Restive Husbands

Mikhail Zaitsev made a beautiful corpse. Propped in the coffin he had carved and painted himself, he wore his Sunday suit and an expression of noble serenity. Then, when the village photographer had finished taking his picture, Zaitsev leaped out and helped his neighbors down the generous supplies of vodka and cold cuts he had laid in for the wake. Next day, the neighbors mailed the funeral picture to his estranged wife in another village, explaining that Comrade Zaitsev had been electrocuted by a high-tension wire.

Like Zaitsev, whose sole aim was to dodge his alimony payments, many oppressed Russian husbands try to start life afresh with forged documents and new names. The Soviet press recently reported the cases of three other tricksters, including a marital deadbeat named Nikolai Borinchuk who married four times in eight years and shuffled off his marital obligations each time by faking death; police are still looking for him.

Despite the Communists' rejection of "bourgeois morality'' in the early revolutionary days, when divorces could be had for the asking, marital laws in present-day Russia are at least as strict as in most Western countries, and divorce requires lengthy court action. In answer to a recent newspaper questionnaire, many young Russians said that they wanted divorce made easier, asked that divorce cases be handled not by the regular judiciary but by the recently established "comrades' courts," composed of ordinary citizens--so far used mostly to deal with juvenile delinquency and lighter cases of "antisocial behavior." While many Russians favor quickie divorces, others press for long, old-fashioned engagements and more romantic wedding ceremonies. To replace the pomp of church weddings, many Russian cities now have "wedding palaces." much like U.S. funeral parlors, where couples can find the music and atmosphere they miss in registry offices. Chief complaint: wedding palaces are so much in demand that their use is re stricted to couples under 30 getting married for the first time.

If the ceremony tends to reflect socialist realism, actual marriage in Russia has come to resemble marital coexistence in capitalist countries. Asked to suggest ways to "liquidate the remnants of woman's inferior position in the home.'' a 27-year-old Moscow engineer protested that modern wives are no longer inferior. They make their husbands take the children to school and do the shopping, insist on eating in restaurants, send most of the laundry out and leave the rest "unwashed and unironed until there is nothing left to wear." Said he: "It will soon be a question of 'emancipating' men, not women!"

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