There is a popular opinion that Russia has most beautiful girls

There is a popular opinion that Russia has most beautiful girls: slender, well-groomed, with just the right amount of that mysterious soul mixed in. They run across icy January sidewalks wearing high heels with alarming dexterity and barely perspire in their fur coats on the metro. Beauty requires sacrifice, as they say. The pickiest critics claim that true beauties don’t take public transportation any more, but the general consensus holds that Moscow’s metro scores higher on the babe-o-meter than any other metro in the world.

One goal of this article is to try to explain a puzzle that male expats and visitors to Russia have been trying to unravel for themselves. What happens to all the babes later in life? What happens to the supermodels on the metro? Do they all emigrate upon reaching the age of thirty? Why are most middle-aged women in Russia squat and bitter, resembling Madeleine Albright rather than Sophie Loren?

This is one mystery that is definitely wrapped inside of an enigma. Evil tongues declare that all the beauties are promptly exported abroad as mail-order brides, but I am skeptical, since older Russian women vastly outnumber older Russian men. So, there are two possible explanations: either bitter overweight women are secretly introduced into Russian society by extraterrestrials, or Russian girls eventually mutate into plump ladies on their own. Since this is twenty-first century, and we are not frivolous x-file theorists here, the only true option is the first one. So, let’s approach the dilemma with a serious attitude.

Russian women, who, according to a proverb, can stop a galloping horse and enter a burning house, are a species different from their younger slender daughters. Stress, poor health, and childbirth make them what they are. Plus there is the general weight issue: Russians, both men and women, have been getting heavier and heavier in the past years, and this is even more evident among the older generation.

Childbirth is when most women start putting on kilos, not only in Russia. But here getting back in shape is even harder: the lack of exercise is a combination of cultural and financial factors. Exercising regularly in Russia is a heroic undertaking, even if “regularly” means “once a week for 30 minutes.” My friends make fun of foreigners who get up at 7AM for their habitual jog: you can be sure that every jogger is a visiting American. Jogging in Moscow’s pollution seems unwise, and all other options, like clubs or gyms, are way too expensive: only 10 percent of Russia’s urbanites can afford them. So the only hope that’s left for staying in shape is running around the city and doing steps on the metro escalators.

So, most women end up much heavier after they bear their first child. Excess weight problem in a relatively poor country seems like an oxymoron: when people don’t have enough money to eat, aren’t they supposed to lose weight? In Russia this doesn’t really apply for several reasons. First of all, there is a lot of cheap food here, which has little or no nutrients, like pasta, bread, and potatoes. Many people go on a so-called “poor man’s diet”, especially during winter, eating exclusively carbohydrate-rich foods. Fruits and vegetables are affordable only during the summer, and meat is a special treat. When looking for a snack after work, people buy candy or chips and a bottle of beer, rather than something healthy.

For the same reason junk food is becoming more and more popular. Despite being a recurring target in anti-American diatribes, McDonalds is a popular venue. I very rarely eat at McDonalds, but on all occasions it happens, it is invariably in Russia. Too often there simply aren’t any other alternatives, in both price and speed of service. If in the States there are cheap ethnic eateries, in Moscow there are none.

The fact that lunch options are limited, and for many people inexistent altogether, ruins people’s food intake routine. A very typical meal schedule for a person who is financially constrained is eating an open-face sandwich and a cup of coffee for breakfast, skipping lunch and having a carb fest at night, most likely not earlier than 9PM, when everyone finally comes home from school and work. Moreover, the culture of food is different, and a lot of Russians think low-fat foods are for sissies, piling on butter and drinking 6% milk. I mean, my grandfather says “caloric” when he wants to praise the food he’s eating.

To add another dimension to the Russian woman phenomenon, there is the heritage of what it is to be a “Soviet woman”. Woman worship a-la-francaise was done away with after the Revolution, especially during and after World War II, when widows had to rebuild the country and raise their kids alone. Children worship was introduced, with the registered “happy soviet childhood” trademark, the symbol of a bright communist future.

Children still get more sympathy in Russia than middle-aged women, and girls have more time and energy up until they finish college. The woman, the traditional Russian workhorse, gets left on the sidelines. She can’t afford to get fit after childbirth, she is stressed and tired at work, and the only self-indulgency she can permit herself is food.