Shame, promiscuity and social mobility

 in Russian autobiographies from working poor milieus

Outline:
1  Discussing the margins   Workers, lumpen and the rest
 1.  Post-war promiscuity   Ivanov, the taxi driver - Problems of reliability - Fallen women
      and social ascent - Sexual blat and prostitution - From muzhik to knight
 1. Suburban gang culture   In the cellar - Attempts of social ascent
        - Misogyny and male bonding
 1. Concluding comparisons   From culturation to blurred mobility
- Milieus and subcultures

Abstract
This paper will look at descriptions of poor and socially marginal milieus written by two men from different Soviet Russian generations. ‘Mikhail Ivanov' (born in 1935) tells about incest and promiscuous milieus of the 1950s and ‘Aleksei Lukashin' (born ca 1960) about Leningrad suburban gang and rock subcultures of the 1970s and 1980s. I am interested in the links between private and public selves and in the conflicting ideals of masculinity in these autobiographies. The first autobiography also created doubts about its authenticity. I conclude with a discussion of how to grasp the extension of a certain way of life on the basis of only a couple of autobiographies, and propose a conceptual distinction between ‘milieus' and ‘subcultures'.
The autobiographies belong to a corpus of 47 materials, collected in an autobiographical competition about love and sexuality organised in St Petersburg in 1996. They clearly differed from the rest of the material and were for me personally among the most unexpected and shocking to read. Ivanov's life draws a quite classical picture of the Soviet class journey from poor, marginalised worker to well-to-do upper working class. Just like in worker's autobiographies from one century earlier, male self control, including sexual self control, is seen as part of a rising social position (Maynes 1995, 135). Ivanov depicts an amoral world, much in order to eventually be able to distance himself from it. Parallels between middle class morality and social ascent are made by Ivanov himself throughout the text..
 Lukashin, by contrast, has had to let go of his initial (albeit diffuse) dreams of becoming a doctor. He has worked in show business and as a masseur. Like Ivanov, Lukashin describes sexual blat relations. In the beginning, such affairs added to his status in the working collective, but they were not integral to them. But in the late 1980s his sexual affairs moved to the centre of the picture and the promiscuity appeared as a central feature of his professional life.
 Ivanov's life story evolved away from an a-cultural setting to established Soviet middle class life, while Lukashin's social mobility is horizontal. The evolution from Ivanov's blat relations to Lukashin's semiopen prostitution are evidence of recent economic and structural dynamics in Russia. The Soviet way of social ascent through education has become blurred. Parallelly, behaviour that used to be underground or semi-official has entered public and professional life.  That these developments also affected men is not to say that they were gender symmetrical. On the contrary, Lukashin's deliberate misogyny is a good example of attitudes that have also entered the Russian public sphere together with the generation of the 1970s.

1. Discussing the margins
Workers, lumpen, and the rest
Poverty and social marginality have received little attention in Soviet studies. A silenced phenomenon in official Soviet discourse, the illegal migrants, beggars, working poor and their culture became one primary "other" for urban educated Soviet citizens. In the rhetoric of perestroika, they were often disdainfully referred to as the lyumpeny or the lumpenproletariat, and the supposedly lacking, or at least vanishing, civilisation and education in Russia was referred to as lyumpenizatsiia of the country.
 As in many other cases, the "otherness" of little qualified workers is here characterised by two traits - demonization and trivialization. On the one hand, they are called nekulturnye lyudi, or children from "families with many children" (mnogodetnye sem'i): the uncivilised, drinking, violent, animal-like, amoral and sexually promiscuous. Many autobiographies of children from educated families are "implicitly contrasting their own behaviour with that which they believed to be characteristic of the popular milieus surrounding them" (Maynes 1996, 148) For instance, one woman describes learning early about sexual things from other kids on he street, and playing advanced and consciously daring doctor games. She stopped when a girl from a cultural family disapproved of her behaviour.  (Woman, professional education, born in 1946, No 11)
 On the other hand, the way of life of these popular milieus is seen as so embarrassingly simple as to be uninteresting. For instance, when a Alexandra Chistyakova's life story was published and then nominated for the Russian Booker prize in 1998, the major part of the Russian mass media questioned the relevance of her testimony. Although comprehensive life stories about Russian peasant- and working women  have scarcely been published in Russia before, Chistyakova's testimony of famine, social struggle, illegal abortions, alcoholism, and family violence was discarded as something that ‘everybody knows' and that would ‘interest only Western feminists'.
 Neither have Russian or Western scholars had much interest, or adequate access, to the poor and marginal groups of the population. It is still utterly unclear who belonged to such "groups" and how extensive they were.
 The difficulty of any discussion of social margins and lower social groups is connected to the class problem of Soviet society. The Stalinist "2 and 1/2" formula, which divided the socialist society into workers, peasants and the intelligentsia, remains the dominating one in both vernacular and academic thinking about Soviet Russia, with the addition of the Soviet elite classes or "nomenclature" as a fourth stratum. These categories are not so much classes in a socio-economic sense as peculiar forms of quasi- or proto-estates, the adherence to which was decided by the Soviet state (Fitzpatrick 1993). Furthermore, they superficially united professionally, politically and economically distinct and in some cases even potentially antagonistic social groups. Thus Fitzpatrick (ibid., 766) underlines how the category of the Soviet ‘intelligentsia' merged "the old ‘employees' category with both the /pre-Revolutionary/ intelligentsia and the Communist administrative elite to form a single white-collar conglomerate".
 The same problem overshadows any discussion of Soviet "workers", and especially the working poor. Soviet categorisations made additional distinctions into high, semi- and low skilled workers. But especially the two lower groups were actually supposed to cover culturally very different groups: from semi-agrarian communities, migrant limichiki workers and ex-convicts to factory workers of the second or third generation with a basically middle class life style. Detailed research has been made to classify the working classes through their power and status at the Soviet work place (Wright 1997, Kivinen 1998). Neither of these work-place-related classifications provide direct transitions to the question that interests me here, namely, the ways of life and self perceptions of the economically and culturally poor.
 The conceptual vagueness of "the masses" persists in today's Russia. While sociologists of the 1990s struggled to determine the extensions and criteria of the new middle class, the categorisation of the "rest" - the classes under them - was at least just as problematic. In the model of Russian society by Tatyana Zaslavskaya (1998, 12), one of Russia's leading sociologists, over half of the population belong to the "basic stratum", with one tenth as the bottom (the "underclass" and the "social bottom" - presumably the homeless, the criminals, and so on. In Timo Piirainen's (1997) classification, the lower rest is called the "proletariat" and amounts to forty per cent.
  For lack of better concepts, then, I will here refer to the working poor or the lower social classes. In the two cases below, much needed information, e.g. about the education and occupation of parents or partners, is absent. As I have myself no direct experience of similar milieus and as these life stories have little support in other autobiographies of my material, I am relying more on the single texts themselves than what is the case in the other chapters. These testimonies belong to what Mary Jo Maynes has described as the seemingly patternless stories that defy and question categorisation. She stresses the importance of including such texts, as they "hint at the many lives that never culminated in autobiography" (Maynes 1996, 150). In the case of Soviet Russia, we may still add a "yet".

7.2. Post-war promiscuity
Ivanov the taxi driver, born 1935
‘Mikhail Ivanov's' autobiography is lengthy - almost 80 double-spaced pages - and covers his whole life course. Born in 1935, he lost his father in the war in 1942 and grew up with his widowed mother and elder sister. After the seventh grade he started studying at the age of 16 at a vocational training school. His sister finished ten grades and then studied at an agricultural institute. Their mother advised her daughter to contend herself with a lower education at a technikum level, but Mikhail's sister refused to even consider that option, showing clear signs of social ambition. The sister left the family and later moved, together with her husband, away from Leningrad. Mikhail served in the army in 1954-1957, after which he started working as a chauffeur for a larger enterprise. In 1959, he married Raia, his first wife, with whom he had two children in the early 1960s. His mother died of cancer in the uterus in 1961.
 In the second half of the 1960s, Mikhail divorced Raia and married Ksenya, with whom he was still living at the writing moment in 1996. He also adopted Ksenya's daughter from a previous marriage. Towards the end of his first marriage he changed work place and became a taxi driver. Although he probably still continues with this in both Soviet and post-Soviet conditions quite lucrative work, he complains of scare financial resources.
 Ivanov's two first homes - that of his childhood and of his first marriage - constitute the main bulk of his autobiography. Both families were milieu of material and cultural poverty, which the young Mikhail repeatedly tried to escape from. His relatives and friends worked as doormen, factory workers, saleswomen and porters. In one family which is enviously described, the wife works as a caretaker (dvornik) "because of the apartment space" while her husband was a doorman in the famous restaurant Metropol. They lived well as they could by "bought crystal, gold, silver, everything from drunkards". These are lower working class people, often migrants and the first generation of leningraders. They were culturally marginalized, albeit not necessarily any longer materially poor during the last decades of the Soviet regime.
 Ivanov gives "thick" descriptions of various everyday situations, for instance the customary heavy drinking (although he proudly notes denying alcohol if he had to drive afterwards, "if I had to work the next day, I was always in form, and almost always sober"). He also describes his working career, but mostly through his sexual relationships at work. They are, in turn, merely a subtheme of the main, overshadowing subject of this autobiography: the lack of  life control - which is equated with lack of sexual life control - and the opposite aspirations for better living conditions and a "normal" family life.

Problems of reliability
Throughout his life, Ivanov tells about having been seduced, exploited or practically raped by family members, women neighbours, his wife's girlfriends, and female colleagues. From the age of seventeen, Mikhail had various sexual experiences with girls, but his first fulfilled sexual intercourse was with his mother. Their incestuous relationship continued until after he finished his army service and moved away from home. When he married his first wife, it was much due to the activities of his mother-in-law, who is said repeatedly having tried to seduce him, and with whom he eventually had a sexual relationship towards the end of his first marriage.
 This autobiography caused the only greater disagreement between me and the Russian scholars involved in the research project. The three Russians who originally read the text found it an exceptionally rich, interesting and totally believable story. I was, on the contrary, for the first time inclined to suspect the authenticity of the related events. But the Russian readers pointed out that the living milieus, described characters, street addresses, and work relations were most convincingly described. We agreed to award this autobiograhy one of the jury's special prizes. After our discussions and after having repeatedly read the text, I have come to specify and limit my objections into three points, all of them related specifically to the depiction of female sexuality.
 First, this autobiography has unusually much dialogue in the form of direct quotations. This is not a common nor advisable device for autobiographical writing, as one seldom remembers the exact wordings of sentences uttered twenty or thirty years ago (Roos 1999). But it is especially problematic as many of the quotes in Ivanov's autobiography are put in the mouths of women, all of whom are sexually uninhibited and actively desiring personalities (only the second wife, Ksenya, modifies the overall picture by being attributed with an indifferent attitude to sex later in their marriage). The dialogue is also written in the vocabulary of pornographic stories, like in this excerpt of the mother talking to teenager Mikhail: "You, my son, have really got a big one, not all men have such a big one, you'll reach the girls even in the womb, and well, I wouldn't say no to that myself..."
 Second, some sexual events repeat themselves suspiciously often. One is the theme of mother-son (or mother-daughter) incest. Mikhail's best boyfriend during his teenage years is said to have told him how he "fucked his mother as well, and she is very content with that, and I don't forget my sister either"; later one woman friend at work told him how she had "made a man" out of her son. Another key scene is Mikhail seeing a woman he loves and desires making love to another man. Such voyeuristic scenes take place with his mother, his school teacher, his first girlfriend Galya, and with his first wife Raia. The repetitions are, while psychologically understandable, difficult to relate to as sociological evidence.
 Third, women's sexuality is depicted according to physiological stereotypes common in pornographic literature. In addition to explicitly explaining what they want and how, and commenting aloud on intercourse while it's taking place, practically all Mikhail's partners regularly have multiple orgasms during which they "let out juices". These formulations can be interpreted as pure exaggeration or, more diplomatically, as merely an attachment to a certain sexual vocabulary. But similar behaviour has not been confirmed in empirical research on women's sexuality (e.g. Hite 1978). I have not included or discussed the sexual techniques or orgasmic sensations depicted in the other autobiographies. Therefore this objection mostly served to strengthen my suspicions in the first two instances.
 On each of these three points, the author's way of describing events can be interpreted as more or less phantasmagoric. Even if the events actually took place, which is not impossible, they have been retold according to a (subconscious?) pattern of repetition and in a specific pornographic vocabulary, which make any generalisations about Soviet social sexual practices problematic.
 My solution has been to relate the social interactions and their environments - the realm of the habitual - depicted by the narrator, assuming they are basically adequately rendered. For example, I render the descriptions of contraceptive devices and domestic abortions described in the autobiography. They do not follow a usual pornographic rhetoric and sound believable. But I have avoided quoting and relating to the dialogic "excerpts" of what the women surrounding Ivanov supposedly said about sex and desire. I do not want to exclude the possibility that Soviet women in some milieus may have expressed themselves and behaved like that, but I think it highly improbable. In any case, I would wait until we have at least some kind of similar evidence from women themselves. Only one recurrent theme in Mikhail's sex talk with women, that of breast milk, will be discussed in connection with his views on masculinity - that is, inside the realm of interpretations to which they undeniably do belong.

Fallen women and social ascent
Ivanov's social mobility follows a path from the suburb of Pargolovo to the centre of Leningrad, through successive apartment changes and gradually improving housing conditions. The autobiography opens with a description of the family's deplorable material situation during the war years.
  /I/t is better not to think about how we managed - like everybody else. ... ...we were moved to a small one-store house, after they had moved the Finns out… The little house was divided into two parts, and we got one room as earlier, although this one was smaller, and a kitchen, and two storage rooms, we did not have much furniture - a table, some chairs, two stools, and two single beds which we seldom used. A couple of big and wide barrack-beds were patched together in the room, and we slept on them all the three of us under one big blanket, it was warmer that way. We did not have enough firewood for the winter, somehow we managed to heat, we probably burnt everything that could be burnt.Mikhail married inside this poor milieu. With his first wife, they shared a wooden house without any facilities with her sister, brother and mother. Raia and her mother work at the Metalloprodukt factory, making agricultural machinery. In 1960, a commission checked their living conditions and the family received a room of ten square meters from the new dwelling houses of the factory in which the women were working. "This was a real blessing", he notes: now they had an in-door toilet, although the heating was still made with wood. Mikhail, Raia and their children moved to this apartment, but they continued to be in geographical and social proximity to Raia's mother. Ivanov describes the mother-in-law as the central and supporting force, especially in the beginning of his marriage. All family members gave her their salary. When a new wood shed proved too small, it was she who arranged a tractor-load with old boards, out of which they built a new shed. She was the one who provided the household with fire wood, or the young couple with condoms; and when her daughter soon after the wedding became pregnant for the first time, she told her how to provoke a miscarriage.
 After the second move, the family's material situation was already somehow satisfying. For instance, Mikhail was not pressuring his (in his view, lazy) wife to return to her wage work, as "we still had enough money". A few years later, the family received an apartment in the centre of Leningrad, at Grazhdanskii prospekt. They got two rooms and kitchen, central heating, hot water, a bathroom and a separate WC. "My god, what a miracle - you don't need to prepare wood, carry water and carry the waste water out." Mikhail's mother-in-law and her other two children also received a two-bedroom-apartment.
 After divorcing his first wife, Mikhail left their apartment to her and their children and moved in with his second wife, her daughter and mother in a three-room apartment, also situated in the city centre. We are not told the occupation of his second wife, but it is clear the second marriage continued and stabilised his improving social status. It is through Ksenya that Mikhail finally escaped both the material and moral stigma of his first two families, although the past returned as a dividing issue between the spouses later in their marriage.
 Parallelly with the story of escaping material poverty runs the description of escaping moral stigma and sexual promiscuity, condensed in the figures of Mikhai'ls mother and his first wife.
 In the late 1940s, Mikhail's mother started to work in a military unit that occupied his family's previous house. The neighbour woman they shared their new dwelling with also worked there, and both women received soldiers who "gave them food products" and were their lovers.
 At the age of fourteen, after Mikhail got drunk for the first time, the son's relationship with his mother became explicitly sexual, involving kisses, petting and her giving abundant advice about how to do things with girls in the right way. The boy was highly ambivalent about his whole life situation. On the one hand, he tells us he trusted and admired his mother. This is, for instance, how he describes his feelings after one of their first sexual encounters: "In the morning everything was fine. After that I did not taste wine for a long time and started to relate tenderly to my mother - how wise and good wasn't she, after all." Also their first intercourse, when Mikhail is about seventeen years old, is described as a happy event.
  So my mother got up, took off her night gown, put in a /contraceptive/ pill and lied naked in the bed. I pressed myself against her breasts and started to suck the nipples, squeezing the tits, my mother was swooning. ... She was content with me, and I was in high spirits. That is how I was my mother's man for the first time, and neither was it the last. ... In the morning I woke up in a good mood. After breakfast both of us went to do our own business. I did not tell anybody about this event, not even Oleg, and now I am for the first time in many years depicting this story.
But both before and after the first seduction Mikhail describes how he was "unwilling" and "disgusted" to go to sleep in the same bed with his mother, or even to go near her. He was often depressed and desperate, "it was all so difficult and disgusting, I became angry with everybody. It is hard for me to describe all my worries." From the age of seventeen, Mikhail started to detach himself from his mother. He notes that he had then become older and "perhaps got more sense in the head". His studies provided a way out of the intimacy and the drinking his mother enticed him into:
  I started to develop a different attitude towards sexual life, and to life in general, I started to get irritated by the persistent girls and the men that came to our house. As a rule, they all brought vodka with them. My mother was drinking with them, and they offered me to drink. I got drunk a few times. But when I woke up a saw the house was a mess (bardak). My mother sank morally, and I did not even want to talk with her anymore, not only not to go to sleep in her bed. But when there were no men next to her she asked me to lie with her again, she said that she cannot do without men, that she wants all the time, and she was crying. I felt sorry for her, and the drinking made me feel sick, especially the next morning. I was afraid of the hang-overs because I had to study, to work, and I started to run away in order not to take part in the drinking. I dived head first into my studies.
Mikhail graduated from his vocational school and started to work in a factory. Through his new acquaintances, he further re-evaluated (pereosoznat') many things related to families and morality. The connection between material and moral standards is almost seamless in the following reflection:
  After having visited my friends, who lived in the city even if in communal apartments (and some - in separate apartments), I understood what kind of (khalupa) I was living. My friends did not have to think about getting wood, fetching water and emptying buckets with waste water, or running out on the street to the outhouse. And I also saw other kinds of family relations, I learned to know many good girls, who were shy to change clothes in front of me, where shy to show their precious parts, and who blushed if something awkward happened. Those girls did not offer their kisses and did not let themselves be kissed TOO daringly - they either pushed you away, or ran away, and avoided being alone with you after that. This made me feel both more light-hearted, and more gloomy. I did not want to go home at all, and I tried to stay overnight at my friends' place.
The army service was welcomed as a way of escape.
  On the factory we had a wonderful sport collective/group with our own sport centre, where you could do sports in winter and in summer and occasionally stay overnight. Looking at such families I understood that we had completely abnormal relations with my mother, she was both a mother to me and not a mother, but a mere woman, female and drunkard, and that started to torment me. Now I only waited for the day when I would go to the army, everything else went to a secondary plan.
Mikhail obtained a chauffeur's license while preparing for his army service, which he started in 1953. He was satisfied with his experiences and says the army occupied him totally: "The most important thing was that there were no women." Also his social ambitions were supported. He entered the sergeant school, and was looked up to: "I was the only one with a seven year education and I counted as being from Leningrad".
 But on the second year in the army his mother came to visit him. "So mother came, like snow on the head in the middle of summer". With her, "women" and sexuality entered his army life, literally ending it. Ivanov describes his mother having intercourse with two of his superiors on the way to the hotel were mother and son were going to spend his leave together. When he reproached her, she explained that she did it only because it was in his interests. Indeed, only two months after her visit he was prematurely demobilised in 1956, which he thinks was due to his mothers contacts. After that, however, he ended the sexual relationship with his mother.
  I was appalled to look at my mother, my own mother. She started to drink, smoke and lead a whore's life. Soon after my demobilisation /from the army -AR/ she gave birth, but the child died in the hospital. I do not know why, and neither was I interested, I had my life and she had hers.
Towards the end of the 1950s Ivanov's mother became increasingly alcoholized. "...she had stopped hiding that different men came to her, brought something to drink, and she paid them with her body". Mikhail knew he had to arrange his life. First he started working, and then he soon met his future wife, Raia, on a dancing place in the suburb where he lived. He became infatuated with her and first perceived of her as a suitably nice and decent woman. Raia had an older brother and younger sister who, "...characteristically, were all born from different fathers. I learned that a little later, but at the moment I was not thinking about that, and I did not know." Raia was not drinking vodka at that time, but her mother liked drinking. She got cross when Raia refused alcohol and objected that is was always all right to take a little at dinner - "This also made me unhappy, but it became clear only after quite a while."
 The couple dated following the norms of Soviet romantic courtship. For a long time Mikhail was not allowed to kiss Raia. "I was not insisting. but in the end she kissed me herself, I had brought her flowers, and then we started kissing all the time, but things did not go further than that." The couple started disagreeing, but Mikhail remained infatuated: "We started to quarrel about anything and nothing, but I was still drawn to her like a magnet."
  During this period of ‘pure' dating, Mikhail had sex with Raia's friend. While later moralising over his mothers and his wife's behaviour, he is here describing his own premarital sexual relations in a neutral and non-judging way. Raia's friend told him Raia was more experienced than she had let him understand, but he refused to believe such rumours. Mikhail also visited his mother's acquaintance, who worked as a porter in a obshchezhitie and could arrange for some girl to come and spend time with him. "The girl knew why she was brought there, and without words or preludes she either undressed or merely took her trousers off". We are not told whether Mikhail paid these girls, and the woman arranging the meetings is said to have asked him only for sexual favours "in exchange", which he refused. Probably, the woman got some kind of material rewards for her services.
 If Mikhail first thought well of Raia, Raia's mother is from the start described as the intriguing and driving force. Ivanov admires her ability to arrange things, but was also repelled by her sexual advances and her determination to get him as an in-law; he would later accuse her of literally using spells in order to bewitch him. One evening during their dating period, she is told to have made Mikhail and Raia drink and put them to sleep together in the woodshed. Ivanov says that the mother thus directly encouraged him to take her daughter's virginity, after which he would be obliged to marry her. Another time, he noticed that the cellar was full of wine, vodka and moonshine. Raia's mother explained that it was for the wedding. "I had not even started to think about marriage, but I was already being married."
 Mikhail eventually married Raia in 1959 and moved in with his wife's family. After the birth of their second child the marriage started falling apart. Like his mother, Raia started smoking, drinking, and talking openly about her affairs on the side. "She knew I did not like that women smoked or drank wine, but later /her friend/ Valya taught Raia to smoke too, and they started to smoke and drink the two of them, and that was the beginning of the end of our family life (I talk and write ahead now)." Mikhail felt trapped:
  I openly blamed my mother-in-law. There was nothing I could do. I could not leave the children and break up the family, so I had patience for the time being, I said, "it was you who married me to your daughter, why did you bewitch me, why?" And there was nothing she could say in reply. ... I was fed up with everything: my work, my family, but you have to preserve the family because of the children (no semju nado hranit radi detej). But you can change your work place. So, weighed down by my work ... I quit and started working as a taxi driver.
Once again, a change in Mikhail's public life gave him some sense of life control. Earlier this sense came through his studies and army service, now it was through a new job. But in the private sphere, his helplessness grew. It culminated when Raia started expecting a third child, the paternity of which he was uncertain about.
  I did not know anything about this pregnancy, neither did my mother-in-law. We learnt about it when her stomach was visibly big. Everything happened in silence, once again nobody knew what to do. We started to wait for the third child, and I did not know whose it was.
It was too late for an official abortion and this time Raia failed in her usual attempts to "get rid of it herself". But the child was still-born and evidently had malformations - Mikhail never learned the details. He was interrogated by the doctor, who eventually refrained from raising charges, "although it was obviously a crime. It seems Raia had also confessed to that." While Raia was still in the hospital after the tragic birth, Mikhail was seduced by her mother, and then he engaged in other sexual relationships.
 Soon afterwards, Mikhail fell in love with his future second wife (a friend of Raia's sister), moved in with her and eventually applied for divorce. In this third family setting he finally managed to escape from "loose living" (besputnaia zhizn') - the expression he uses e.g. when seeking reasons for his mother's premature death of cancer in the uterus. In his thirties, living in the centre of Petersburg in a family with "normal" relations and taking pride in handling his work tasks well, Ivanov had established himself as proper Soviet middle class.

Sexual ‘blat' and prostitution
Ivanov's autobiography is full of descriptions or mentions about sexuality as a means of exchange. It appears in two forms: prostitution and sexual blat. A specific Soviet phenomena, "blat" relations were a middle form between gift and exchange, corruption and friendship (Ledeneva 1998). Thus prostitution here denotes an exchange of sexual favours for money in a somehow organised setting, including pimps, certain places, contact persons, etc. (Of course, in many cases the line between sexual blat and prostitution is blurred.) ‘Blat' existed as horizontal ties within circles of friends, and vertical ties between different social classes or hierarchical positions in, notably, the workplace. For instance, Ivanov describes these relations among taxi drivers: "I never suspected that money decides everything in the taxi, you have to pay to everybody and for everything with money. The result is that you become dependent of everybody." In this quote, "money" does not mean overt bribes. This is clear from the ensuing example, where Mikhail after the work day went to the central in order thank one of the telefonistka women, who had provided him with many advantageous orders during the day. "I had bought a cake (tort) and a box of chocolate and (...) was almost knocked over by laughter. Later I understood that I should have brought something to drink and cigarettes, at least Bulgarian ones /if not Western -AR/."
 Ivanov has not been involved in outright prostitution and describes it only as indirect knowledge. For instance, he tells about an elderly woman who was his neighbour when they first moved to the factory dwelling house in 1960. She was somehow involved in court proceedings against an underground brothel. "Then it became clear to me that there were many brothels in town. I heard especially much about them while working as a taxi driver. But that happened after a long time, ten years later."
 Working as a taxi driver, Mikhail met women passengers offering themselves as payment (which he declined), or men asking him to provide them with alcohol and women.
  When I told them I did not know where to get that, they would not believe I did not have any vodka nor wine and do not frequent prostitutes. But that's how it was. It took me a long time before I learned to know (pronikat') in the work of a taxi driver.
An outsider to prostitution in the Soviet times, Mikhail was often part of or direct witness to sexual blat relations. The visiting soldiers of his childhood and his mother's way of getting him prematurely released from the army are the first examples in the text. Later, after returning from the army and shortly before meeting his first wife, he worked as a chauffeur in a research institute. Once he drove food to one stolovaia or work place restaurant and met the director of the place. They agreed to meet after work and eventually spent the night together. After this, Mikhail was soon called to her office:
  There I was unequivocally told /by the director -AR/ that if I will at least sometimes pay Nina V. attention in a sexual way, I will get a good position in society and at my work place. Instead of answering her I embraced her shoulders, pressing her against my chest, and our mouths were united in a single passionate kiss.
While Ivanov is not prone to moralising over his own pre- or extramarital affairs, the blat relations are condemned and described in negative ways. This is not related to the relations per se - he openly acknowledges the benefits he got from them and did not seem to mind them in the beginning. Rather, he judges the psychological discomfort and social stigma eventually created by such affairs, "it turned out I was a prostitute":
  She was content, and I was also, to a certain extent - I always had enough to eat and did not have to think about my daily bread, and I got a new car, and a  better wage, and the director even appointed me as a stand-in in the buffet. So sex had such a good influence on my career and my life. But of course, that could not continue for a long time: I had to arrange my private life
... I was content with my work, I had to give attention to the director, but that was without any future prospects - I will not marry her, she is much older than I am, her daughter is already grown-up. Well, so far she is keeping herself in shape, but for how long can it continue later on, it is not such a pleasure with an old lady, but sexually I continued to satisfy her, and she did not stay indebted to me, so it turns out that I was a prostitute.
The relationship ended when the director got caught for dubious financial transactions and lost her position ("lucky me, and unlucky her"). Mikhail lost his opportunities for extra work and additional income in the work place restaurant, but he got to do more financially rewarding long distance driving*. Later a female colleague proposed an affair, to which he first objected on the grounds that "there was no love between us". She let him know that "if I want good trips and good moonlighting, I have to show her attention once in a while" and they eventually had a two-year long relationship.
 Ivanov also describes a failed blat arrangement. His sister-in-law was supposed to marry a close friend of her boyfriend, a released convict, in order to help him get a propiska in Leningrad. After they had made an application for a registration of marriage, the boyfriend demanded that she should have sex with his friend. Thus the two men deliberately confounded gender blat (marrying the friend of a friend in order to help him) with sexual blat (having intercourse with him). She refused, but her boyfriend left the apartment and let her be raped by her ‘fiancé'. In revenge, Dasha "of course did not go anywhere" - i.e., did not report to the police - but withdraw her application for marriage. This was something the two men had evidently not expected and to manage with this, she needed the support of her brother, who warned the two men from attempting any kind of repercussions from their part.
 As I have previously stressed, we have no way of knowing whether the women involved in these cases of blat did really express themselves as explicitly in reality as in the autobiography. But the relations themselves were not improbable. Neither is it surprising that, although some autobiographies written by women in my material tell about sexual blat relations with men (cf Rotkirch (forthcoming)), there are no other mentions of blat where women occupy the higher position and demand sex in exchange for material favours. Ivanov's affair with the director is a clear example of vertical blat relations, close to (but not identical with) prostitution. This gender constellation was certainly much more rare than the opposite one, if only for the reason that there were more men in middle and upper managerial positions in the Soviet Union. The secrecy and stigma attached to blat relations in general, and to sexual blat in particular, would also be highest in the case of a harassing woman. As a man, Ivanov justifies his relations by appealing to valued masculine features such as his great capacities as a lover and the attractiveness of the women who desire him. For a Soviet woman, it would be harder to present (ab)use of power and sexual initiative as part of accepted femininity. At the same time, Ivanov also conveys his moral ambivalence and feeling of a lack of life control as the blat relationships continued.
 The other work place affair, and the related story about his sister-in-law's failed fictive marriage, are examples of horizontal blat relations between work colleagues or friends. In Ivanov's two experiences of sexual blat on the workplace, the biggest problem is not the rewards themselves, but the absence of feelings between the partners. Belonging to the silenced generation born in the immediate pre- and post-war years, Ivanov is typical for his emphasis that sex without love is condemnable.(cf courtship) After meeting his second wife, he refused all relationships on the side, emphasising love and fidelity. And when yet one work colleague tried to seduce him, he notes how "I could no longer trade my consciousness, I had fallen in love with K. and could not be unfaithful to her, even with those whom I depended upon, I could no longer have sex without love. It was prostitutes who had sex and got money and presents instead of love." At the writing moment, he similarly notes that his occasional passionate meetings with younger women are so rewarding, because they give him "the feeling that you are still needed, which provided an indescribably satisfaction and pride".
 Ivanov's need of moral self presentation is also felt in the stories of refusing prostitution or other types of casual sex on the road. On long-distance drives, he earned an additional and informal income from taking people along with him (hitch-hikers). He notes that many women offered themselves to him, but he mostly refused as he was afraid of venereal diseases and as "sex on the road did not tempt me very much".
 The experiential triad emerging from Ivanov's autobiography can be drawn as follows:
Figure 1.  Interpretation
  ‘muzhik' vs. love
  abnormal family life
 
 
 

Feeling     Practices
loneliness     incest, sexual blat
ambivalence     escaping poverty
lack of control

 
In Ivanov's class journey, social mobility was connected with rejecting loose livings and developing "normal" family relations. The cultural clashes between poor worker's and middle class milieus, public Soviet institutions and private complicated chaos, resulted in feelings of loneliness, ambivalence and lack of life control.
 Maynes' (1996) study of 19th century workers' found a pattern of men's self presentation, where sexual restraint was equated with self control and social mobility. Ivanov's life story follows the same logic. It also features more detailed evidence of the tension between two conceptions of  masculinity, the crude ‘muzhik' and the courteous man, or ‘knight'.

From muzhik to knight
Two almost exclusive notions of masculinity are present in this story - the local brute, or muzhik, and the courteous man, or knight.
 The muzhik is from the local milieu Mikhail was brought up within. It is symbolised by his best childhood friend, Oleg. Ivanov was a lonely child who was tormented by jealousy and several times remarks that "nobody loved me when I was a boy." During the difficult times of his youth, Oleg became the one who "helped me with everything". Clearly idealised by Mikhail, Oleg first taught Mikhail how to handle girls and the main sexual vocabulary. Oleg has also had the same incestuous experience with his mother (and even his sister) as Mikhail, but talks about it without any shame. He is made to represent the harsh, commanding and highly sexual male, the muzhik who says "I never let anybody pass whom I could fuck". This type of man also appears in the already mentioned story of how Mikhail's sister-in-law was raped. "She was against it, but as he was a man (on vse-taki muzhik), he added: ‘If you won't undress, I'll fuck you nevertheless and that'd just be worse for you.' (...) he tormented /zamuchil/ her, and only when V.  returned to the apartment did he let her go."
 The second, contrasting masculine ideal of the responsible man belongs to Soviet notions of proper courtship and family life. These ideals were elaborated in the 1930s and 1940s and represented the life style of the emerging Soviet bourgeoisie (Dunham 1976). They are condensed in a statement put forward towards the end of Ivanov's autobiography: "The preservation of the family is one the big problems of our days". Quite unexpected and unintentionally comical in this context, the declaration sounds like a direct quotation of a psychological or pedagogical ‘expert' or headline of the 1970s or 1980s. Earlier, when Mikhail's first marriage was falling apart, he provided similarly sounding arguments for not taking a divorce ("you have to preserve the family because of the children", "no semju nado khranit' radi detej").
 Interestingly, Ivanov does not at any point openly condemn the muzhik ideal taught to him by Oleg. At one point, Oleg destroyed Mikhail's relations to his first girlfriend by forcing her to perform oral sex with him, an event which Ivanov witnessed and made him want to hang himself. Already in those years, Mikhail longed to distance himself from such crude manners and the text stresses the importance of love and reciprocity in sexual relations. This contradiction jumps into the eye of the reader, but is not at all commented on or elaborated by Ivanov. Although Mikhail actually behaves like a muzhik only on rare occasions. Mostly, as we have seen, he perceives of himself as the passive, insecure man being seduced. Once towards the end of his first marriage, he saw a naked young woman at a party, and "one thought overwhelmed me: how to fuck her". But even here his behaviour is justified by a quote from the same girl, who commented on the infidelity with the words "they don't have a normal family anyway now, everybody is on his own". And at a similar wild party, he remarks "..I did not fall in love with anybody and just like that, without love, I did not want to get closer to anybody, I did not even feel aroused by /the naked girls/ without their trousers on them."
 A similar contradiction appears in Ivanov's relationship to pornographic journals. First, he disapproved of his first wife's, Raia's, loose morals. When she took import condoms and Western pornographic journals home, Mikhail said supposedly "take away them, I don't want to look at naked women, and even if I want to look, I don't want pictures". But later in life, he tells about hiding pornographic journals from their daughter as an example of his efforts to provide a strict moral upbringing.
 The ‘knight'-ideal of the responsible man seems closer to Mikhail's self understanding than the muzhik. Such Soviet middle class culture is in the beginning represented by his student milieu and later by his second, lasting marriage. In this family, his wife was quite embarrassed of any discussions about sex, and Mikhail was the one who has to explain and teach the curious daughter. The parents watched out while making love and avoided showing themselves naked in front of the child, they carefully hid their erotic literature and journals, and Mikhail explained to her that only husband and wife may wash each other naked in the bathroom. Nowadays, they have found erotic books, "some kind of boulevard sex" and condoms in their student daughter's bag. The parents asked her about this but did not reproach her. At 18 she started bringing boyfriends home, "we decided it was her fiancée, but we were deeply wrong, because she had quite a number of such fiancées" - in sum, a for many Western readers fully recognisable, tolerant approach to teenager sexuality, with minimal control if quite a bit of worries from the side of the parents.
 The muzhik and the knight are exclusive of each other to the point of resembling the classical female dichotomy between whore and madonna. Nevertheless, the contrasting ideals have one thing in common: they control the situation. In this particular life story, the ideals provide different reactions to the perceived threat of feminine immorality/material poverty. The knight ideal is the culturally approved of, proper way out, much like the self restraint advocated by Maynes' working class autobiographers. The muzhik is the immediate, brutal response: it is the man who does not rise socially, but who does control. The big difference between the young Mikhail and his friend Oleg is that the latter is not ashamed of his incestuous relationship and even brags about it.
 Ivanov's self understanding remains divided. As young, he used to suck his mother's breasts both with tenderness and passion. Later, his wife suggested he should drink of her breast milk (she was breast-feeding their second child for almost two years) since it was healthy and would strengthen his potency. Mikhail retorted: "I am not such an idiot as to drink women's milk, that's the last thing I need". Once again, these kind of contradictions do not seem to be perceived by Ivanov. Still, he does articulate and reflect on his experiences. Towards the end of the text he describes a quarrel with his wife. She complained about his looking at young girls on the beach, he complained about her refusing to have sex and pointed out that (again with clear allusions to pedagogical popular literature) "sexual relations are formed in the family, they depend on how you are growing up, and being brought up, what and how you are seeing in your milieu (sreda)." She retorted that one could, indeed, see from his behaviour where he had been growing up and told him that his former sister-in-law had told about all his relationships, including those with his mother and step-mother.
After this revelation follows the credo of Ivanov's autobiography, summarising his pain and powerlessness:
  Saying that, she did not understand that I grew up in a milieu among women and girls who were unashamed of me, were naked, and washed themselves with me, or rather I with them, in the sauna, and that I was sleeping with my mother who was young and did not shun men. It was not my fault that she made me lie on her and made me a man, and later, my mother could not and would not refuse herself sexual pleasure, and she did not pay attention to who was beside her at that moment, so I said to her: ‘Be content that you had your mother, a grandmother for your daughter, and that she got used to sleeping in her own bed since childhood. It is not certain what would have happened if Olya would have slept with you, what she would have been drawn to, perhaps she would also have become a lesbian, and would have been drawn to others like her. And about that mother-in-law ... you know how she got me married, and you know the rest. So you should not blame me now. And later, in what followed, all my life went in some kind of sexual dependency and notwithstanding everything I have seldom chased women, the women have chased me, and so what, if they succeeded?'.
Here, finally, the contrasting male ideals merge in order to support Mikhail's explanation. Sexuality is, like in the muzhik's behaviour, a wild, raw, and potentially destructive and immoral force. Then the cultured knight appears: with proper education and upbringing it can be civilised and the development of perverse habits (incest, lesbianism) can be reversed. Nothing was Mikhail's own fault, because what happened is how things inevitably evolve in that situation. In his view, the naturalisation of sex moves on two levels: it first excuses male muzhik behaviour and then blames education for failing to regulate it. Women are only partly embraced by these justifications. Loose women are morally condemned of, unlike the muzhik, and women are additionally blamed for not providing the social regulation (here symbolised by a separate bed for the children), by which both sexes become civilised.
 

3. Suburban gang culture of the 1970s

In the cellar
Aleksei Lukashin, a medical student who has worked as a sound operator in a rock band, a doctor, a masseur and nowadays in show business, was born in 1960. Like Ivanov, he was raised by a single mother in a clearly poor district of the city. Aleksei was the youngest of three boys. The eldest brother moved out when Aleksei still a toddler, but he spent much time with his middle brother. Aleksei's school teachers are told to have lost all hope at an early stage: the only one who really minded him not attending classes was the sports teacher, who is described chasing him with a basketball around the building, his eyes blood stained after Aleksei had made a stone hid in a briefcase fall down on his head. This anecdote says much about the social setting, as the Soviet schools of the 1970s generally had severe discipline .
 The young Aleksei and his friends played some sports (especially ice hockey, but also some cross-country skiing) but mostly hang out together. In this autobiography, there is never any hesitation about which ideal of masculinity to follow: there is much fighting with fists, knives and occasionally even with guns, and much laughing, drinking and dragging. "My brothers were known (v pochete) in the whole okruga*. They fought very well. I tried not to be worse than they were. ... When it became necessary, I took part in the battles, when I could, I went out with them in the company of girls." These girls - later in the text usually called ‘beauties' (krasavitsy) - only figure as sexual objects who circulate between the guys. It is a muzhik's world, where the word love is mentioned only in quotation marks and there are no attempts at knighthood discourse, except in order to ridicule or oppose it.
 Out of straightforwardness or provocation, the text opens with a close-up of a "meeting" many others would call a gang rape:
  It happened a long time ago. It is over 20 years since. I was about 15 years old. I was a clever, quick little guy. I was physically strong, above my age. I was friends with my classmates, but also with guys who were 3-5 years older than me.
My first close meeting with a woman took place in a cellar. My elder brother had brought some girl. Together with his friends we got drunk and then everybody fucked her. Around the tenth turn was mine. I was very nervous, standing in line. The older friends calmed and encouraged me. You won't even have to do anything, they said. Just take off your pants... When I went in, she was lying on the floor, smoking a cigarette. To hide my anxiety (*mandrazh), I behaved rudely /naglo/ (like a big boy), and took off my pants without a word. I firmly followed the instructions. I lied down on her. Physically, I felt her body, and some kind of smell that was new to me. Sensing this all so close to me lifted my worries to a qualitatively new level. My legs started shaking. But like a bulldozer, without noticing anything around, I acted. It was very wet in there ... After that I quickly left and went home. At home I washed myself and went to bed. I was all trembling of excitement. I lied just a short while. Then I jumped up, dressed and ran to the cellar, but, alas, there was already nobody there.
This is the first episode in Lukashin's sexual memoirs. Of the hundreds of other sexual encounters, none is as closely described. The first time is recalled with a strong component of vitality affects and feelings - smells, tactile sensations, trembling. The ensuing encounters merely describe the outlook of his female partners (often giving them grades), the positions used and the general impressions of the conquest in question. But in many respects the style of the cellar scene is typical for the whole text. On the one hand, the author makes a strong effort to remember, but on the other hand, he adopts a half-joking, anecdotal tone that often serves to belittle the events and distances the reader from the events.
 The frequent mentions of laughing - with the guys, or while first flirting with a girl - are among the most personal and sympathetic features. Otherwise, Lukashin clearly expects the reader to want a story of his sexual escapades, much in the genre "Letters to the reader" in pornographic or erotic journals. The directives provided in the autobiographical announcement (to begin with early childhood, to write about both sex and love, to talk "like to a close friend", and to reflect on various phenomena e.g. homosexuality or prostitution, etc.) do not seem to have left any trace. Lukashin clearly enjoys recalling some very successful or unusual affairs but discards others, "I have left much out on purpose, and I think there is also much I simply do not remember." Some experiences, such as his family relations or his religious views, are deemed irrelevant in this context, "that is another story". Towards the end of the text, he complains of being tired of writing and having too little time left as his wife (or companion) will soon return, and he does not want her to read the text.
 The girl in the cellar is not described as having resisted the boys in any way. At the same time, it is hard to imagine that any teenager girl would of her free will participate in such a scene. She may have been threatened in some ways, like Ivanov's sister-in-law was forced to agree with the argument that it would just be much worse if she did not cooperate (see above). At the very least, the girl in the cellar had for some reasons reached a point where she did not or could not care about her own integrity. This is the most striking example of the moral grey zone and ambivalence about sexual norms that were especially large during late socialism (cf Rotkirch, forthcoming). The Soviet statistics already indicate that sexual violence was frequently committed by young males and that specifically group rapes by youth gangs were more frequent than in other countries (Kon 1996). Yet we may suppose that the events reported to the police must have been among those perceived by all participants as more or less unequivocal violence. In addition, there were probably many more situations akin to Lukashin's sexual initiation, in which neither the offenders nor the victim seem to have had clear notions about how to name, react to, or later think about what happened. His version is the other side of what the women autobiographers describe as foolishness, fatal innocence, becoming paralysed or fearing to scream (see chapter six).
 These practices created intense and contradictory feelings, which evidently found no adequate or stable frames of interpretation. This is obvious when Lukashin tells about how he later was recognised by the girl in the cellar. His first reaction was - "naturally" - guilt:
  That was my first close meeting with a woman. By the way, she remembered me (although it had been quite dark in the cellar). A month or two later we met each other on the street one evening. I didn't recognise her, two girls just asked for a cigarette and we started to talk. Then one of them left, and the other suggested we go smoking in another place - which turned out to be an attic, and even a comfortable one, it had a sofa. We sat down, smoked, and that was when she reminded me of the story with the cellar. I, naturally, denied it at first, but she calmed me, saying that she had no grudges, that it was her own fault and so on, well, and that she had liked me. I looked at her, she was about ten years older..
This time, they had more varying and longer sex. But then this latter sexual encounter is in retrospect - jokingly, but nevertheless - called a rape (of himself!).
  After I had been raped (as I now understand) by my brother's girl on the attic, my life took on different colours. I somehow changed sharply. Something in my head awoke that drove me crazy.
Aleksei invited one girl home and forced her to undress before him by bending her fingers so it hurt. The girl agreed, but on the condition they would not have intercourse. After this they often met for mutual petting and without any mentions of further persuasion by force. When Aleksei insisted on intercourse, she promised to provide another girl for him. Indeed, after some time a new girl appeared in their circle of friends. "I do not remember what I told her, but relatively easy I took her to a hut on a construction site", where the new girl "calmly lied down". Aleksei got nervous when he discovered she was a virgin, as he did not know how to manage without any help from his partner. Furthermore, the other guys had already formed a line outside the hut.  "It all ended so that we just got dressed and I followed her home, which happened and still happens to me extremely seldom."
 Aleksei obviously rescued his partner from another gang rape like the one in the cellar. His noble behaviour is presented in the rhetoric of "praising by downgrading", stressing that he practically never followed the golden rule No 1 of Soviet courtship: that the man should follow the woman home . He also provides us with a cynical ending of this relationship. The couple met again and managed to have intercourse, he was confronted with her boyfriend and beat him up, after which they had sex "a couple of times more, and then she went from hand to hand".
 The list of women, types and places of sex during the next fifteen years continues, until Lukashin at the last page a little surprisingly declares that he is actually tired of all this, "sex has long ago lost its actuality for me". In his mid-thirties, he has not settled in his family life nor in his professional circles. He was at the writing moment cohabiting, but dreaming about finding a completely "harmonical woman". He was employed in show-business but finishing his studies on the side, hoping that "the best is yet to come" in his life. This life phase of personal and professional unrest may have created the need of self reflection, or at least the urge to remember, that prompted Lukashin to write.
 Although Lukashin's social status is far from settled, his social trajectory represents a very different pattern from that of the previous generation. This is evident in the perceived relation between sexual restraint and social success, as well as in his attitude towards women.

Attempts of social ascent
Initially, Aleksei Lukashin's path follows a similar logic as Mikhail Ivanov's: to get away from his childhood milieu by putting order into his life and studying. In the end of the 1970s, Aleksei was two years in the army, where he used all spare time "maximally, in order to develop my intellectual and physical qualities. It gave results. When I returned after the army service everybody found me different. I did not drink or smoke and I talked about important goals in life." However, the dramatic separation and opposition of spheres (home milieu vs. student milieu, chaotic family life vs. responsible working life) characteristic of Ivanov's social trajectory is not paralleled in Lukashin's case. For instance, the army improved Aleksei's intellectual ambitions, but he also notes how "in the army my muscles of stone started to dry and indifference and apathy entered my soul". Public life and Soviet institutions do not appear in the role of stabilising and saving structures (as was the case, for instance, also in Alexandra Chistyakova's (1998) life).
 While Ivanov's life style ‘relapsed' into lack of life control and promiscuity due to his first marriage, Lukashin interrupted his plans of higher education in order to work for some years with a touring rock band. Aleksei had less problems with women than with his own drinking, but the general logic of women and alcohol versus social improvement and life control, is dominant in the beginning. He motivates the work as a way to escape his life style at home:
  At that time, I needed to somehow detach myself from women and actively looked for some interesting work. An administrator I knew well suggested I could call the organisation of one regional centre and give his recommendations. I did so and was offered to work for a rock groups that was more or less famous at the time.
Touring life proved even more full of sexual encounters, and Aleksei started to drink and smoke again - blaming the meeting with his older brother in one Siberian town, a celebration which evidently was not conceivable without excessive alcohol. He was also baptised "the specialist on bitches" (spetsialist po babam) in the group, as he had so many affairs and also "seriously helped everybody else to get women". But life on the road exhausted, he "left a part of my health at the tours (na gastroliah) and I had a serious need to regain my former strength. I skipped drinking and smoking and started to go to a body building gym (atleticheskii zal)."  him. He left the rock band after a couple of years and began his studies. The balanced and healthy life style was not at odds with several sexual affairs or black market transactions (fartsovka) to gain extra money. Aleksei also married one of his girlfriends, who had become pregnant and who also had immense patience with him, including with his infidelity during the wedding festivities.
 But then, times started changing. Lukashin does not once refer to any social or political factors, but it is hardly a coincidence that he quits his education after the mid-1980s. He left the medical institute and the straightforward track into a feminized profession, low paid in Soviet times and one of the relatively worst off professions in the 1990s. Instead, he acquires the less demanding qualifications as a masseur. At his first work place, the succession of affairs started again. "I had to fuck in the ispolkom, at the registration office (ZAGS) before somebody's marriage, and so on."  At the same time, he divorced his wife whom he found too lethargic. Following the classical script of short first Soviet marriages, she automatically kept the child (if it was ever born - there is no mention of it at all in the text) and the apartment, and he moved to one room in a communal apartment, which was close to his work but far away from his mother and ex-wife.
 Through an acquaintance, Aleksei got a temporary assignment as a physician . Once more, he tried to straighten up. Lukahsin proudly notes being able to save a woman's life, and how he " did not drink, did not smoke and was in good form ... For about half a year I recovered morally. No sex, no nothing. I was all in my work." True, the next paragraph describes how "the most interesting women received complete satisfaction" and only the locals were refused special treatment, although they tried hard to have some.
 The same winter, he the listed through his telephone notebook and called an acquaintance, who arranged for him to work as a masseur in a newly established, private sauna.
 Here the old logic - social ascent equals adoption of proper middle class morals (the normal family life, in Ivanov's terms) - is broken. True, Lukashin underlies how good he was at his new work, getting clients from his already established colleagues. But he also notes that is "was a psychologically hard transition from the image of the doctor to the image of nearly a banshchik. But I had to live and obespechyvat myself somehow. I couldn't expect help from anywhere." Soon he works much, and this included sex. "I had to fuck sometimes several times a day. Naturally with different women. Everything started to spoon ( zavertelos, zakruzhilos)..., I started to drink and to smoke. The Bacchanalia continued for about three years. I actually tried to regulate the process somehow."
 But, clearly, the regulation of the "process" did not succeed. The nature of the sexual relations in the sauna are not clear - Lukashin says most of his female clients were prostitutes, although some were married rich women, but who paid whom and what kind of exchange of sympathies or favours took place remains unclear. Neither does he mention any relations with the male customers that he also received in the beginning. He alludes at propositions also from their part - "I was surrounded by all kind of  strange kinds - gay, dike and so on. (vsyakaya vsyachina - golubaja, rozovaja i t.d.)."
 At this point, Aleksei's professional and personal life have become completely intertwined. Far from helping him away from the behaviour he himself perceives as problematic, the job in one of the new post-socialist commercial structures exploited and reinforced it. By trying to improve his life - moving from a medical position in state owned policlinics to professionally lower but economically better position in the private sector - his working life and his sexual life became more entangled than before. On the road with the rock group, or as a doctor in a tourist base, he had numerous affairs, but of his own choice and as an addition, a non-obligatory complement, to his working profile. The fact that his own body has been cynically exploited by his employees and their clientele may perhaps explain Aleksei's pronounced cynicism with regards to women.

Misogyny and male bonding
Lukashin presents himself as an uncaring man, whose only aim is to seduce women. Only in a couple of exceptions he may, for instance, note that he "by the way, also held a seriously deep feeling towards her". Or that he was disappointed when one meeting "satisfied only the lust, but without anything like a more human thing, with proper setting and scope (rasstanovka i razmakha)" Statements like "I belong to those who think that the best moment with a woman is closing the door after she has left" , or "/The intercourse/ could be graded as satisfying. That is for me - I let the steam off, and her opinion did not interest me" are from the lightest end in this autobiography. In themselves, they are quite possible to explain by his bachelor life style and resistance to stabile love relationships, coupled with a longing of finding the perfect woman.
 But there are also a few descriptions which indicate a deeper hatred of women. Sexual violence is practised without any regrets, as already discussed above. The women's hesitations or opposition to have sex are always rendered with overt contempt. For instance, one woman picked up after a rock concert was made completely drunk by Aleksei and his friends, who both have sex with her. That she never completely agreed to this is made clear from the summarising statement: "In the morning we parted with her not as friends, but not as enemies either." Another time, he and his friend had picked up a woman in a hotel bar and invited her to their hotel room. When she "pretended to leave", Aleksei asked her to stay:
  She began something stupid about her being an honest girl and so on. But I understood that she had simply not had enough to drink ... Morally I was already tired but the lust-devil (pohot-zlodeika) in me surfaced. Finally she started to talk less and react more to my caresses. ... It was like a wind had blown away from the girl all the education, upbringing, and the manners that she first displayed like a model of upbringing.
It seems, really, to be so, that when the natural, the core (estestvo, nutro) of a human being is speaking, which is, according to one theory, animal, then all the artificially adopted disappears without a trace.
This woman is told to have enjoyed the night with Aleksei and his friend to the extent of inviting her girlfriend for a foursome the following evening. But notwithstanding the woman's feelings, there is in Aleksei's comment much contempt for her way of negotiating and especially for her education and good manners. Sexuality, and especially wild and daring sex (like group sex with strangers) is the natural drive that surfaces in both sexes when the surface is a little melted with alcohol. Educated women's opposition is merely artificial and dishonest behaviour. This logic is of course familiar from many pornographic and erotic texts, notably Henry Miller's production. It presents a naturalised view of sexuality ("the natural", "the inner", "animal") where especially women who, through education and ambition, socially compete with men, are denigrated.
 Lukashin's misogyny is matched by strong homosocial ties. Men are the self-evident frame of reference, and Lukashin often notes how he had been respected and feared due to his physical force, courage, and success with women. In his youth, it was indeed, a question of  interpersonal violence as a pattern of communication (Zdravomyslova & Chikadze 1998, 19). A bit later, alcohol in itself suffices. Lukashin describes a funny incident of male bonding, when he consoles his boss, who found him in bed with the woman the boss has been courting:
  /The boss/ started to scream, wave his arms and spit around him about what kind of trash (negodiai) we were. He was a proper, intelligent man, taking her, it appeared, to dinner to restaurants, following her to her /hotel/ room, almost reading her a fairy tale before she falls asleep, but instead she, and so on. I stood calmly, contemplating it all in silence. To fight with him was simply not of any interest to me, and well, the guy had to speak out. When he stopped I immediately offered him to drink, although he was not drinking anything at all. But now he accepted. We drank. Our talk gradually entered the subject of the hardships in his life. In sum, I became almost as dear to him as his own brother after that night.
His male friends are pitied and ridiculed if they suffer from unhappy love, like some of his youth friends who opened their veins or attempted to jump down from a ceiling because of women. Lukashin says he was "spared by God" and only trembled in front of women, until the age of 25 when he stopped doing even that.
 Lukashin's experiences may be described as a triad in the following way:
Figure 2.
 Interpretation
  ‘muzhik'-ideal
  naturalisation of sex
 
 
 

Feeling     Practices
lust     forced sex, promiscuity
physical strength    drinking, dragging
laughter

In his autobiography, Lukashin presents himself as a straightforward guy. There are seemingly few conflicts between feeling, social practices and their interpretations. He appears a physical, active man who always enjoys sex and more or less successfully fights his drinking. He has the most complete realisation of a macho, don juanistic muzhik ideal. In the few reflections on sexuality, he advocates a naturalised view of sexuality - sex is an inner core, which only artificial education or too well-behaved women deny. This aggressive, naturalised sexual ideology also seems to compensate for professional and personal instability and failed attempts of social ascent. At the very end of the autobiography, more serious aspirations surface:
  I do not look at the world with wide open eyes, but I think that the best is yet ahead. Sex has long ago lost its actuality for me, I mean that to fuck somebody is no problem. The problem lies elsewhere. To meet a harmonically (garmonichno slozhennaia) composed woman (physically, psychologically and intellectually) is very hard. To keep her, after having met her, is still harder. Usually they have way too high self esteem, demands and so on. In my opinion, one should trust the will of the divine volja vozvyshennogo, and if something should happen, it does, and the other way around. But that is the theme of another essay.
Here again, the reader is reminded that Lukashin consciously follows the genre of erotic memoirs, and hides e.g. his religious or more serious social views. He admits to longing for a stable relationship, although his expectations seem high enough, especially if the perfect woman should not have high self esteem or "demands". Interestingly, Lukashin's final credo absolves himself - just like in Ivanov's final justification - from any responsibility or active agency. Where Ivanov blamed his upbringing, in line with the dominant pedagogical ideas of his adult years, Lukashin gives a semireligious, fatalistic solution characteristic of the Soviet 1970s and 1980s - "if something should happen, it does".

 Concluding comparisons
From culturation to blurred mobility
Mikhail Stern, a Soviet émigré doctor, has made the following characterisation of the sexual moors of the Soviet lower social groups: "/Al/though sex may be a taboo subject among 'respectable' people in the SU, those people who live on the fringes of society, who think of themselves as belonging to 'the lower depths', talk about sex very openly and naturally." (Stern 1979, 199) The 'loose behaviour' of the lower working class is a prevalent social stereotype, in Russia just as in the rest of Europe. But as Mary Jo Maynes has pointed out, even if workers may have a less strict attitude to some types of sexual behaviour (e.g. virginity) than the middle class, that does not imply their cultures were more "natural", without their own specific codes of shame and respectability. Against the kind of simplification of working class sexuality that Mikhail Stern performs in the quote above, Maynes argues that the "links between sex and social identity were not generally the same for workers as they were for their class superiors, but they were equally problematic." (Maynes 1995, 131; see also Steedman 1991.)
 This paper has only looked at male examples of such links in poor working cultures. The few texts I have read by Soviet women workers make quit different emphasis. None of the working class men could make the consoling claim by a working class woman born in 1925 (No 2): "There was also life, even if very gloomy, not like normal life. But love is love everywhere, however savage that seems." For Ivanov, love was not the same everywhere, and for Lukashin there was no love. The links between sexual and social identity seem especially problematic for these two male cases from marginal milieus: the men have a more dramatic gap between local and dominant ideas about sexuality and family life, and they have a harder time consoling them with each other.
 Ivanov's life draws a quite classical picture of the class journey from poor, marginalised worker to well-to-do upper working class. Just like in the worker's autobiographies from one century earlier, male self control was seen as part of a rising social position (Maynes 1995, 135). Although he depicts a seemingly amoral world, the fact remains that he himself was deeply morally affected by it. The parallels between middle class morality and social ascent are explicitly drawn by Ivanov himself throughout the text. He willingly followed the path of okulturyvanie, adopting stricter sexual norms after starting out from a situation that was rather akulturnyi than nekulturnyi.
 Lukashin, by contrast, has had to let go of his initial (albeit diffuse) dreams of becoming a doctor. Like Ivanov, Lukashin describes sexual blat relations, for instance how one of his lovers who worked as an administrator in a hotel always provided him with de luxe rooms. Affairs like those may have added to his status in the working collective, but they were not integral to them. But in the private sauna, Aleksei's affairs moved to the centre of the picture and the promiscuity appears as a central feature of the establishment itself. He also relates how he worked for a short time in a sport and health institution, where the administration wanted to arrange a "commercial line" (kommercheskoe ruslo). Aleksei helped them organise the new sauna department, and describes the criminal and rich clients, billiard played with naked prostitutes, etc. The sexual component of the sauna institutions had moved from occasional meetings between two people in closed rooms to a display in front of the whole clientele in the main room.
Russian women are more often objects of the intertwining of sex and work described in these male autobiographies (cf Rotkirch 1999). But the evolution from Ivanov's blat relations to Lukashin's semiopen prostitution are evidence of the same economic and structural dynamics. The traditional Russian and Soviet way of social ascent through education was at least momentarily stopped. Ivanov's life story evolved away from an acultural setting to established Soviet middle class life, while the private and the public in Lukashin's biography is blurred: his social status remains undefined, and his sexuality moves into the centre of his professional life.

Milieus and subcultures
The two autobiographers belong to different Soviet generations. Ivanov, born in 1935, was part of the what I have called the silenced sexual generation, while Lukashin belongs to the personalised generation (Rotkirch 1997). I have claimed to describe a "way of life", without specifying what that refers to, or how extensive that way of life may have been. What, indeed, can be said about the spread of the sexual cultures and male attitudes described by Ivanov and Lukashin? Were they stable and reproducing ways of life and how far did they extend?
A "way of life" has been conceptualised as a  specific combination of generation, culture and class expressed through a particular habitus (Roos 1988). Although this definition does not deal with the temporal dimension, it approaches ways of life as something long-lasting. However, we can use the examples above to introduce an additional distinction. Both represent specific ways of life, but the first one (Ivanov) was more limited and short-lived than the second (Lukashin). I propose to talk about the ways of life of a milieu in the first case, and of a subculture in the second.
 The main distinction is that a milieu is smaller, and does not get culturally transmitted and reproduced. A subculture is, by contrast, transmitted symbolically and through habits. A subculture has the potential of becoming a dominating and hegemonic culture, if it continues to spread. A milieu would thus be more of a random chance, connected with exceptional social and ecological circumstances, while a subculture is a milieu that has become rooted in society. In order of size and cultural visibility, we could imagine the following axis: circles of friends - milieus -  subculture - class culture - dominant culture.
 What in the autobiographies supports such a distinction? I have found them on the level of two criteria: how the author describes meeting other social milieus, and what kind of language is used.
 In Ivanov's text, entering different social milieus is described as a recognition of differences. As a student, and in the army, he began to think that his family milieu was abnormal and unusual. By contrast, Lukashin behaves the same way with everybody, although he travels around the country. He notices that middle class women are "too innocent" to be approached too harshly, but not once does he depict feeling an outsider whose norms do not fit in with the present surroundings. I propose that Ivanov's milieu may be seen as a temporary, literally anomalic milieu, created by the social upheavals and war times in the preceding decades. Lukashin encountered similar morality and behaviour whether he was in his home milieu,  rock groups, or in a tourist base. It was no longer a question of a possibly unique milieu, but of a rooted and extended, if not dominant, way of life.
 My second, linguistic, criteria is on a more shaky ground, as we cannot know whether the language employed was used in the youth of the narrator or has been adopted in more recent years. Still, Ivanov's text is marked by self made and very local expressions. Lukashin, by contrast, uses special terms (like "defloration") as if it was a part of his vocabulary even in the 1970s. This could indicate that the sexual subculture was wide and large enough to include access to various popularised scientific and pornographic vocabulary.
 If this analysis is correct, we may see how a certain attitude to sexuality and masculinity gradually establishes itself in post-war Soviet history. For instance, while Ivanov was highly ambivalent about a naturalised view of sexuality, Lukashin embraced it totally. He recalls using this argument with women: "I mumbled something about the elevated and beautiful, about how good sex is for your health, about the beautiful music that was playing and how it is better to listen to it lying down and relaxing , with your eyes closed and so on." In this seduction talk, some shattered pieces romanticism remain ("the elevated and the beautiful"). But they used purely for strategic reasons, and paired with the totally different view of sex as a healthy thing.
This is a glaring difference to Ivanov and his generation, who sincerely searched for the elevated and beautiful, and perceived it in painful opposition to lust and the sexual. Ivanov emphasises the role of education in prohibiting sexual excess and perversions, while Lukashin understands sex as less problematic, a healthy activity. In both cases, though, the adopted views serve to enhance the men's feeling of control over women, over their own life, without blaming themselves for anything in their past experiences. Lukashin's deliberate misogyny is yet another good example of a trait of a Soviet subculture, that entered the Russian public sphere together with the generation of the 1970s and achieved the status of one of the dominating and most visible attitudes.

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