running for president in a March election, asked the child’s mother in front of a group of television reporters.

“It was all down to him. I am just a normal mum,” Yelena Nikolayeva, replied as she handed the boy to Putin, Russia’s paramount leader. The pictures were aired on state television at peak viewing times.

Growing Russia? One day following the 2008 Presidential election in the US, Russia announced deployment of short-range weapons capable of reaching Poland, the Czech Republic and Germany in Kaliningrad, formerly Königsberg and a bunch of other non-Russian names.

Russians think of themselves as the smartest people on Earth — because they know better than democracy.  Had an American candidate made his campaign propaganda so improbable, he’d be laughed out of the room.  And yes, that applies to Democrats too, even to black Democrats.  Recall Maureen Dowd’s skepticism about the Team 6 film set to open a few weeks prior to the next Presidential election.

Although the “election” will be a farce in a long-standing Russian tradition, a lot of Russians genuinely like Putin because he’s a nationalist and a strongman.  They love to be an empire, and even the more intelligent ones believe their country is so unruly, it needs an iron fist.  But here is a novel idea: Try organizing your vast stretches from the bottom up.

To be sure, Russia’s problems are legion.  It is no secret that much of Russian intelligentsia wants to leave the country.  A few months ago, my uncle forwarded me an anonymous editorial by a young Russian woman working towards a graduate degree in computer science so that she has the skills to find a job abroad.  I toyed with the idea of writing a post about it, but didn’t, and now I lost the link.  She explained her motives, and they were not at all financial.  The essay was lengthy, but in a nutshell, she is turned off by the lack of respect for the rule of law and the individual that permeates Russian society.

When I told DH about the essay his reaction was: “Where exactly does she plan to find respect for the individual and the rule of law in this day and age?”  It’s all relative.  One man commented on the article said that he now lives in Prague, and, yes, it is much better there.

On the other hand, if here, in the US, we have adherents of Russian political theories planting their a***s in the middle of our cities, defecating in public and demanding to be cared for, that’s exactly the kind of mindset that’s forcing this woman to flee.  Add to it our Chicago way President who rules without any regard for both the public opinion and the rule of law, and doesn’t show much interest in the well-being of his countrymen.

But I digress.  While Americans are suspicious of sex in politics and are unlikely to elect an attractive female nominee to the highest office, in Russia and the former empire, sex appeal is a plus.  Think of recently jailed Ukrainian PM Yulia Timoshenko.

She's pushing 50 in this shot.

Our next President should appoint Sarah Palin to a Russian ambassadorship.  They will listen.