The Modern Girl

Belatedly, the flapper is beginning to flourish in Russia. Called chuvikha (slang for female), she dabbles in sex and tipples vodka, cares more about fashions than factories. Russian cartoons criticize her rebelliousness, lampoon her fickleness. With heavy Victorian moralizing, the press points out the tragedies of good girls gone wrong. Stimulated rather than appalled by all this attention, the chuvikhi lap it up. Last week they had another heroine.

Svetlana Serova was a precocious Moscow schoolgirl with well-to-do parents, a mental block about studying and an obsession for makeup, hairdos and boys. When her parents were away, she gave wild parties, whose telltale traces were rumpled sofas and broken crockery. Picked up a few years ago by a youth squad for hanging around Moscow's Hotel Metropole, where most foreign tourists stay, Svetlana brazened it out. "What's wrong with that? Modern girls don't have to wait until they're noticed." Father Vasily Andreevich groped for words and cried: "Shame! How can our daughter debase herself to the point of running after foreigners?'' Answered Svetlana: "Russian boys are dull." And how could she converse with tourists when the only English word she knew was goodbye? Said Svetlana: "We get along without words."

Finally, the problem child ran away with a "flashily dressed, middleaged" Middle Eastern diplomat. Two and a half years later. Komsomolskaya Pravda reported, a pathetic figure stood begging forgiveness on her father's doorstep. How she had paid for her folly! Her husband, it turned out, already had one wife, and Svetlana had been little more than a brutalized, half-starved harem slave, forced to wait on wife No. 1 and her three children. This, said Komsomolskaya Pravda, was the awful fate awaiting those "frivolous girls who consider they are born only for amusement and recklessly chase after foreign libertines."

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