MOSCOW - Glass breaking, overturning furniture, muffled thuds. A woman screaming from a downstairs apartment: "I'm being killed! I'm being killed!"
It's midnight, and three floors up, in a cozy kitchen with a kettle on the boil and pipes gurgling behind the curtains, neighbor Tania Kucherecnko shrugs off any suggestion that she should call the police.
"It's the same every Saturday night. The husband comes home drunk and beats her. There's nothing we can do," Kucherenko, a 42-year-old teacher, says nervously. "It's best not to interfere."
Violence against women is perhaps Russia's most invisible problem. It is the underside of a surface culture of sentiment and gallantry, in which men help women into their coats and out of cars and buses, open doors for them, light their cigarettes, drink toasts to feminine grace and beauty, call women 'girls' until they are 50 and buy bunches of red carnations to give them every March 8, International Women's Day.
At the same time, comtempt for the female sex runs deep. Among its more dramatic expressions are the possibility that women who dare leave their husbands can lose their legal status and right to a home; the expectation that a woman applying for a new job should be ready to sleep with her boss; and even the growth of a slave trade of women bartered internationally for sex through organized crime groups.
Usually, however, this contempt takes physical form in black eyes and broken bones.
Many men will laugh with resignation and tell stories about the neighbor who gets drunk and beats his wife; a surprising number of women, in strict confidence, tell close friends about the times their husbands have beaten them.
The Russian government recently suggested that violence occurs in one our of four familes here, said Matina Vandenburg, former coordinator for the Newly Independent States' U. S. Women's Consortium, a Moscow-based umbrella group of women's organizations from Russia and other former Warsaw Pact states as well as from the United States.
But the government does not collect specific statistics on violence against women. Such attacks are hidden in statistical items such as "light, bodily injury," and "hooliganism."
The attitude of passivity in Russia is such that, between 1993 and 1996, not a single sexual harassment case went to court in the Russian Federation, and, between 1995 and 1996, the number of rapes reported to the police fell from 12,515 to 10,888.
Such official figures - contrast to the nearly 100,000 rapes reported in 1995 in the United States - are virtually meaningless, women who have experienced domestic violence agree. All they show is that victims seldom bother going to the corrupt and mostly male police, knowing in advance that they will not get a sympathetic hearing.
"Why bother with the police?" You'd need to show them medical certificates proving your bones were smashed before they'd even begin to listen," said Natasha.
This poised, highly educated, 26-year-old economist recently divorced her 42-year-old entrepreneur husband after eight years of physical abuse. "Even if you did get compensation for assault, it would be a tiny token sum, like $20, and then he would be home again - and angry again.
Zinaida Batrakova, deputy chair of the Moscow Union of Lawyers, believes women's hesitance about pressing charges against violent partners is the start of a vicious spiral that makes police reluctant to weigh in on their behalf. "A woman being beaten up by her husband would call for help. Then, facing jail or a fine that would sit on the family budget - and the fact that the situation would be worse when he got out of jail - many women would beg the police not to put her man in jail," Batrakova said. "The police start to think of it has a joke, even when it is very serious."
The wrenching changes in every Russian life over the past decade have only made a traditional problem worse, according to Natalia Gavrilenko, deputy director of Women in Danger, one of just two shelters for battered women in the country of 150 million people. A clean, bare dwelling place in Russia's second city, St. Petersburg, it is designed to house 17 people but is often packed with up to 30.
"In Soviet days, at least there were authorities that battered women could complain to - their employer, their local party organization or the trade union representatives. They could ask the bosses to influence their husband to behave better," Gavrilenko said, referring to an era when alcoholism and cramped, claustrophobic housing were the typical family's worst problems. "But with perestroika, those avenues were closed off."
"Suddenly, women faced worse violence because the times became so stressful. Men suddenly threatened with unemployment, instability, unbelievably high prices and crime on all sides were far more likely than before to take out their resentments on the women at home."
Gavrilenko says 565,000 crimes agains women were committed in Russia in 1994, and more than 600,000 in 1996. She calls the secretive violence that has ripped through Russian homes since the Soviet collapse an "undeclared war."
The center's first aim is to overcome Russian women's reluctance to go to the police and the courts. Its lawyers pursue divorce and assault cases; they also fight for their clients' right to a "propiska," the hard-to-get residence permit. Many fugitive wives lose their propiski - and thier official right to live and work - by fleeing their family homes; without new pemits, it is almost impossible for them to make a fresh start. Gavrilenko worries that the shelter - whose clients so far have mostly been middle-class and educated women "who've heard our radio ads and realized there is an escape route" - is failing to reach a whole desperate lower layer of society, the less-educated women who have not yet begun to believe that any way out of their private misery is even possible.
Following the worldwide trend toward what Vandenberg calls "the feminization of poverty," this low-status female underclass has been growing in Russia since the Soviet collapse. The World Bank estimates that the average working woman in Russia earns just 71 percent of what a man does per hour. Women are banned from more that 460 well-paid job categories by the Labor Ministry, which considers these jobs harmful to their reproductive health.
Within Russian families, most spouses have kept traditional gender-based roles, with working women shopping and cleaning and cooking while their men drive and change light bulbs.
But Soviet child-care programs have collapsed from lack of state funding, putting new pressures on women to stay home. More than 70 percent of the officially unemployed are now women.
Even in the thriving private businesses of now-Glitzy Moscow, few women expect equal salaries for equal work or equal work for equal qualifications. In the land that political correctness forgot, no one raises and eyebrow at job ads for women stipulating that only the young need to apply, and even then only those who are leggy, scantily clad and "bez kompleksov" - without hangups, or willing to have sex with the boss.

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The adjacent description of the plight of Russian women shows a potent contrast to our relatively civilized society.

On the other side of the world, the struggle against oppression is at a different place in its evolution.

Our nation's egalitarian ideals compel us to open the world to include all people - the goal is to provide space for everyone to thrive.

This noble ambition challenges ugly, deeply entrenched human tendencies.

Brutality by men against the weak is commonplace throughout history, and throughout the world. Everywhere but in the manicured shelter of civilization.

The recent history of Russia reminds us of how order can descend into chaos with just a few twists of economical-political fate.

The underlying, and perhaps unanswerable, question of why some men turn into sadistic bullies, is where the real problem is. It is impossible to understand why some people enjoy generating hate and causing pain, but they do. Some inner torment must drive them to it.

Bigotry crops up like bindweed despite the best efforts of the social engineers. These 'gardeners' of society make progress in one place, lose ground in another.

This consciousness-raising is a gradual process, and parallels the elevation of general knowledge and education.

Prescriptive linguists, those who would raise consciousness by steering the evolution of language, are among the most daring and optimistic of social engineers.

Are their efforts effective? Perhaps. Bigotry is in the closet now - (it seems there always has to somebody in there) maybe it will go away.

P.C. is part of the equation. The deeper work of eliminating cruelty and instilling kindness depends on many things. Prosperity is one. When people don't have to grovel to survive, they can develop their consciousness. Poverty is the medium in which hatred and cold-blooded oppression thrives. (Of course some prosperous people are cruel, and some impoverished monks are enlightened, too...)

But it is not constrained to economic poverty. Spiritual poverty among society's powerful is starkly apparent. Governments tacitly permit genocide in Mexico, Algeria, Africa, Palestine, Russia, China - the list goes on and on. Corporate kingpins exploit people, the environment, and whole societies. Their hearts must be in dire poverty, to the point that some aren't even aware of it.

Mismanagement of society (and yes, like any endeavor, it MUST be managed) both helps to create and is a product of the seed problem: Arrogant, contemptuous, de-humanizing "Fundamentalism." Whatever justification is used, these attitudes are anti-human, anti-life, and doomed to extinction. They encourage the disorder that engenders cold-bloodedness.

Any belief system (even P.C.) is prone to the calcification that brings fundamentalist inflexibility.

Curing society is an individual responsibility. Every increment of progress is of benefit.

Good mental and physical advice is: "STAY FLEXIBLE."

If everyone would mend someone, then would all be mended.