East meets West on love's risky cyberhighway

The potential dangers of dabbling in cyberromance are dramatized in a recent film, Birthday Girl, in which Nicole Kidman plays a mail order bride from Moscow who brings a gang of Russian mafia thugs crashing into the life of her English bank-clerk beau. In real life, the sting is usually more mundane: An unsuspecting Western man falls in love after a few gushing e-mail exchanges with a false identity posted on a Web site – sometimes the photos are actually of a Russian actress or fashion model – and is persuaded to wire cash for a ticket to visit him, or to meet some personal emergency.

"A woman can string a man along, playing on his emotions and sympathy and, in doing so, trick him into giving her money or expensive items,'' says Paul O'Brien, a US Web designer who has temporarily given up his search for a Russian wife after being burned by two women who just wanted money from him.

Mr. O'Brien says he resorted to the Internet because of America's fast-paced, impersonal and workaholic culture. "A lot of guys I know work many, many hours and do not have time for a social life,'' he says. "So it seems particularly appealing to them when these agencies offer to help them make contact with beautiful and single women," he says, but warns: "Prospective suitors need to be very wary of the women out there who have no intention of developing a relationship with them.''

Most of the known scams are now listed on a special website supported by several matchmaking agencies, http://www.russian-scam.org/

Russian women insist it is they who face the greatest hazards. Many have heard about Anastasia Solovyova, a Russian from the former Soviet republic of Kyrgyztan, who was murdered by her American husband two years ago. She had been his second mail- order bride. Experts say there are many more tales of miserable, and sometimes tragic, mismatches.

"You come to a strange country, to meet a man you've only corresponded with by e-mail,'' says Ivanova. "There are issues of language, culture and personal morality. It takes a lot of trust, and for some women it goes badly wrong.''

After her many encounters, Ivanova says she now advises her clients not to consider men from the US at all. ''American men are not cultured, they work too much and think far too much about money,'' she says. ''Western European men are different. When they correspond with a prospective bride, they look upon it as forming a relationship. American men act as if they're buying a wife.''

In any case, the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, which brought the Russian and US governments closer together may, paradoxically, have put at least a temporary damper on the love fest.

Tamara Babkina, deputy director of Wedding Palace No. 4, which is the only office in Moscow where foreigners can legally marry, says that until last year, Americans were the largest group marrying Russian women. "We had 175 US-Russian weddings in 2001, but since Sept. 11 there has not been a single one," Ms. Babkina says.

While no one wants to go on the record criticizing love, some experts argue that the Westward outflow of Russian women must be viewed as a baneful social indicator.

"Russia has become the world's leading exporter of wives, and this is a tremendously profitable business,'' says Ms. Gurko.

"It may be a real supply-and-demand situation," she says, "but let's try to remember that this vast supply of terrific women is made up of individuals whose hopes have been crushed in Russia.

"It's so sad that, in order to seek a better life, a Russian woman has to leave."

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