A Western lover par excellence, in Russian imagination: Cosmo girl. This is the cover of the first Russian issue of the Cosmopolitan magazine, published in May 1994. Source: cosmo.ru.
In the mid-1990s, I observed Russia’s transition to “emotional capitalism” — a value system based on personal autonomy, individual choice and private interests not only in the market, but in the private realm, too. Every morning as I made my way to school, I would linger at the newspaper stand near the metro, where I was entranced by the ever-changing assortment of newspapers and magazines. Glossy covers, one after the other, with pictures of racy women and equally racy cars were forcing the greying Pravda into the back row — until it disappeared completely. Whereas the front page of a newspaper previously ordered Soviet citizens to dedicate every minute of their lives to socialist labour on factory floors and fields of collective farms, Cosmo, Vogue and GQ now insisted that men and women alike ought to focus on a new sphere of productivity: their own lives and their own bedrooms.
