The Russian Way

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31113, 16 July 1966, Page 2

The Russian Way

(N.Z.P. A.-Reuter) MOSCOW. On a warm summer evening, the tree-lined alleys and open-air dance floors of Moscow’s Gorky Park are a meeting place for thousands of the Soviet capital’s young people.

Some statisticians calculate that up to 10 per cent of all the marriages in Moscow have their beginning there. Ludmila Vlasova, a 19-year-old blonde bookshop assistant, says that three of her closest friends met their husbands In the park. She herself is to marry Yury Nikitin, a student of English at Moscow University, later this year. “I was standing in a queue for ice-cream in the park one night last summer when I met him,” she says. “He was just in front, and kept looking at me over his shoulder.

“At the counter he bought two ice-creams and turned round and gave me one. I did not want to take it, but he was very polite, not like a lot of the other boys. We have been going out together ever since.” Ludmila and Yury are typical of thousands of young Russian city dwellers today. Yury has a small grant of about £l4 a month at the university, but he knows that she likes flowers, and takes them to her at least once a week.

They probably will marry In the Moscow Palace of Weddings, where, instead of the dry registry office ceremony, young couples are given more of a feeling of occasion. But the idea of an official engagement does not occur to Ludmila and Yury. This custom went out among young Russians soon after the 1917 Revolution, and they will not exchange rings until the wedding ceremony.

Ludmila took Yury home to meet her parents six weeks after she met him. She took the opportunity provided by her father’s 50th birthday party—otherwise he might have waited for another month or two, she says. Ludmila, like most other Russian girls, began to take an active interest in boys only in her last year at school, when she was 16. But she did not have a steady boy friend until she was 18.

Yury, who Is 23, says that he took out a girl from his class when he was 15. They met frequently for a year, but Yury did not want to settle down until he was older.

“It looks as though I shall now, though,” he says. “I always thought 23 was a good age to get married.”