Russian dolls, diamonds and large cars, but why and especially who wants to demonize Russian women?

In the activity of the CQMI Matrimonial Agency, unfortunately, we often have a problem with the propaganda of unscrupulous journalists, also from both sides, but especially of course from the West against Russia and Ukraine. The Russian woman, as we have shown in articles on the FIFA World Cup in Russia, for example, is a political issue because she is a positive and bright image of Russia and Ukraine. It has been a very long time since geopolitics took hold of the Slavic woman, and before that it was cinema, as we also demonstrated in another article about the Russian femme fatale, an image of James Bond's films of the 1960s and 1970s. After that, Russian women were the subject of great interest in the emergence of the first dating agencies between men from the West and women from Eastern countries. This subject has made many men fantasize and sink many bad inks to the point of making a sketch of the unflattering, even outright murderous, Russian woman.

Since then, the Western, French-speaking and French media have been enjoying themselves from different angles of attack and we have already presented other Internet videos. Today we are tackling the issue of Arte, a Franco-German state media that has long been considered as outside propaganda, more honest, more cultural, but which over time has shown that it can sometimes do much worse than these other competitors... Much worse is this documentary broadcast in 2015, shot in 2014 in Russia. We are then in the middle of the Mayan revolution in Ukraine, the ruble collapses on international stock exchanges, journalists are relentless after the return of Crimea to Russia (for other annexation, we do not make politics at CQMI), then civil war breaks out in the Donbass. Very quickly the Russian woman is taken to task, and through her fatally the Ukrainian woman, because the two cousins obviously cannot be separated. From the title, Russian dolls, diamonds and large cylinders, flashy and catchy, a click title to stay in the measure, we feel that the tone given will be that of aggression, and behind the repressed aggressiveness, lies, caricature and alas baseness.

A nasty divorce case and an oligarch's wife.

This German report attacks the subject of Russian women through the North Face... by telling us in 2014 about a Russia that existed under President Gorbachev and Yeltsin... 20 years ago. The illusion is so well shot, well arranged around the images and shots chosen that in the comments and myself who has been visiting Russia for a long time, I wondered on what date this report was filmed, if I had not known the date, I would have said... 1998, the real shooting date is actually 2014, it was broadcast in 2015. It talks about mafias, the Soviet Union and oligarchs and soon a woman will appear on the screen, they will only be two women anyway to appear in the whole report to represent the entire Slavic female population, from Russia and Ukraine. Two women... The first Natalia Potanina is the wife of a Russian authority and millionaire, Russian businessman and politician, Vladimir Potanin. Everyone will of course have their own personal idea of the question, but after watching this video you will understand that Natalia's divorce from this powerful Russian character is a bit like serving on a set the private and crispy story of a French millionaire and oligarch, having been in politics or close to power (and God knows there are some), when her divorce had not been pronounced. The first observation is that journalists are using this woman's divorce in sight, who sheds crocodile tears in the film, to make her look like THE prototype of the average Russian woman... But this crude trap unfortunately works perfectly if we believe the hundreds of comments posted on this video (and other versions that exist on the Internet). At the CQMI Agency we have sometimes had women members of a high level, but we can also tell you that a millionaire's wife, and there the only common sense of everyone must speak, does not represent at all the women of an entire country.

The documentary lingers so long on this long story that we could rename the documentary "Divorce, epic war and the meandering battles of the Potanin couple". This is obviously not serious, because this woman being in an open and bitter conflict with her husband (who is not heard), who has obvious interests in using the press to reach her husband, in threatening him and in putting pressure on him by all means, is therefore taking millions of Western television viewers hostage with the backing of the TV Arte channel. We think we're dreaming! And yet this bad dream lasts almost an hour and a half, not to mention the fact that even if Natalia Potanin were really an icon of the Russian woman, she would have difficulty even representing even just the Russian millionaire woman... is already only (and that is a lot of course!) a few tens of thousands of women in a population in Russia and Ukraine of 110 to 120 million women. The report, moreover, quickly began to catch on: "billions of dollars are at stake". Unfortunately, everything has been said and the report struggles to build around its subject by trying to fit into a mold already cut, the famous Russian doll who loves diamonds, big cars and "princes charming". In terms of Russian dolls, Natalia Potanin can indeed already take another exam... that you can check in the profiles of CQMI members of her age, because this woman of a millionaire who was born in the early 60s, would have difficulty competing with "dolls" members of the CQMI Agency... even of her age and if we can talk about Russian dolls at the age of 55 or 58 years...

Maria Sobol, a "Russian doll" who will certainly have received her cheque... to shoot the report.

To justify the title of the report and make it look as if all Russian women (dolls) dream of Natalia Potanin's fate, German journalists are staging the young Maria Sobol. She is a very young Russian woman, who came from the back of the province and is about to go up to the capital to pursue a career... and above all as she says "discover Prince Charming" because "she believes in fairy tales". It is then that in a few minutes, alternating with the story of Natalia-Cosette Potanina, the young girl serves as a justification for the whole report. First presented in her universe, or rather in the universe of her grandparents' house (in order to look older, poor and retrograde), the young girl is then systematically staged, and the whole scenario is skilfully written and planned in advance. If tomorrow I were to take to the streets to report in Moscow on young Russian women who would like to find Prince Charming, then I would have all the difficulties in the world, because no one would want, especially as a foreign media, to appear before a camera to play the agreed role of the service pot... Then where does Maria Sobol come from? This is something we have already seen, for example, in dishonest wedding agencies in Ukraine or Russia, young women who are willing to be "false members" for money, or here to be cheap for a misleading report. After all, for money, since this report is never broadcast in Russia, nor seen by anyone or almost anyone in the Russian-speaking world, it is a good deal for the young girl.

Recruited and selected by a classified ad and a casting, a few thousand rubles for a young girl who needs money is indeed an unhoped-for windfall. Do you think that the team of German journalists discovered her in the streets of her village while wandering in the countryside of the Russian steppes? Of course not. It is likely that the girl was already in Moscow and that the scene of the departure with the grandparents, of the famous speech heard from her grandmother, was a pretty text written in advance and recited wisely in front of the camera. Since then, the famous seduction classes in a specialized school in Moscow have certainly been paid for by the German documentary director, as well as a number of the young person's actions, including his short trip to a fancy and paid nightclub, or his makeover session. We are here in a reality TV game that seems more real to our German or French-speaking friends because the vast majority of them have never set foot in Russia or Ukraine. Based on all the negative things repeated in half a century about Russia, the imagination of mocking viewers only has to let it happen, complain, cry with Natalia, to be surprised by Maria's naivety... and to congratulate herself for having guessed of course that the young woman would return to peel naughty potatoes in the Isba of her Babushka "in order to find herself a good and docile Russian peasant, well from the countryside". With 545,000 views, however, the video will have been loved by only a few thousand people on this YouTube version, for only 213 who will have understood the trickery... It is here that we can finally be saddened by the state of critical thinking, the understanding of the world around us, but this is another story.

Destroy the Russian and Ukrainian woman.

After such a report... "in a world of wolves where only money prevails between human relationships, without love", this is how the Slavic woman comes out once again milled, skinned, crushed and laminated, without anyone taking the lead to say deception, to say that definitely not Russian women are not only victims of horrible oligarchs close to power, that Ukrainian women are not only interested in money, and that Russian and Ukrainian girls are not idiots, dreamers, beasts and brainwashed who will be victims in the Slavic seraglio of evil men, in a black and cruel world, with poverty or the repression of a dictatorship as the only alternatives. At the CQMI Agency we have nearly 250 videos of members from Russia, Ukraine and elsewhere in the Eastern countries… If some of them might look like Maria, none of them are of Natalia's social level and the interest in broadcasting such reports has only one purpose: to denounce the Slavic woman as a victim at best, a turkey with venal slurs at worst, and in any case evolving in a terrifying world. This desire to destroy the Russian woman subtly perspires from the details of the report, there is here both dishonesty, using exoticism and surfing on the wave of Russianophobia. Because for the reader who will not know much about this world, a documentary filmmaker actually has only one objective in mind at the end of his work: to sell his documentary to a television channel...

In this profession, therefore, contrary to what is shown in investigative journalism, and in the vast majority of cases, whatever the subject, documentaries are instrumentalized in relation to an editorial line, a request from the latter, a political or geopolitical need, dictated by events in the world and also in what the public wants to see and review. With the birth of reality TV in the late 1990s, the so-called "people" media also underwent an unprecedented wave of expansion, which allowed the distribution of hundreds of magazines on the selling themes of celebrities, their lives (private and possibly sexual), sex, blood, the exotic, the new, the unseen or the shocking. From bottom to top we have a distorted report by the interests of a millionaire woman struggling in a difficult divorce (against a man falsely shown as the richest man in Russia), by a friendly and kind girl who has only collected a few thousand rubles (in euros perhaps a few dozen or two or three hundred?) to better live and afford some clothes and gadgets of the moment, the need for a director to run his shop and make a living from his productions, as well as the orders or needs of a Franco-German editorial staff in the spirit of the times. We will never know if the report had been commissioned from the director before, or if it was shot and then proposed to editors... but it is difficult to believe that a filmmaker embarks on a trip to Moscow with a whole team, visa fees, salaries, travel, transport, taking such a risk of unprofitability... unless he had the information that perhaps if he proposed something well felt about Russia, then the man could easily receive his cheque and also make his butter in history. So everyone's happy?

At the CQMI Agency, we notice every day the drifts of such reports, the reflections of stupid and wicked people, or "great truths" about Slavic, Russian and Ukrainian women in social networks, on the Internet or in the mouths of journalists and various public figures. In a few decades, the famous Nathalie of Gilbert Bécaud's 1964 song, has become a vulgar, stupid, venal, pitiable and pathetic woman and we sometimes even wonder how far this deformatory journalism could take us. By indulging in caricature, either out of financial interest, political calculation or simple stupidity or malice, directors, journalists, editors and even cameramen, all these people, including the two women in the report, will have shown only a certain intellectual dishonesty in the making or participation in such a film. At CQMI we defend strong values, whose transparency and honesty are regularly promoted and firmly defended. We invite our future members to become in their turn defenders of Slavic women and the Slavic world, because it is precisely in concrete terms, on a daily basis that we can change things, that we can no longer accept such ways of doing things, because very often it is with public money that these films are made, that these people are paid (sometimes grossly). The hundreds of women, certainly with their qualities and faults, who are members of the CQMI, deserve to be defended for them, because to be married to a Slavic woman, a Russian woman, I must affirm the immense happiness I experience and how incredible these women are, to say so is still too little! Screaming it is at least the minimum.

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