Before Anastassija Tuman goes into her workshop, she carefully puts on make-up.

She puts on a black jogging suit and neon yellow platform sneakers, puts on a cap.

The long hair underneath is a hydrogen-blonde, her fingernails are perfectly painted.

Tuman, a 29-year-old petite woman, is a car mechanic in Moscow.

Her mini-workshop, as she calls it, is located in an industrial park on the edge of a dusty parking lot where men tinker with construction vehicles.

Katharina Wagner

Business correspondent for Russia and the CIS based in Moscow.

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    Tuman opens the gates to a tall garage that only fits a single car.

    Customers don't come here anyway: The place is just the backdrop for Tuman's videos, which are seen up to four million times on YouTube.

    In it she refurbishes used cars and sells them on;

    drives a taxi in tuned cars and surprises the passengers with her fast-paced driving style, or she introduces other Russian women who love cars, truck and racing drivers, in the series “Car Girls”.

    The fact that they usually look just as dazzling as Tuman, who herself likes to appear in skimpy clothes, may contribute to the success of her blog.

    At least for the female fans, who have recently become more, something else is likely to be decisive: that women like Tuman are an exception in Russia.

    Until recently, car repair was one of the 456 activities classified as potentially hazardous to health that were actually forbidden to Russian women.

    At the beginning of this year, the list was reduced to just under 100 professions, since then women have officially been allowed to repair cars, drive trucks and tractors and drive metro trains;

    However, they are still not allowed to work underground in the mine or in the production of certain chemicals.

    "Giving monkeys a hand grenade to play with"

    Tuman never bothered about such prohibitions, she doesn't even know for sure that there was one. At 19, she decided on her own to become a car mechanic out of anger that her father's Lada kept breaking and she was being ripped off in the workshop. It was only used in the tenth of ten workshops in Volgodonsk in southwest Russia. And there, too, she initially heard from some customers that she should better cook soup or do her nails. Tuman talks about it without bitterness, rather with amusement. In her videos she wants to show that such stereotypes are not true, that a woman at the wheel is not the same as "giving a monkey a hand grenade to play with", which can only end in disaster, as a Russian joke put it .

    The role of women in Russia is clearly defined. On the one hand, it has to be strong, because in addition to work, she is usually responsible for household and children and also has to compensate for the weakness of the men, who often leave the family, add to alcohol and die on average about ten years earlier. On the other hand, women must not show this strength, they should remain feminine, soft and delicate. This is drummed into her on television, at work, by her mother; so she constantly goes for a manicure and doesn't leave the house without make-up, and she wears short skirts and stilettos even in winter.