Alt-Masculinity and the Stiliagi

In “Strange Young Men in Stalin’s Moscow: The Birth and Life of the Stiliagi, 1945-1953,” Mark Edele describes the alternative masculinity articulated and embodied by the image-conscious, musically engaged, and socioeconomically well-placed stiliagi of the immediate post-war period as a “struggle to find a positive sense of gendered self in the absence of the defining trait of postwar masculinity – wartime heroism.” (Edele, 39) Edele credits the lack of inclusion of women as both an inevitability due to both the lack of female gender contestation necessitating a new female identity post-war, and to the stiliagi’s identity strictly as Man, and therefore concerning a male audience. As a result, the stiliagi Alternative Man is a wealthy, educated, socially protected being who builds his identity in collaboration with other well placed men, fundamentally in opposition to both women and “normals” (both wartime heroes i.e. the epitome of mainstream postwar masculinity, and those less socially and socioeconomically well placed). Implicitly, Edele is thus making the statement that the stiliagi identity was built off the exclusion of women, with the exception of parties (with the expectation of sex), for the good of their collective masculine identities. How can we place women in this context? Or rather, can we say that to an extent, the stiliagi identity would not be possible without acknowledging women explicitly as both objects of desire and objects of disdain? Is it possible or productive to understand the stiliagi’s articulation of their gender through a Western feminist lens? Additionally, I’m interested in the class-based exclusions of the original stiliagi. Given the sheild their socioeconomic positions afforded them from official retaliation in the Stalinist period, could the ultimate growth of stiliagi masculinity in different socioeconomic groups be attributed at least partially to the mild post-Stalinist easing of State discipline against subversive groups?