Russia’s 1990s Etiquette Revolution

In today’s class-conscious new Russia, however, refinement is on the rise, and those pondering careers in international business or diplomacy are seeking to rectify their deficit of graces. From social etiquette classes that have been added to public school curricula to resurrected pre-revolutionary finishing schools like those within the New University of Humanities founded here by Natalia Nesterova, there is growing interest— and income— in the teaching of proper manners.
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Minding Manners in Moscow

Vera Ignatieva’s lecture on how proper young ladies accept an invitation to dance is interrupted by a door slamming behind a tardy pupil. Ignatieva halts the culprit in her tracks with a glare as powerful as a stun gun.

“Is that any way for a cultured person to enter a room?” she demands of the trembling 7-year-old arriving for a first lesson. “Go back outside and try again— this time in a civilized manner!”

Across town, the latecomer is slightly older, but the reproving glance from Alena Gil is as withering as Ignatieva’s. “You are late again, Vika. And furthermore,” says the appalled etiquette teacher, “how dare you come into my classroom with gum in your mouth!”

Slammed doors, snapping jaws, slouchy posture and sloppy table manners are under attack in places such as Ignatieva’s Ballroom Dancing and Court Etiquette School and the Institute for Noble Young Ladies, where Gil teaches socially aspiring teens.

But after eight decades in which society put more stock in a young person’s skill handling a forklift than in his or her way with a salad fork, the purveyors of polish at Russia’s revitalized charm schools concede that they have their work cut out for them.

Boorish behavior was a hallmark of the Bolshevik era, when civility was thrashed by the coinciding brutalities of war, widespread poverty and social leveling. The remnants of the Russian aristocracy fled abroad to escape exile or execution.

In today’s class-conscious new Russia, however, refinement is on the rise, and those pondering careers in international business or diplomacy are seeking to rectify their deficit of graces.

From social etiquette classes that have been added to public school curricula to resurrected pre-revolutionary finishing schools like those within the New University of Humanities founded here by Natalia Nesterova, there is growing interest— and income— in the teaching of proper manners.

“We could hardly have operated during the Communist era, when the very concept of nobility was officially targeted for destruction,” says Nesterova from beneath the net veil of a milliner’s fanciful creation. “But now that it is possible, it is all the more important that we prepare a new generation of young women to be credits to their families, to their future husbands, to their employers and, most importantly, to themselves.”

The Institute for Noble Young Ladies, which is one branch of her private university, was reconstituted three years ago on the reputation of an imperial-era boarding school that trained the daughters of wealthy merchants and noblemen in the czar’s court.

Nothing but that somewhat antiquated ideal survived the traumas of communism, says Nesterova, and the institute now strives to incorporate the modern demands of society into the structure of education in more traditional spheres.

“In today’s conditions, it is not wise for a woman to be without the intellectual means to compete in the workplace, even if she expects to be a homemaker,” she says. “That is why we have added courses in office management and business to our cultural repertoire.”

Sexology, family planning and body-shaping aerobics are also new twists to the classic agenda, but they are additions graduates need to deal with modern realities, Nesterova says.

Vika Zavalnaya plans to study law at Moscow State University beginning next year, but she enrolled at Nesterova’s institute at the urging of her older brother, a successful businessman who supports her and their widowed mother.

“This is the kind of instruction that will give me an advantage in my profession,” says the exuberant 17-year-old, not yet weaned of her affection for gum. “When you work with clients, especially foreigners, it’s important to know how to conduct yourself gracefully in a restaurant as well as the office.”

Looking for Employees With Polish

Russian and foreign hiring executives say they are on the lookout for employees with polish and that something as simple as a thank-you note after an interview can affect their choices.

“Knowing how to present oneself is as important as professional and technical knowledge,” says Konstantin Korotov, head of personnel development here for Ernst & Young, the international accounting firm that employs 500 local professionals throughout the former Soviet Union. “We’ve always managed to recruit well-educated people, but we want those representing our firm in the CIS [Commonwealth of Independent States] to do so with the same level of quality and professionalism as we have in Sydney or Paris or Cleveland.”

For 15-year-old Nina Babicheva, a charm school diploma is the ticket into the most desirable social circles.

“I’m not very good at math or science. What I love here is the attention to art and culture,” says Babicheva, who is balancing the finishing school program with her high school education. “I don’t have any big career goals. If I have to work, I think I’d like to be a journalist. But what I would really like is to get married and be free to spend my whole day riding horses.”

Private finishing schools such as the institute in central Moscow remain beyond the means of the vast majority of families, even at what might seem a reasonable tuition by Western standards of $1,500 a year.

But programs tailored to local circumstances are growing alongside the charm-school courses for the well-heeled, including weekly etiquette classes introduced in most elementary schools over the past two years. It is mostly young women who have expressed interest in learning social graces, but some schools also aim to prepare boys for a more courtly environment.

“We are educating tomorrow’s business and social leaders, and we cannot do that properly with yesterday’s practices,” says Irina Sirina, vice principal of Moscow Elementary School No. 184 in the far northern suburb of Dmitrovsky. “Personal hygiene and good behavior were discussed in schools indirectly during the Communist era, but there was no encouragement of the individual at that time. Etiquette then existed only as another measure of conformance.”

Her school, like many other public institutions, has taken aim at the surly behavior exuded by older generations, in which even the most highly educated can be found spitting on the sidewalks or hunkering down over their dinner plates like prisoners. The hourlong classes cover both personal and social behavior, from good grooming to diction to table manners.

“In the past, etiquette was not considered important because the measure of an ideal student was his ability to multiply and write properly and learn by heart poems about Communist Party heroes,” says Marina Nayanova, deputy director of a private finishing school with 50 students in the provincial city of Kostroma, 250 miles east of Moscow. “We see how much children’s behavior has deteriorated, and parents now have to work so hard that the last thing they have time for is [worrying about] manners.”

Extensive instruction in the social graces tends to be limited to private schools, where tuition runs to thousands of dollars each year, or to hybrid institutions such as the Donskoy Military Academy, where commercial sponsors augment the fees paid by parents.

Ignatieva, who has been teaching ballroom dancing for 45 years and etiquette since it became politically safe to do so about a decade ago, accepts payment only as individual parents can afford it and relies on connections with the artistic elite to cover the rest of her expenses.

She teaches a few dozen children who come to her studio in small groups twice each week for dance instruction and brutally candid assessments of their social skills.

“All of the popular and elegant dances were forbidden under [Soviet dictator Josef] Stalin— the fox trot, the tango, everything, especially if it was foreign,” says the feisty proprietor of the children’s dance academy. “It wasn’t until a few years ago that there were enough of us to rise up and demand our dignity back.”

The ninth child in a poor family, Ignatieva learned how to behave in high society only after it was banished. She married the son of a count who had been driven into exile after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and acquired her knowledge of etiquette from a hidden book on English manners and in whispered lessons from her husband.

“What is nobility and how do you teach it?” asks the snow-haired widow who is long past retirement time but coy about age specifics. “Some are born with it, but it can also be acquired through learning, and one of the most elegant expressions of nobility is ballroom dancing.”

But to dance well requires self-confidence, elegance and poise— commodities she says were hard to come by in the Soviet era, which glorified the spartan lifestyle of the working class.

Those deficits have compelled Ignatieva to broaden her dance instruction to include a general education in social graces.

“You cannot act like a gentleman when you are dressed like a laborer,” Ignatieva admonishes a hapless and humiliated preteen who has come to her studio in jeans and black T-shirt.

Parents Learn Manners From Their Children

The young patrons of Ignatieva’s studio and at etiquette classes being offered across the country bear up determinedly despite the upbraiding, often because they are encouraged by their parents to take advantage of opportunities they never had.

Oksana Abramova, a homemaker whose 8-year-old daughter, Ella, is enrolled in an after-school etiquette class, confides in a visitor that she too is taking instruction— indirectly.

“We like it when she practices at home, because my husband and I are learning from her,” Abramova says of her daughter’s recent recitals on how to set the table.

Older students undertaking more extensive training for entrance into the new elite cite a need to find a middle ground between the crudeness of the past and the garish excesses of the present.

Gil, a former drama instructor who teaches posture and grooming at the Institute for Noble Young Ladies, helps her young charges learn to use makeup with moderation and to dress appropriately for the business environment that is currently populated more by those wearing leather miniskirts and spike heels than by devotees of tailored suits and silk blouses.

“We have many people in our society who are smart and capable, but in the future it will take more than that to be successful,” says 16-year-old Yekaterina Vorontsova, who wants to become a financial secretary after finishing her course work at the institute. “What we need isn’t just a matter of clothes and expensive cosmetics. What we need is sophistication.” — Los Angeles Times, 1997

Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J Graber, is the Site Editor for the Etiquipedia© Etiquette Encyclopedia