Russian RouletteMail-order brides gamble on a better life By RICK E. BRUNER In the new thriller "Birthday Girl," Nicole Kidman plays Nadia, a Russian mail-order bride who moves to a small town in England to marry mild-mannered bank clerk John Buckingham (played by Ben Chaplin). John is disturbed to learn that Nadia speaks no English, but a week of kinky sex eases his troubled mind. For a while, anyway — until her two Russian "cousins" arrive on her birthday and turn John's life inside out. "I think it was quite believable. The whole story could be true," said Oksana Katsuro-Hopkins after a preview screening last week. She's quite familiar with the subject, being a Russian mail-order bride herself. Katsuro-Hopkins' story is quite different from Nadia's. No thuggish old friends have shown up at her upper East Side apartment to terrorize her husband of two years, Douglas Hopkins. But she understands how a girl like Nadia might find herself in that situation, given Russia's economic straits, lawlessness and mores that stress a woman's loyalty to her man. While mail-order brides have been the subject of many recent exposés, the practice is not new. The brokering of wives in this country goes back to the days of the Pony Express, when men on the frontier ordered East Coast spouses from catalogues. Today, Web sites such as VolgaGirl.com, A-Russian-Bride.com and Special-Lady.com bring together foreign brides, generally from poor countries, and Western men. The sites, which usually make their money providing dating and travel services, have turned a once-obscure practice into a small but fast-growing industry. Reliable statistics about the industry, which is largely unregulated, are hard to come by. A report that the Immigration and Naturalization Service presented to Congress in 1999 estimated there were then at least 200 agencies in the business of promoting foreign women, principally from the Philippines, Russia and Ukraine, to marriage-minded men, resulting in as many as 6,000 marriages annually. Industry observers say the number of agencies has grown closer to 1,000 in recent years. Introducing the Hopkinses In many ways, the Hopkinses could be poster children for the "international introduction service" industry. After a year-long E-mail courtship that began on one-and-only.com and included two visits by Hopkins to Russia, Katsuro-Hopkins moved to Manhattan. She left behind a dorm room in Obninsk, a small city, populated largely by scientists, not far from Moscow. Katsuro-Hopkins, 28, is a bombshell of James Bondian proportions. She's tall, blond and gorgeous, a Columbia University doctoral student of plasma physics and a helluva cook, if she does say so herself. Her American husband, while not quite 007, is charming (if somewhat eccentric). The tall, handsome 55-year-old is a former volcanologist and fashion photographer who has made his living for the last decade running Douglas Hopkins & Co., which markets a luxury perfume line. With Oksana, Hopkins says he has found "an emotional simplicity." By all appearances, the Hopkinses are a perfectly happy couple. Both claim the 27-year age difference is a nonissue. Hopkins is clearly delighted that his bride is such a looker. And if his doting attention verges on controlling, its worst manifestations appear to be correcting her English frequently and pushing her on the career front. Hopkins claims he was drawn to one-and-only.com by a friend. "One day, I was hanging out with some buddies in their 70s, and they were all still single, and I realized I didn't want to be like them," recalls Hopkins, who dropped out of Manhattan's dating scene while he was building his business. "One of them invited us to watch a mail-order-bride video of a tour in Russia. The men were losers but the women sparkled. ... That night, I went online." What's the Motivation? Marriage-minded men attracted to mail-order-bride arrangements frequently cite being "sick of the dating scene" as a reason, along with the "traditional values" of the women. This can mean everything from being family-focused and a good cook to being subservient. Craig Rich, a social worker from Boonton, N.J., says it's hard to "pigeonhole" what led him to the Web agency where he found his Russian wife, Arina: "All four of my grandparents were immigrants from Russia. I was in my early 40s and had never married. I had dropped out of the singles scene and wanted to try something different." Typically, women are recruited via ads and parties and by word of mouth to post their photos and biographies in a Web database, normally for free. The men browse through the listings, then pay for access to E-mail addresses of women who interest them (typically, $5-$15 per name). Additional fees can mount up for translation services (for E-mail, letters, calls and visits), gift delivery and travel arrangements, among other things. It is not unusual for a man to spend $10,000 in his quest for a bride. At the point when an American man decides to propose to a woman abroad, the woman will be issued a three-month fiancé visa; after that, the couple must marry, or she will have to return home. A few lucky women meet Prince Charming. Others may not fall in love, but find that America's Joe Sixpack is not so bad. But in an unfortunate number of cases, marrying a virtual stranger can lead to abuse and even murder. Ripe for Abuse In "Birthday Girl," it is the husband who is the victim, and there have been cases of men falling prey to marriage fraud, confidence games and worse. (Some cite the case of Texas oilman Maple Hughes, who died under suspicious circumstances in Ukraine in 1997 after following his reluctant bride back to her homeland.) Far more often, however, it is the women who are the victims of mail-order marriages gone bad. In the last decade, at least seven Russians and Filipinos have been slain by men who brought them to this country as mail-order brides. Seattle has seen two such killings, one in 1995 in which the husband shot his pregnant Filipino wife and two of her friends in an open courtroom. Indle King is now on trial in Portland for the murder of his Russian wife in 2000. Critics allege that the businesses engage in a form of trafficking of women. "I see it as a wing of the global sex industry," says Dorchen Leidholdt, a lawyer for Sanctuary for Families, a New York City support organization for victims of domestic abuse. Leidholdt represents two mail-order brides from the former Soviet Union who she says were terribly abused by their American husbands. In one case, she says, the man, a thrice-divorced New York City schoolteacher, raped and beat his wife and forced her to pose for pornographic photos. He has recently been making trips back to Russia, apparently searching for his next victim, Leidholdt reports. "I'm not saying there are no happy couples, but it's rooted in profound inequalities and it is ripe for abuse," she argues. "Financial inequality, gender inequality, age inequality, immigration status ... I think that a certain type of man is attracted to the mail-order bride industry ... a man who's not comfortable with equality in a sexual relationship with a woman." That seems to describe Bob and Tanya's relationship. Tanya, 39 (she requested that their last names not be used), met Bob in 1999 at a party in St. Petersburg, Russia, arranged by an international marriage-tour agency. The guest list comprised 400 women and 15 men. Bob, 19 years her senior, asked Tanya out and, after three dates and lots of sign language, shocked her with a proposal. He had come to find a wife, he said, and needed her answer by the next day. As far as the agency was concerned, Tanya was one of the lucky ones. Her situation was desperate. The government had not paid her meager bookkeeping salary for months. She lived with her hyperactive 13-year-old son in a single room at a communal boarding house. She had been attending mail-order-bride parties for more than a year after a friend urged her to come along, but before she met Bob, she never really took them seriously. "I figured the worst that could happen would be I would have a threemonth vacation in America and get a break from my miserable life in Russia," she says ruefully. What she got instead was a holiday in hell. She gives this account: From the first morning in America, Bob either ignored Tanya and her son or issued humiliating demands. At parties with his colleagues, he would simply point at her and then at the place where he wanted her to stand. He said he didn't want her to eat much, so she was always hungry. Although Bob never became violent, Tanya says, his psychological abuse was unrelenting. He tracked her and the boy's behavior on a chart, doling out plus and minus signs for dozens of activities, including her sexual performance. He refused to let her call, E-mail or even write a letter to anyone in Russia. After six weeks, she says, an American-Russian couple she barely knew came to the rescue, spiriting her and the boy away when Bob wasn't home. Two and a half years later, Tanya is married to a 76-year-old American man in failing health whom she says she loves. Her son is happy and doing well as school, but Tanya is still troubled by immigration problems and haunting memories. Horror at Home Abuse of mail-order brides is not rare, judging by the anecdotal evidence. Leidholdt urges that more countries adopt measures similar to a 1990 Philippine rule that forbids bride brokers from operating in that country, the only such law on the books. "The mail-order-bride industry was bringing in big money to the Philippines, which is under pressure from the World Bank and the IMF to earn foreign money," Leidholdt says. "The only reason those politicians passed the legislation was because of public pressure after feminists brought case after case after case to the media of Filipino women who fled abusive American husbands they met as mail-order brides. The Philippines has seen the cost of this industry for decades. The newly independent states [of the former Soviet Union] are new to this game and have not yet seen the costs." Leidholdt believes obtaining mail-order brides should simply be illegal worldwide. "What's wrong with these men that they can't meet women over here?" she asks. Many Americans would agree with her, but impoverished Russian women are often willing to overlook these men's shortcomings if it means building a better life. And then there are the cases that go beyond marriages of convenience. Finding Her Future For Arina Rich in New Jersey, finding happiness in her mail-order marriage meant keeping her eyes wide open. It was originally her mother's idea that Rich, then 18, look for a husband — and a better future — through the Internet. "I didn't like life in Russia. The environment and the people are very nice, but there was no bright future there," she explains. Two years later, after she corresponded online with about 10 men, Craig came along. He sent her gifts, wrote romantic messages and ultimately flew her to Prague from her hometown of Togliatti, Russia, so they could meet. "We met, and he wasn't like the prince in my life, but I tried to do my best," recalls Arina. They were married three years ago, when she was 20. With Craig's help, Arina has set up her own business making custom window treatments. Craig, meanwhile, was so happy with his mail-order marriage, he decided to start a business. He now runs VolgaGirl.com in his spare time, employing a growing staff here and in Russia. "Some girls hope their white knight will come, but most just try their best to be good wives," says Arina. "When we moved here, and I got to know him better, I fell in love with him. But not in Prague." Original Publication Date: 1/31/02 Purveyors of fine royal, ancient, or lost apothecarial discoveries. Tel: 212.327.2020 www.DouglasHopkins.com Email:
[email protected] Fax: 530.327.6107 Douglas Hopkins & Co.