This article is not even close to being true.

I know we want to have this image of the Soviet Union only being a drab grey place with everything controlled by the state. But this was not completely true.

Did the Soviet Union have the many choices of fashion magazines that the west has? No, but they did have some, and women did have make-up. They did have movies and television shows that had very beautiful actresses, and even brought movies and shows from other countries like India and Brazil.

My wife is a beautiful Russian woman, and she had to laugh at the stupidity of this article.

The real answer is that many Slavic women have found it easier to travel to the west, and yes the western fashions have found it easier to travel east.

This article was just not well done or thought out.

The real answer is that many Slavic women have found it easier to travel to the west, and yes the western fashions have found it easier to travel east.

Uh, that's pretty much what the article says. Sheesh.

The article also implies that people were forced to hide their beauty in the Soviet Union, and that, like intelligence, beauty wasn't rewarded. This is absurd. Anyone who knows anything about how the Soviet Union actually functioned knows that, like in the West, smart, attractive people tended to become elites. What they used those talents for was limited by politics (politics, as oppossed to the market, being the backbone of the soviet system), but there were plenty of non market privledges that the professional class of the Union enjoyed. The recruitment of these people was also in many ways more meritocratic than in the west as well.

Anne's been duped by both anti-communist and Communist party propoganda and doesn't seem to actually have any clue as to how these societies actually functioned.

Does anybody really care ?

Not only is the article somewhat ridiculous but Ana Ivanovic and Jelena Jankovic aren't russian, they're serbian and Serbian has never been part of the Soviet block.