The Russians

Russian men have a reputation for a slam-bam-thank-you-ma'am approach to sex.

Some women privately retort to the complaints of their husbands that the way Russian men make love, the women do not get much sexual satisfaction anyway.

"For each birth, we figure two abortions," Dr. Bloshansky said. "In Moscow we have almost the same statistics as New York — about 200,000 abortions [in 1973]. That includes both abortions and miscarriages. Abortions are about 85 percent [or 170,000]."

Soviet condoms are so thick and clumsy that they destroy all sexual pleasure and men told me they refused to use them.

Privately, Russians have a lively, earthy approach to sex-in-the-flesh whether on university campuses, in writers' homes or in any other mixed group setting that lends itself to promiscuity. Privately they relish dirty jokes and gossip about other people's infidelities. But in public, they have a Victorian squeamishness about candid discussion of the biology of sex, and "in public" can mean just two people.

To me, one of the most attractive features of Russian life is the strength of family feelings and the deeply felt sense of responsibility from generation to generation.

The high divorce rate (about 28 percent in 1974 compared to 43 in America, though in Moscow it was said to be about 50 percent) is further evidence of the strains of modern urban life, intensified by pressures on working women and the housing squeeze which allows individuals little privacy.

Roughly 60 million women were at work in 1974, close to 85 percent of all working-age women, the highest percentage in the industrialized world (in America the figure was just about 50 percent).

I recall one leading Russian journalist, back in Moscow after a visit to the United States, unhappily contending that "American men are under the thumbs of their wives."

For centuries, Russians have been flooding Westerners with vodka as a form of hospitality which conveniently numbs the travelers' critical faculties.