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Genetics have been kind to Ukrainian women. Who, of either gender or orientation, can cease to be amazed at their beauty, casually on parade in the living catwalk of Ukraine? Ah, yes, and the summer dress code, unencumbered by puritanical sensibilities. Miles and miles of skin. I recall my foreign male comrades many moons ago confused, wondering whether that gorgeous, provocatively clad creature was riveting eyeballs on her loveliness in a kind of professional sense? Those heart stopping shear lacy blouses and "ace bandage" skirts over stiletto heels. My first thought was, poor girls, they are given only these gaudy garments to wear, linen sheaths and sensible shoes denied by five-year production plans. But as fashion boutiques sprouted with better economic days, it was apparent that this was the choice of dress for many from schoolgirl to grandmother. The wardrobe is about attracting male attention, but in a "Look But Don't Touch Unless Invited" fashion.
Their mash of genetic inheritance has made a potent mix for Ukrainian women. Behold the lean lines of the first millennia Scandinavian ruling class and the cat-like grace of the Asian hoards imposed on the succulent Slavic country girl chromosome. Scarlet grits her teeth with envy. When I came to Ukraine, I knew little more than the line from the Beatles' song, "Back in the USSR." Little did I know that that small phrase would be so meaningful. No wonder the Ukraine girls even knocked out the jaded Fab Four. And, how did they know, anyway? This secret, more powerful than the location of missile silos pointed at NATO Europe, was withheld from the west for so long.
Genes are less a blessing to the men, from the standpoint of beauty. Like my native Texas, where the gals are "mighty purty," the men are less renowned as "lookers". I remember walking Khreshchatyk with my pal Ty in the mid-90s, enduring his ogling and drooling. For the hundredth time he uttered his praise for the cornucopia of feminine beauty. I asked him, "Have you every noticed all the gorgeous Ukrainian women on the arms of really dorky looking guys?" He perked his head up and asked without irony, "Who looks at the guys?" Some days later, after taking a wider view, he agreed with me.
When it all came unraveled, Ukraine was found a poor country, dirty, shabby, and neglected. People wanted desperately to escape the hopelessness. Waiting in line at the train ticket window in Uzhgorod during the years of inebriated inflation, I heard a smart but angry young lady next to me spitting with venom in heavily accented English, "I would do anything to leave this horrible country." But, where to procure that ticket out? For untold thousands of Ukraine girls, hope sprang from union with western men. The dorkiest western male died and came to heaven in those days, raptured with a bevy of unimaginable beauties vying for his affection. He was the ticket to freedom, financial security and respect. In exchange, she offered beauty and a pledge to love, honor and obey to an extent not seen in the west since Betty burned her bra.
But let us get clear on one thing. The Ukrainian woman is much more that the simple allure of her surface beauty. Her attractiveness comes from deep within. It is a secret weapon called khytrist.
While English may be the most expressive language with its acres of synonyms expressing subtle shades of meaning, there are just some words that can't be translated. Khytrist is like that. You have to experience it in vivo to get it. Roll together the concepts of wily, sly, manipulative and cloak them in a complementary vestment. You are getting close. It is not attributed only to women, but it is their treasure to nurture and propagate. I saw it in action before I put the behavior together with the commonly used word. Not without a bit of envy, I had to ask, whence this seamless art of getting what you want while leaving your victim in velvet intoxication?
First I talked to girl friends. Mostly they had to think about it before answering. It is like an auxiliary to women's intuition a la something very specific in Ukrainian culture. It is taken for granted, passed from mother to daughter through the ether. It is used for many things, not just attracting men. I know of one recent case when a happily engaged woman talked her happily married boss into letting her work from home in provIncia as co-workers agonized with the morning commute of Kyiv. Oh, that is so khytra, goes the water cooler gossip.
Pursuing the question, sensing it had some kind of tangible origin, I spoke with a female cultural psychologist. What she told me was demystifying and concrete, a lesson in the hard history of a land pressed between empires. Her thesis was that khytrist is a tool in the competition for scarce resources. No need to look back further than the last century. Ukraine: the primary eastern front of the first world war followed by fighting between armies red, white and blue/yellow. Between wars, annihilation of the landed class of kulaks, artificial famine, and political purge by death and exile. The main front of the Great Patriotic War, Nazis grinding across Ukraine, Red Army grinding back. While no one escaped unfathomable suffering, it seems, in particular, Ukraine has been plagued by the periodic slaughter of its men folk.
And what of the surviving men who made it home? It doesn't take a session with a psychologist to understand that men have suffered psychological trauma for generation upon generation. My friend's father was just a child during the Great Patriotic War. Now retired, he won't speak of his post-war job in the state security service. Something there is not right any more. He won't speak much at all to his family, but meets occasionally with former colleagues to talk about secrets too heavy to shoulder alone. Another male friend, a leading clinical psychologist, says that the military continues to ruin Ukraine's men, to make them hard, barbaric, angry and prone to drink.
"You see," said the lady cultural psychologist, " Ukrainian women had to become very competitive to get a good man. We know what men like, how they like to be treated. We know all about their fragile egos and how to manipulate them. This includes the way that we dress. Unlike other kinds of animals, the human female should be the one beautifully adorned. And savvy in psychological manipulation in order to catch the good man." This is not to paint a portrait of Ukrainian women as subservient fluff. In the United States, after World War II, women left the ball bearing factory for a suburbia newly furnished with war-technology cum modern household appliances. Top-loading clothes washers - avocado or gold? - and upright Hoovers for all! Because so many of their men did not come home, Ukrainian women never left the factories and continued to run the household with the same technology used by generations past: hard physical labor. I too learned to do my laundry in the bathtub. Wringing jeans and towels by hand is great for building Madonna-like sculpted arms. When exchange student Alex brought his pediatrician host mom Nadia a potato peeler in 1993, she demurred. Any kitchen with an axe for hacking off chicken heads had no room for fancy gadgetry.
I lived in Lviv with its restricted water supply. I remember watching women flying home after work in time to catch two hours of water. They fixed dinner from the rawest of raw ingredients, washed the kids, dishes then the laundry in the bathtub. One night I fixed dinner for my friend Misha. After we ate, he laid upon the couch with his newspaper. "Misha," I said, "Did you know that in the United States, men help out with the dishes after the meal?" He asked with complete sincerity, "What do the women do?" His astonishment astounded me. Another fellow once told me, after returning from a Muskie Fellowship, that he observed that American men are shvabry, literally mops. To be fair, this fellow had attended a top graduate school wherein the women were, no doubt, assertive. I don't think American men consider themselves mops, but they have been cornered into helping out in ways that their forefathers eschewed. As they used to say in Texas and still do in Ukraine, there's women work, and there's men's work. Women do the housework and take care of the family; men do not.
What is a gal to do? For thousands, the answer is to go western if not west. The pairing of a Ukrainian woman with a western man has elements of a match made in heaven, an enthusiastic move to the middle on both sides. Ukrainian women find a fellow willing to do more than just take out the trash and fix a broken kalonka, a man who might make the dinner and/or wash the dishes, who wouldn't think of whacking her upside the head during a drinking binge. Men find a woman full of magic, sexuality, tenderness and tendency to follow their lead. Bedazzled and beguiled, judging from the number of successful alliances, western men are on an eastward crusade for love and respect. They too have fallen under the spell of the Khytra Zhinka.
Valerie Wright was a member of the first group of Peace Corps volunteers in the former Soviet Union in 1992, and has lived and worked in Ukraine continuously since that time. After many years in Kyiv, this transplanted Texan now calls Ivano-Frankivsk home.
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