She would finally break through to see him, his body sprouting tubes and cords like vines, writhing in near-constant seizures. She would stare them down, out-argue them, and bend their will to hers, all while a gathering swarm of journalists trained their cameras and microphones and smartphones on her. To enter his room, she would need to present a marriage certificate, they said, and secure verbal consent from Navalny, who was still unconscious and on life support. They were reinforced-or kept in line-by a small battalion of plainclothes federal security officers, all intent on keeping her from seeing her husband. At the hospital in Omsk, Navalnaya would encounter a wall of doctors who seemed more scared of their civilian superiors than they were of losing their patient. Her husband, she learned, hadn’t died, but the hardest was yet to come. “The most important thing is not to relax,” she felt, “to not show weakness.” It would stay with her for weeks. She had been preparing for this moment for a decade, and now it was finally here, pouring in with the sun on this warm summer morning. If the plane carrying her husband had to make an emergency landing 1,700 miles from its intended destination, Alexey’s life must have been in imminent danger. “Alexey has been poisoned, the plane landed in Omsk.” Navalnaya said “okay” and hung up. It was Kira Yarmysh, her husband’s press secretary, who was supposed to be midflight with Alexey. She wasn’t normally up that early, but she was preparing to go to the airport to meet her husband, Alexey Navalny, the sole remaining leader of the Russian opposition, whose flight from the Siberian city of Tomsk was scheduled to arrive in Moscow at eight that morning. (I refused.It was 6:40 on the morning of Augwhen Yulia Navalnaya’s phone rang. When I protested that I was not a home wrecker, he reassured me that his home wouldn’t be wrecked, whatever we did together. I have my own tale: I was once propositioned by a newlywed man with a 6-month-old child. She went on seeing him for months, including on his wedding night. This time, the guy meant it, but my friend soon found out that he was getting remarried in two days’ time to a different woman. When she discovered he was married, he too said he’d get a divorce. Another friend dated a man for months who said he was single. “I don’t even know what I want anymore,” she told me. Years later, she has given up on kicking him out or fighting with him. When she brought up the subject, he said he’d been joking. When she first found out he was married, he proposed divorcing his wife and marrying her. One friend has a boyfriend who has lived with her but vacationed with his wife and kids for years. Three of my Russian girlfriends, all attractive women under 30, are caught up in the attendant misery. “But for a woman, who the hell knows if you’ll ever find another one?” This recalls a Billie Holiday-esque traditional Russian women’s saying, “He may be bad, but he’s mine.”Īccepting infidelity doesn’t neutralize the harm it can do, however. (This is also how they explain why they are always dressed to the nines.) “Men are not afraid to lose their women here,” a 23-year-old Muscovite named Olga told me. Sixty-five years later, even perfectly sculpted Russian women talk about the fierce competition for a mate. In the aftermath of World War II, a single man could father children with multiple women because it was the only way for many women to start families. There are nearly 10 percent fewer men than women here between the ages of 15 and 64. Since World War II, when the Soviets lost 27 million people, there have been real or perceived shortages of men in Russia, who have one of the lowest life expectancies in the developed and developing worlds-age 62, compared with 78 in the United States. Women also put up with infidelity because there are simply more of them. What does this culture of infidelity look like, and what are the costs? Since then, these attitudes have taken hold more deeply after a prolonged consumer boom that encourages Russians to indulge their whims and desires. But by 1998, a study showed that Russian men and women led their peers in 24 other countries in their willingness to engage in and approve of extramarital affairs. This is quite a shift, given that 20 years ago an affair was considered a career-wrecking scandal. Infidelity in Moscow has become “a way of life,” as another friend of mine put it-accepted and even expected. Tanya and her friends are young, educated, upper-middle-class Muscovites, but talk to any woman in Moscow, and, regardless of age, education, or income level, she’ll have a story of anything from petty infidelity to a parallel family that has existed for decades. “Men’s environment here pushes them towards cheating,” Tanya told me, adding that, these days, a boys’ night out in Russia often involves prostitutes. Wandering spouses have become a common trope for the women of Moscow.
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