Scamski City

People are fools if they want to find a wife on the internet.

It is not real. I correspond with a whole division of Westerners - and they are all idiots.

From an article in the Daily Mail.

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From the About Time Department

Green Card rules relaxed. Now those lengthy FBI clearances -- detailed in my recent investigative piece -- will be reduced.
See The New York Times for more.

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Geography of the Heart

The Geography of the Heart
How US immigration law divides families
By Stephan Clark

One Sunday almost four years ago, Thomas Carson, a 50-year old electrical engineer with corporate commendations from Nabisco and General Electric, parked his KIA Sportsman near the US-Mexico border and waited.

It was after dark in Las Milpas, once the largest colonia – or border settlement – in South Texas. Since being absorbed by the City of Pharr to the north in the late-eighties, this community of low- and very low-income Hispanics had almost doubled in size, reaching a population of 17,000. It had also received the type of things most Americans believe lacking in only the third world: running water and electricity, sewer service and paved roads. With such improvements, the community no longer laid claim to the state’s highest incidence of tuberculosis, Hepatitis A and leprosy, and it had even attracted the development of a Jack in the Box.

But one thing about Las Milpas remained unchanged in July 2003: its close proximity to the border. It was that which brought people like Carson here, just as the North American Free Trade Act (NAFTA) had brought business to the Pharr-Reynosa International Bridge, then not quite ten years old.

Carson parked near the intersection of Highway 281 and East Dicker Road. Beside him in his SUV was his son, 11-month-old Thomas Alexander, secure in his baby-seat. Further south was the boy’s mother, Carson’s girlfriend of five years, one Lucia Ramirez Hernandez. This night, she wouldn’t be traveling over Pharr’s celebrated bridge.

Hernandez had attempted that crossing in Jan. 1999, just a few months before a fire at a maquiladora in Reynosa would send Carson south of the border on work. Her crime that day was simple: after being stopped in a car with Texas plates, she made a false claim of U.S. citizenship.

Since 1996, when Congress last overhauled immigration law, this act has drawn a punishment as severe – a lifetime ban on entering the United States – as it is permanent. Hernandez cannot appeal or seek a waiver. She is no different than the terrorists, communists and practicing polygamists also singled out by law. She has no means of appeal.

“It wouldn’t matter if someone had a pistol to your side and you drove up to the border crossing and said, ‘I’m a US citizen,’” said Carson. “That’s it. You’re inadmissible. You don’t have a case.”

And so that night four years ago, while Carson and Thomas Alexander waited in the dark, Hernandez stepped into the river that runs along the Texas border between the Gulf of Mexico and El Paso. It is a tributary President Bush knows well. Going back to his days as Governor of Texas, he has frequently said family values do not end at the Rio Grande.

After emerging on the other side, Hernandez got into a car and continued toward her family. Carson spotted her passing the little strip plaza where they’d agreed to meet. He followed her to an area home, where Hernandez changed clothes and got into Carson’s SUV. The three then drove north – father, son and mother – toward the secondary inspection point at Falfurrias.

Eight months previous, Carson, a US Navy veteran, had imagined a reunion of another sort, petitioning for an immigrant’s visa on behalf of Hernandez and her two children from a previous relationship. But the false claim of U.S. citizenship derailed that effort, and so the descendant of five American veterans of five different foreign wars had been left with only what he’d been taught in the military: if you are captured, you must try to escape.

“We were desperate,” he said. “I don’t know what else to tell you.“

Parts 2-8 of this story can be purchased at Amazon.

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Mail-Order Integration

Seems marriage tours are "fueling an explosive growth in marriages to foreigners in South Korea, a country whose ethnic homogeneity lies at the core of its self-identity."

From the NY Times:

More and more South Korean men are finding wives outside of South Korea, where a surplus of bachelors, a lack of marriageable Korean partners and the rising social status of women have combined to shrink the domestic market for the marriage-minded male. Bachelors in China, India and other Asian nations, where the traditional preference for sons has created a disproportionate number of men now fighting over a smaller pool of women, are facing the same problem.

The article says that marriages to foreigners accounted for 4 percent of all South Korean marriages in 2000. In 2005, that figure was up to 14 percent.

Also interesting:

In South Korea, billboards advertising marriages to foreigners dot the countryside, and fliers are scattered on the Seoul subway. Many rural governments, faced with declining populations, subsidize the marriage tours, which typically cost $10,000.

The article also said gender-screening technology may play a part in all this, as it allows for a disproportionate number of male babies in a culture that values them over females.

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What did you call her?

A 29-year-old man accused or murder in Maine (the eerily named Steven Clark) is claiming he shot his friend, Robert Wagner, in self-defense after Mr. Wagner threatened him with a knife (following a night out at the strip club). What could have made Mr. Wagner so angry? According to a report Thursday by WCSH Channel 6 in Portland, Maine:

On the witness stand, Clark said Wagner went into a rage after Clark called his russian-born wife a mail-order bride. He said Wagner put a knife to his head and demanded a ride home.

Clark says he pushed Wagner to the ground, grabbed a gun off a bookshlef and made the decision to shoot at Wagner.

In Friday's report, the incident is reported somewhat differently: "Clark told jurors Wagner went into a rage after he insulted his wife, and pulled a knife on him."

You can read more about the murder trial in the Boston Globe. And more about the risks of dropping a loose "mail-order bride" in this .

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'I wouldn't mind a bit of that'

He's a pensioner, living in Wales, who while in the Navy took part in the British H-Bomb tests in the Christmas Islands in 1958. She's a 44-year-old in China, awaiting her final immigration clearance, who speaks little English. Together, they're man and wife, bangers and mash.

'People have said to me that she's just after a visa. To which I say: "Yes, of course she wants a visa. Of course she wants a better life. And who can blame her?" But it works both ways - I get companionship, so I think it's a fair gamble.

'It's all very well everyone taking the moral high ground but as far as I'm concerned that's their own pettiness. This is my life and after all my years, I've earned the right to do as I please.'

So how does a man who's had both hips replaced, is awaiting knee and hernia surgery, and who lives in a village that is home only to those of pensionable age, find a Chinese wife?

... a friend in the nursing home told Mr Miller he had seen an advert in a local newspaper for a dating agency which specialised in matching British lonely hearts with Chinese brides. 'He had already made an appointment so I asked if I could accompany him to see what it was all about,' Mr Miller recalls.

'When we got there, the man who ran the agency was a very ordinary man, not particularly attractive at all, I must say, and he had this lovely, attentive Chinese wife. It got me thinking. I thought: "I wouldn't mind a bit of that."

If you want to read more about this man's search for a companion, including reference to the troubles that come with using hand-held translators ("One time when I typed in 'affection' it came up with 'love for an elephant' instead.") read the even-handed Daily Mail article here. It may be the best bride-hunter profile I've come across. Certainly the most well-written.

If you don't have time for that, I'll leave you with the last line: 'I'm conscious of it possibly going wrong, of course I am,' says Mr Miller. 'But look at it the other way. I've got five, maybe ten years left on the clock. Six months ago, mine was a very vacant life. Now it's full and happy.

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The Political Coming Out of Sacramento's Slavic Community

Organizers of the annual Rainbow Festival were prepared for trouble.

The Q Crew, a local "queer/straight alliance," distributed cards telling people what to do if approached by hostile demonstrators. Sympathetic local church groups formed a protective buffer along the festival ground's cyclone fence. Mounted police were on patrol.

Jerry Sloan manned a table for Stand Up for Sacramento, a recently formed gay self-defense organization.

"So far, so good," he said. "No Russians."

Russians, as is so often the case in America, here means anyone from the Former Soviet Union, and in particular those Ukrainians in the Sacramento area who arrived ten or fifteen years ago but only recently have started to show an interest in local politics.

Numbering between 80,000 and 100,000, Sacramento's Slavic community isn't Jewish or Orthodox, but largely evangelical -- Baptist and Pentecostal. (The Pentecostal church was introduced into Ukraine in the 1920s by missionary and martyr Ivan Efimovich Vornaev.)

That the community chose to settle in Sacramento, making it the largest non-Jewish, non-Orthodox destination for Russian and Ukrainian immigrants, can be explained by the Cold War.

Before emigrating, many of the refugees learned about Sacramento from two sources: a short-wave fundamentalist religious radio program, "Word to Russia," that originated here, and a Russian-language newspaper, Our Days, that was printed in Sacramento and distributed to underground churches in the Soviet Union. A local Russian Baptist church persuaded several Sacramento evangelical churches to sponsor the refugees.

...

Michael Lokteff, 69, is a former high school teacher who was the voice of the "Word to Russia" broadcasts into the Soviet Union. A cheerful, white-haired lay Baptist who takes a glass of wine with his meals, Lokteff said that many of the immigrants were unprepared for culturally laissez-faire California.

In part, Lokteff blames his own broadcasts, which he said left the listeners with the impression that America, and particularly Sacramento, was a Christian bastion.

"They even thought my program was government-sponsored," Lokteff said. "They came here expecting a Christian commune, and all of a sudden the first thing they see is a gay parade."

An interesting article. Read it while you can.

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The Public Shaming of Harmon Lee

The longer I'm exposed to discussions of it, the more I see the subject handled by the media, the more I'm convinced "mail-order bride" is one of those phrases that instantly either sends a person into an ideological fit or reduces their intelligence by half.

Harmon Lee, a reporter with the Sacramento News & Review, may arrive here some lonely night when he googles himself for company. If so, he will see that's he is a part of the latter group, or one can only hope -- because that would suggest growth, wouldn't it? The realization that he done did it wrong?

Mr. Lee wrote an article on the "mail-order bride" industry. His editor probably said, "Write an article about mail-order brides," and so Mr. Lee spent an hour or two online, kept the ball game on mute, and wrote this in between bites of cold pizza. It is immmersion journalism, I guess, the writer pretending to call up a marriage agency to see how easy it is to find a wife.

After several rings, a tired-sounding woman with a Russian accent answers.

“I’d like to wed a Russian bride now!” I yell into the phone. “Can I get one delivered next week?”

“Uh, it’s a matter of the agreement with your bride if she wants to come here and live in North America.”

“Can I get more than one?” I whine.

“Yes, you can get many. The more you get, the more you order addresses.”

“But do I have to choose only one bride?” I clarify. “Can I marry many Russian brides?”

“I do not think that is possible,” the woman states flatly, popping my bubble.

“Then choose a bride for me!” I demand. “Now! Choose one now!”

“I don’t know your taste.”

“Red hair!” I blurt.

“What?”

“Can you get me one with red hair? I WANT A BRIDE WITH RED HAIR!”

“Red hair? We have many girls--aaah, I think--with red hair.” She checks. “Not really red, but reddish.”

“Reddish hair ... OK, that works,” I whimper. “But if she doesn’t like me, do I get a refund? Or, if she doesn’t like doing housework, do I get my money back?”

“It’s a matter of the girl’s likes and dislikes.”

“But there’s no money back if she doesn’t like doing my housework?”

“No!”

If I were an editor, I would have kept the first line. The rest -- I would have sat Harmon down and said, "Harmon, sit down. We know you're ignorant, but must the article be? Let's get at this with an intellectual fortitude that is not quite presidential, but at least greater than a high schooler dissecting a really good fart joke. What do you say? Can we do that?"

If you want to read more, go here.

I promise a more engaging read in the coming days. A play has been written on the subject of mail order brides, and from the excerpts I've read online, I can only say I wish I was in New York City so I could see a performance.

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NY Times writes about The Waiting

The Times posted a front-page article today about the waits men have to go through if they look online for a foreign bride.

The article is headlined Law on Overseas Brides is Keeping Couples Apart, and it details the added layers of bureaucracy that were created earlier this year when President Bush signed the International Marriage Broker Act of 2006. In short, the law states that men must provide information to marriage agencies about their criminal records, and women, when interviewed for their visa, must be asked if they met their fiance through a marriage broker, if only so they can be told that if they find themselves in an abusive relationship, they can seek permanent residency status without having to stay with their husband, who otherwise would have been their only connection to a life in this country. The law aims to protect women from an abusive relationship, in part because the marriage agencies advertise "traditional women," often describing them as submissive to a man's desires. The thinking goes, when he takes her home and finds out this isn't the case, he'll be more prone to strike out in anger.

This, to me, seems a leap in a logic, kind of along the lines of if-you-view-pornography-you-will-commit-an-act-of-violence-against-women. What causes violence against women? Unmet expectations? If so, every relationship would be abusive. The law really seems to be making an assumption: that the character of men seeking a foreign bride is questionable, and therefore added protections are needed.

Newspaper articles usually cites the murder of two women from the Former Soviet Union as evidence for the need for legislation. But it seems possible to me that two murders is well inside the statistical norm for society as a whole. Thirty-seven thousand women enter the country each year on a fiancee visa, up to half of them women who met their American partners through an online match-making service. These mail-order brides account for no less than ten percent of all immigration by marriage to the country each year, resulting in no less than 4,000 or 5,000 new immigrants each year. That's according to the results of a study conducted in 1996, before the current surge in internet match-making. Just since 1999, as the Times states, there's been a four-fold increase in the number of women entering the country on a fiancee visa.

One thing the article doesn't cover is the fears of the men in search of an internet bride. Several have suggested to me that they're now at risk to wrongful accusations of abuse, as a woman can more speedily receive her Green Card if she claims abuse and turns her back on her relationship.

Me, I'm not sure how the separate-but-equal thing works in Washington D.C. any more, but I can't understand how you can require a certain group of Americans to do one thing, but not the others. If RussianBrides.com-Jerry must present a criminal record before marriage, I don't see why YahooPersonals.com-Don mustn't -- if not all American men, and for that matter American women too.

It's very of this country, and I can already see how it'll look in fifty years. The marriage will start with a divorce ceremony, the two sides negotiating and switching papers, making offers and counter-offers, hiring detectives to test the validity of the other side's word. Then, once the lawyers have been paid, everyone will go off to the city office, say I do, and then go home loathing each other and secretly pining for a new start.

Two marriage agencies are challenging the law in court.

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The Voice of America: Get Married

The Voice of America profiled Natasha Spivack -- "a modern day matchmaker who arranges marriages between American men and Ukrainian and Russian women" -- last Valentine's Day, though it failed to report how a woman was awarded $434,000 in damages after Spivack set her up with an abusive American man. Don't expect the deep reporting from the VOA, just look for what it does offer, like an explanation of the type of men who use an internet marriage agency.

Ms. Spivack says they generally fall into four categories. “One group, these are men who are divorced, who have been married all their lives and have basically lost their dating skills, she says. They're used to family life and they want to continue that. The second group has never been married, they're probably in their late forties, early fifties. They are very picky. They probably are not married because all their lives they had this ideal, dreaming of somebody that they never found, and now they're trying Encounters International as something different. Typically, we find the woman of their dreams. And these are the happiest men, because if we cannot find [a match] for them, nobody can find it!”

Another group of clients are men who have Slavic roots, and are seeking a Russian or Ukrainian wife as a way of re-connecting with their heritage and culture. The final group includes what Ms. Spivack calls the neediest men - the hardship cases, men who are either handicapped or scarred or deformed. Natasha Spivack says she has been able to find matches for all her clients, no matter what their situation. And the divorce rate among her former clients is about 13 percent - as she points out, considerably lower than the divorce rate for the United States in general. Most of the divorces happen because of unrealistic expectations, she says. She herself is very clear-eyed about the matches she arranges.

A reprint of a Washingtonian profile of Spivack from 1998 is found on Spivack's Encounters International website. If you'd like to read more about "the land of milk and battery," go to this feminist news source.

The VOA also links to an article on the popularity of internet dating:

Jeff Cohen, a commentator and author of the e-book '30 Minute Guide to Online Dating' says, "In the US alone there is 30 million people that are online dating sites and they are generating $300 million per year in the US alone. So you can imagine as it grows into other markets like Asia and South America, the numbers are going to continue to grow."

ComScore Networks, a company that tracks e-commerce data, estimates people spend over $500 million a year for the most popular matchmaking companies such as Yahoo Personals, Match.com, eHarmony.com and Myspace.com.

* By the way, Galina, one of the women in the flashing photo, she's a dead ringer for First Lady Laura Bush.

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Hurricane Katrina and John McPhee

The New Yorker updated its site today, and the next issue (as could be expected) is focused on Hurricane Katrina and the devastation it caused. Though only an excerpt of John McPhee's The Control of Nature is available in the print magazine, the full piece can be found online. It's also one of many timeless essays in Literary Journalism, one of the books I'm bringing over to Ukraine.

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The Business of Love

Ukrainian travel agencies working in the inbound tourism sector are prospering. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs informed that this year the number of foreign tourists traveling to Ukraine has, so far grown by 15% in comparison with last year. This is a result of the seemingly free advertising of Ukraine through the “Orange Revolution”.
One may ask then what was the source of income of local travel agencies in previous years? Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, 50% of the earnings of certain large companies were made in the marriage business. Foreigners came to Ukraine predominantly with the aim of finding beautiful, obedient housewives, while the other half visited for tourism, business or personal and family purposes.

More from this article, written by Volodymyr Pimonenko, can be found in the July 29-Aug. 12, 2005 issue of the Kyiv Weekly.

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"A Lion Stalking His Prey"

Photo by Dan DeLong
Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Story by Chris O'Connell
Court TV

MOUNT HOLLY, N.J. - Lester Stuart Barney was like a "lion stalking his prey" as he lay in wait outside his son's day-care facility for his estranged mail-order bride, a prosecutor said Tuesday during opening statements in Barney's murder trial.

Only hours after his wife Alla, a Ukrainian immigrant he met on an online matchmaking service, won custody of their 4-year-old-son Daniel, Barney viciously killed her with a knife, Burlington County Assistant Prosecutor Robert Van Gilst told jurors.

"He comes up behind her, like the predator he is, and attacks Alla from behind. And like that predator, he goes for the throat," Van Gilst said, noting that the victim's wounds point to a surprise attack. "This is was an unprovoked attack by a man with murder in his heart."

Barney, 60, is charged with first-degree murder for Sept. 29, 2003, slaying of Alla Barney, a 26-year-old computer engineer. If convicted, he faces life in prison without parole.

(Story continues here.)

Barney's is the third murder of a "mail-order bride" from the Former Soviet Union that I know of, joining those of 21-year-old Iryna Singerman, who married Ron Singerman at the age of 18 and is believed to have been killed by her 58-year-old lover last month, and Anastasia Solovieva King, an ethnic Russian who left Kyrgyzstan at the age of 18 to marry Indle

Barney's is the third murder of a "mail-order bride" from the Former Soviet Union.

King, then 20 years her senior. King, a Seattle area man, killed Solovieva two years after their marriage, in 2000.

At one time, prosecutors alleged King's accomplice in the murder was his housemate and 21-year-old homosexual lover, a convicted sex criminal, though no mention of this is made in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer article announcing King's 28-year sentence.
King also spent over $50,000 on his divorce to his first "mail-order bride," and had apparently decided to do anything to keep from having to foot such a bill again.

Meanwhile, Iryna Singerman's alleged killer, Brian Cullen, has reportedly fled the country with the 14-year-old boy who had been living with him.

If you know of any other women from the FSU who have been murdered after emigrating to the United States by way of an internet-arranged marriage, please comment here or drop me an email. I'd like to compare the rate of incidence with the national average.

The nation's murder rate dropped slightly last year after rising throughout President Bush's first term in office. Raw numbers won't be released until the fall, but in the past the national murder rate was about .04 per 1,000 people , according to a United Nations survey covering the years 1998-2000. That makes the US rate a little less than half the rate in Ukraine, and one-fifth the rate in Russia (though to be fair, these were terrible years in Russia, what with the collapse of the ruble and all the lawlessness that inspired).

To help supply some other numbers, I can say that in a 1999 report to Congress, the INS estimated that 20,000 women had emigrated to the United States as a "mail-order bride" since 1995. And those numbers can only have gone up since then, as internet usage has become more ubiquitous.

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Death of a Marriage, continued

LA County prosecutors on Thursday charged 58-year-old Brian Joseph Cullen with murder. Cullen, who is believed to have fled to Mexico with a fourteen year-old boy, is accused of using a baseball bat to kill Irina (Iryna) Singerman, who met and married her husband Ron through a marriage agency in Kherson, Ukraine.

Ron Singerman, a certified public account and member of the Church of Scientology, says in the LA Independent that he's upset with press reports that suggest his deceased wife was a model leading a double life -- and even possibly connected to the Southland's porn industry.

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The Death of a Marriage

Well, you are the first to know outside of Kherson, but about 2 hours ago, around 5:00PM local time, I proposed to this wonderful girl Irina that I met and she accepted!!!

Weston (Rogers, operator of Russian Women Video), this is the culmination of lots of planning and research, including, for example all those chat room meetings and discussions, e.g. Elena valuable advice about body language, as Irina's was super positive with me from day #1!

Your friend, Ron
Culver City, California November 4, 2002

The above quote and photo were found on the testimonials page at Russian Women Video, an internet marriage agency. Ron and Irina are one of the agency's success stories; or they were until Irina failed to come home late last month and "financial documents belonging to the aspiring model were among the blood-soaked items found in garbage bags dumped in a trash bin behind a Woodland Hills strip mall."

I've read of several "mail order brides" being murdered or abused (see this article and this previous post), but unlike those cases, this one does not involve the husband. Instead, the police are searching for Irina's lover, a 59-year-old who is believed to have fled to Mexico. To read more about him and this case go here.

An AP article on the murder can be found at the Kiev Ukraine News Blog, where an anonymous poster also wrote this in the comments section:

This is rather sad news. I knew Irina well from the time I lived in Kherson where she came from, and also knew of her dishonest ways. She was typically one of the so many Ukrainian girls who was out to get as much money as she cold, no matter who she lied to or hurt. Prior to her moving to the U.S., I tried to warn Ron Singerman about her dishonesty, even mailing him copies of all of the e-mails she was sending to different men, getting them to send her money based on her promises to come and see them. I spoke with him after sending him the package. He said he was still going to continue his relationship with her since they were engaged. Too bad she continued her behaviour. Some people think you can always be dishonest and hurtful towards and get away with it. Obviously this is not the case.

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Less Reputable Than a Casino

Chris Sewell recently went on eBay and auctioned off his family's advertising rights.

He convinced five family members including his fiancee and mom to wear T-shirts 24-7 for 30 days to plug their would-be backer.

It started at a penny and 106 bids later the winner was declared: $1006 US from Golden Palace Casino.

Sewell admits there were a few tense moments when a Russian mail order bride service had taken the lead but in the end the casino came out on top.

But where is the used car salesman and the lawyer?

see full story here

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From Russia, For Love

From Russia, for love
She sought a fairy-tale life in America. She got something altogether different.

By JANE O. HANSEN
Atlantic Journal Constitution
Published on: 12/04/04

Those who hear Katerina Sheridan's story wonder how she could have been so foolish. How could she marry a man she hardly knew and go to a land she had never seen?

But the college-educated woman is neither stupid nor naive. Whatever doubts crossed her mind, whatever risks she knew she was taking, paled in the face of a lifelong dream and the desire to escape a harsh reality.

Like young women everywhere, Katerina grew up with the hope that someday she would find her prince. Her personal fairy tale had a Russian motif: The hero would brave the cold of Siberia to rescue her from her homeland, a place with little opportunity and little hope for love.

Katerina became what many call a mail-order bride, marketed along with thousands of other "beautiful young ladies" by a company based in Atlanta.

Her journey began when a friend suggested she submit her photograph to a catalog produced by European Connections. The 12-year-old, family-run business calls itself an international marriage broker, "the first and largest" to arrange romance tours overseas. Its Web site boasts a database of more than 30,000 women, all from the former Soviet Union, making it one of the largest mail-order bride companies in the country.

Katerina was 22, tall, blond and striking, and she described herself in the catalog: "Live a healthy lifestyle, am romantic, kind, honest, faithful, loyal." She also possessed what many men want in a mail-order bride: "old-fashioned values."

In the world of international matchmaking, that phrase is meant to describe what some people say American women lack. It means the women put their husbands first, rather than careers. They're sexy, well-groomed and would not be seen in public wearing sweat pants or a baseball cap. And they have no expectations of being treated as a man's equal.

They typically come from impoverished countries where they have fewer rights or opportunities and where violence against women is often condoned. American men appeal to them because they have heard they are more respectful of women, more devoted to their children and more capable of providing for their families. Each year, a few foreign brides lure men into marriage under false pretenses, then abandon them once safely in the United States. But most are simply searching for a better life.

Like Katerina, these women often know little about the men they're marrying. While U.S. immigration laws require foreign brides to undergo intense scrutiny of all aspects of their lives, the men who court them need reveal only what they choose.

Six years after becoming an international commodity, Katerina's strawberry-blond hair is darker and less coiffed, her makeup more subtle than in her catalog photo. Her wide-spaced brown eyes, pert nose and full cheeks are the same, but her smile appears more genuine than the alluring gaze in the photo. And instead of wearing a low-cut black blouse, she's dressed this day in khaki cargo pants and a T-shirt.

Her story is nothing like the one she envisioned — not a fairy tale, but a cautionary one. She's willing to have it told, in part, because so many women who came of age during the fall of communism and the breakup of the Soviet Union are searching for husbands the same way she did. A study this year found 119,649 listed on Web-based marriage sites, 655 of them from Katerina's hometown.
(Continued)

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