Issue #06/61, March 25 - April 7, 1999  

by Matt Taibbi

"It is easy to show that the wish fulfillment in dreams is often undisguised and easy to recognize, so that one may wonder why the language of dreams has not long since been understood. If, in the evening, I eat anchovies, olives, or other strongly salted foods, I am thirsty at night, and therefore I wake. The waking, however, is preceded by a dream, which always has the same content, namely, that I am drinking. I am drinking long draughts of water; it tastes as delicious as only a cool drink can taste when one's throat is parched; and then I wake, and find that I have an actual desire to drink. The cause of this dream is thirst, which I perceive when I wake."

--Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams

Sometimes it isn't hard to imagine the business of foreign correspondents as a protracted exercise in wish-fulfillment. It doesn't take a huge leap of the imagination to visualize the entire press corps stretched out on cots at naptime in their offices on Kutuzovsky Prospekt, all happily asleep and dreaming, with cables affixed to their brains that run straight to their modems, so that their hack-dreams travel directly overseas and into print unedited. All they'd have to do is DREAM that they understood Russia, and their jobs would be done already... A system like that is almost certainly the next innovation in print journalism. It would eliminate the need for the pretense of research, put an end to those time-consuming appearances at press-conferences, and relieve the working press of the terrible burden of having to regularly extrapolate the political sentiment of an entire nation from the random mutterings of their taxi drivers. Work would be a simple and honest process; just put your head to a pillow and collect your salary. Nothing could be more straightforward than that.

Some reporters are clearly there already. Anna Blundy of the Times of London, brutalized in this column less than a month ago for what we at the eXile all thought was an isolated case of wish-fulfillment reporting, has apparently not yet awoken from a prolific slumber since that time and is still cranking out sleep-features, probably from somewhere deep in the bowels of the Radisson-Slavjanskaya... Her latest piece returns her to the scene of her last sleep-feature crime, the issue of sexuality in Russia. "The idea that Russians are more sexually easygoing that we are is misleading," reads the Times headline. "They may be, but they pretend not to be."

The root argument of Blundy's piece seems to be that, contrary to appearances, Russians are actually prudish and do not approve of open sexual licentiousness in either their leaders or their day-to-day lives. Her vehicle for introducing this idea is the Skuratov scandal, which she argues proved that "cavorting with prostitutes" is "no more acceptable [in Russia] than it is at home." How she arrives at this conclusion is one of those mysteries dream analysts have yet to solve--Freud himself once wondered openly why our subconscious attempts at wish-fulfillment often take such contradictory and senseless forms. After all, the chief lesson most rational people drew from the Skuratov story is that you can't discredit someone in today's Russia through a straight sex scandal. Doubters should ask Nikolai Bordyuzha--he was fired for trying, and failing. Blundy seems to know all this, but she so clearly WANTS to believe that Russian society frowns on Skuratovian behavior that she simply straps on her sleep-helmet and wills her wishes into being, i.e., into print. The result is a kind of waking article-fantasy that should send psychoanalysts (and grammar teachers, incidentally) all over England rushing to her aid.

Here's how the piece begins:

"It seems unfair on the unsuspecting Russian television viewer that he should be subjected to video footage such as that aired last week of the repulsively unattractive Prosecutor-General cavorting in his underpants with two prostitutes. It feels like only yesterday that we were forced to look at page after page of full-colour photographs of Vladimir Zhirinovsky, everybody's favourite ultra-nationalist, in his."

Somebody should remind reporters that words mean what they mean. No one "forced" anyone to look at Zhirinovsky in his jammies. You had to cough up $4.95 for a copy of Playboy to see them. I never saw them, and unless Blundy is a closet rugmuncher, I would think I'd be more likely to buy Playboy than she would. Also, what the hell does "unfair on" mean? Where do these people learn to write? Anyway, she goes on:

"The day after the not-so-surprising revelations about the Prosecutor, the Russian newspapers went out of their way to back the portly Yuri Skuratov, even taking it upon themselves to suggest that he should run for President. "Now that he had proved himself to be a real all-drinking all-fornicating married man of the type Russia so obviously needs, he might as well pitch in with the best of them, was the line they took."

Ugh..."Now that... was the line they took." Jesus, even Lennox Lewis speaks cleaner English than this, and he has been punched in the head 10,000 times at least. I understand that they can't afford Lewis for this job, but there have to be some other punch-drunk boxers out there the Times can get to audition for the spot. Maybe Oliver McCall, or Larry Holmes... someone with puffy eyes and Ray-Bans... Lennox Lewis, at least, wouldn't try to conclude that Russians disapproved of Yuri Skuratov by proving the opposite at the very outset of the piece. He knows how important it is to win the early rounds. Blundy doesn't seem to care; she's going for the big knockout at the end, and in print commentary, you don't need to work the body. She goes on:

"There was a kind of 'good on yer' attitude abounding in the press. The country's fat old men (and there are plenty of them) were assumed to be looking on enviously and wishing they had the power and the money to do the same, and Russia's women apparently smiled on indulgently as if to say 'boys will be boys'. It seemed that anyone who admitted to being shocked that the man in charge of law and order in Russia would behave in such an unseemly fashion was a prude and a bigot.

"English press reports set out to assure readers that Russians are not as censorious as the inhabitants of the foggy Albion and that any sex scandal here can only enhance a politician's reputation. Russians, it was suggested, approve of sex more than we do. Certainly most foreigners visiting Russia leave with an impression of sexual licentiousness, and wonder at the level of personal freedom in a country so long considered by the West to be officially averse to pleasure of all kinds. As a Russian friend once told me: 'That was all we ever did under communism. It was legal and free.'"

We're still waiting, at this juncture, for Blundy to start making her point. So far, I'm thoroughly convinced that Russians are basically indifferent to sex scandals. She finally gets underway arguing to the contrary in paragraph six:
"There was no contraception to speak of and Russian women subjected themselves to a ghastly average of three abortions each in a lifetime. But that is not to say that attitudes really were more liberal. Part of the reason that contraception was so scarce is that a pretense was always maintained that free sex was not going on. In Russia a certain degree of sexual liberalism goes hand in hand with tight-lipped prudery, and, contrary to Western belief, only the latter is usually allowed out in the open."

A month ago, in an indignant, half-coherent column about Russian prostitutes, Blandy was arguing that all Russian women dressed like whores, that there were prostitutes parked on every corner, and that all Russian men were grossly lecherous as a matter of routine. How we go from there to "only [tight-lipped prudery] is allowed out in the open" is a real mystery. I guess Blundy was having a different dream back then.

She goes on:

"This faintly hypocritical morality is a relic of the Soviet days, when the lie that everything was for the best in the best of all possible worlds was maintained on many levels. Under communism, teenage couples kept quiet about their sex lives and married early, often as a result of an unexpected pregnancy. Fidelity was (and is) considered a bizarre Western notion, like teetotalism or pacifism. But these couples retained their moral purity in society's eyes by getting married, and only then did they go on to have illicit affairs. The idea that Russians are more sexually easygoing than we are is misleading--they may be, but they pretend not to be. While Russian voters do seem to appreciate manliness that borders on machismo in a leader, and while they are always glad to know that the boss is, or was, a bit of a ladies' man, they do not want to be told how to live their lives by someone like the Prosecutor-General, who openly humiliates his wife and who uses the services of prostitutes."

That last sentence is the key to the entire article. Nothing could be clearer than the fact that Blundy herself is pissed at Skuratov for humiliating his wife and using the service of prostitutes--the sudden shift in tone from one of detached, academic exposition to one of peevish and outraged social criticism gives her away. She introduces no evidence that Russians have any reservations at all about men who humiliate their wives and use prostitutes--and conveniently overlooks other evidence, like the 98% approval rating Bill Clinton scored in a Komsomolskaya Pravda poll after the Lewinsky story broke, which would have proved her wrong. A prosecutor would be disbarred for concealing that kind of exculpatory evidence, but a hack can keep her job forever. She continues:

"Russians may despise Americans for their perceived prudery (there are hundreds of unprintable Russian jokes involving chilly American women and passionate Russian men to attest to this), but their most popular politicians are, as in America, happily married with children."

Two things. Number one, I doubt Blandy could, even after a lifelong lexicographical/linguistic survey, compile even fifty of those "unprintable Russian jokes," much less hundreds. There just aren't that many. Second, which "popular politicians" is she talking about? And regardless of who they are, how does she know that they're "happily married"? I'll tell you how she knows: she knows because, for whatever perverse reason, she wants it to be true. And in the sleep-journalism world, that's enough.

Here's the rest of the article:

"Boris Yeltsin himself was involved in a bizarre scandal in the late 1980s in which he is said to have fallen into the Moscow River. But it was the suggestion, and only the suggestion, that a jealous husband might have been involved that the Russian public appreciated. Had a jealous husband and an unfaithful wife actually emerged, it is likely that Mr Yeltsin's reputation would indeed have been damaged. (Valentin Kovalyov, the former Justice Minister, was sent packing in a sex scandal very similar to last week's sordid offering.)

"While Russians may have a reputation for a greater acceptance of sexual misdemeanors, they prefer, like the rest of us, that such indiscretions remain private. We can nod and wink about them, but to flaunt them is no more acceptable here than it is at home."

That's the whole article. See for yourself; there's no evidence whatsoever to support the conclusions of the last paragraph. On the contrary, the only evidence she introduces suggests just the opposite. But that's okay. In journalism, you don't have to be right. You just have to like what you've written.