Professional matchmaker Anatoly Ivanovich’s office is near the former Romanov Winter Palace, the Hermitage, on the embankment of the Neva River. A prime piece of real estate. I meet with Anatoly Ivanovich, self-declared expert on love in modern Russia.
One of the curious cases he presents to me is that of one of his clients, a wealthy Russian construction tycoon who lives in Canada. The tycoon is rich, young, and good-looking, and the attributes he’s seeking in a partner are fairly easy to satisfy among the general population of Russian women: roughly twenty-four years old and hot. But every time Anatoly Ivanovich arranges a suitable girl for him, she balks upon finding out that he lives abroad.
“They don’t want to leave their country,” he says. “In this regard, the situation changed dramatically after Putin became president.”
For a time in the post-Soviet era, matchmaking services in Russia focused on hooking up Russian women with foreign men, and vice versa. Love was tied inexorably to escape, and a whole industry of foreign and Russian companies sprang up to facilitate it.
One of the most fascinating texts of this period is the English-Russian Dictionary-Phrasebook of Love. Arranged in alphabetical order by keyword, the entries provide phrases in English and Russian that an anglo suitor might find useful in wooing a potential Russian mate. For instance, if one needs to say something like, “When my lips and tongue revel on your beautiful, luscious body, they will hear your moans of pleasure in South Africa,” this is the ideal book. Alternately: “I watch your mouth forming sounds, moving and undulating so supplely, so softly, so enticingly and I am seized with a raging impulse to fuse my own mouth together with it and once and for all revel in its sweet softness.”
The book is also packed with practical usages. Under period, there are the following: “Are you having your period:” “When will your period be finished?” “My period will be finished in two days” “I’m overdue with my period” And “There’s a required waiting period after the divorce.”
Still others: “Our bodies will fuse together in exquisite pleasure until we are flung into a wild sea of passion” and “You have opened the floodgates of my womanhood.”
Clearly, a useful codex in countless situations. But according to matchmaker Anatoly Ivanovich, such a text has far less applicability today than it may have had in the days when the Russian economy was in a shambles and many women were eager to shack up with any Joe from the American suburbs.
To be fair, the Russian bride business is still relatively healthy. For a few thousand dollars, if a foreign man is inclined to combine adventure and courtship, he can still easily arrange whitewater rafting in the south of Russia with a boatful of women seeking thrills and mates. But there was a time in the nineties when it seemed most girls, and for that matter many boys, would jump at any chance to escape. Demographic statisticians track this as quiet or soft emigration. Independent research reports suggest that between 2003 and 2008, more than 400,000 people left Russia through soft emigration. The Russian Ministry of Statistics (RossStat) reports that over a six-month period in that same time frame, six people renounced their citizenship. Such confusing statistics leave the situation sufficiently fuzzy that one might as well rely on the observations of Anatoly Ivanovich.
Anatoly Ivanovich laughs exactly like the Russian villain in any Western movie you’ve ever seen with a laughing Russian villain. He also has the same voice as the beloved Russian actor Yevgeny Leonov, best known for voicing the Russian version of Winnie the Pooh.
He is quick to mention that he loves his profession. “After the army, I studied business,” he says. “Then I decided to do what I liked, social psychology and interpersonal relationships. But do you know what I really am? A parachutist infiltrator. I studied with Hugo Chávez. Hugo Chávez was learning from me. No, I don’t mean he was learning from me, but we were studying in the same academy in Ryazan.”
Anatoly Ivanovich styles himself as a provider of many different things for many different clients. For the women, he is a father or big brother, checking up on their prospective suitors and keeping them safe. For the men, he screens out the gold diggers—he’s a friend, a big brother, a guiding force … Checking up on prospective suitors ranges from the obvious sorts of things, such as checking their passports for previous marriage stamps, to using his contacts in the police force and medical fields to investigate their criminal histories, tendencies toward alcoholism, and medical screens for diseases.
He has a database of hundreds of carefully screened clients of both sexes. The youngest is nineteen; the oldest is eighty-four.
In terms of potential available partners, the demographic situation in Russia clearly favours men. There are, according to census figures, around eleven million more women in Russia than men. This is in large part due to the history of wars—from World War II to Afghanistan to Chechnya—and the brutality of the military, but also to alcohol, which is largely responsible for the lopsided average life expectancy of men (sixty-two) versus women (seventy-six).
“One or two men from my database die each year,” Anatoly Ivanovich says. “Last year, this man died.” He clicks over to a fresh-faced 57-year-old. “But not a single woman has died in all these years. Another man died this year. He was only fifty years old and he made twenty thousand dollars a month. Bad health. Men die a lot here.”
This is an interesting and depressing observation: men die without finding love, leaving their entries like ghosts in Anatoly Ivanovich’s database.
But death notwithstanding, in Anatoly Ivanovich’s universe, Russia is flooded with good, successful men and women, and awash in riches and possibility. Love is on everybody’s mind, but it’s an elusive thing to find on your own.
He clicks through the database, showing me more examples. Another man, a top executive at Singer. “He writes music very good,” Anatoly Ivanovich says. “We can’t find anyone for him. We did find a 32-year-old woman with a child, and he decided to take her, but then it turned out that she swore too much, so he broke things off.”
He clicks to another. “This client is right now looking for a girl thirty-two to thirty-eight years old. He’s ready to give her a Lexus and 100,000 to 200,000 rubles per month for her personal expenses. I already sent three women his way, but the selection process works this way: First his assistants screen the women. And only if they approve does he meet them. And out of these three, he met only one. But she was also rich and she was driving her own Mercedes.”
Second half is roughly the Russian equivalent of the English soulmate. And Anatoly Ivanovich says that he spends most of his time trying to find his clients’ second half.
“If a man is looking for his second half, he doesn’t have to take all of St. Petersburg to restaurants,” he says. “I had one client who wanted to meet 110 women, and I told him, ‘No, this is too many. Try and select fewer.’ So he chose 97 and said, ‘I really like these ones.’“
His assistant, a woman in her late thirties who tells me that she met her husband with Anatoly Ivanovich’s help, chimes in: “The problem is, our men are all looking for the same market segment—age, qualities, and look of the women. They all look for good-looking, maybe not extremely beautiful but attractive, family-oriented, interesting to communicate with and pleasant in communication, educated women, and, well, they have problems finding these women of this age and this look and especially of this character.”
In short, the men have unrealistic expectations roughly in line with Igor’s “man is first” mantra. Journalist Anna Nemtsova has a slightly different take. In an article entitled “Russia’s Single Ladies Fed Up with Country’s Useless Bachelors,” she wrote: “The litany of complaints that Russian ladies have against their male counterparts is long: They smoke too much and drink too much. They cheat shamelessly and curse freely. They expect their girlfriends and wives to clean for them, cook for them, and to look like models.” This seems for the most part to be a fair characterization. And on top of it all, the men have the demographic upper hand. No wonder Anatoly Ivanovich has such trouble finding some men a second half.
Based on her photo, one of his female clients is a tall, sporty, blond supermodel. She is in the process of finishing two dissertations—in what exactly, Anatoly Ivanovich is not sure. But two dissertations. The problem, he says, is that she doesn’t know how to communicate with a man. Anatoly Ivanovich tries to set up situations in which two people will be able to communicate, and he tries to teach them how to communicate more effectively: how to talk to a person of the opposite sex and how to understand that person.
“When women come to me for the first time, I tell them, ‘Let me teach you how to communicate with a man.’ They say that they don’t want to learn that from me, that they don’t need my advice, but then, when a woman meets someone she really likes, she calls me back and says, ‘Anatoly Ivanovich, how much do I need to pay you to make this man mine?’ “
While we’re talking, the phone rings. Anatoly Ivanovich answers and his side of the conversation goes as follows: “Yes … Okay … So how much younger do you expect the woman to be? Nine years. And how old are you? Forty-five? Okay, for this service it will cost you three thousand rubles. For women who request the same thing we charge them five thousand, but we give a discount to men … You will definitely find someone in a short period of time. We have a wide selection.” He hangs up.
I asked him how, pray tell, he teaches women to communicate. “Simple,” he says. He starts with Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, a wildly popular text in Russia. “First of all, I give them Carnegie to read, and after that we have a discussion about what they read. Then they do two tests. The first test is how to win over a man or how to win over a woman, depending on the gender. Actually, women do both tests and they keep retaking this test as long as they are my clients, so they think more about it and slowly start to understand what they actually need to do.
“I teach them everything. For example, I teach them how a woman should react if a man has a problem performing in bed. Not only young women. When I offer them my help, they say, ‘What can you teach us when we are sixty years old?’ But then, when I ask them simple questions, they don’t know how to answer.”
Anatoly Ivanovich got his start in the matchmaking biz quite by accident. A friend asked him to write some materials for her profile on a Russian version of a dating site Previously she had hits only from creeps, but after Anatoly Ivanovich got involved, she began to attract some more interesting prospects.
He basically took over her profile. He coached her on her photograph. “The facial expression and the imprint of thought in the face is very important. Open face, not clenched jaws, mouth relaxed, eyes want a man … She must have a sexy expression in the eyes so the man would want her and choose her out of a thousand.”
When men started responding to his friend, he continued managing her correspondence. The meeting requests, the dates, the follow-ups all rolled in. She told her friends about her success via Anatoly Ivanovich, and they asked him to help them as well.
So he found himself managing the romantic affairs of a group of women, spending most of his time tending to their correspondence.
“Women tend to write some garbage like, I like the murmur of falling leaves. I tell them not to write that. Here’s what you need to write: I’m looking for my one and only and I will give you children. I’ll take care of you, etc.”
His assistant adds: “It’s not about the woman’s interests. It should be addressed to the man.”
Only one problem: “After I wrote those letters to men, they met the women. They were very disappointed. Because when I wrote to those men, I understood them. And when they met the woman, she didn’t understand them.
“I played on the man’s sense of self-importance. And all the men were mine.”
I had initially wanted to meet with some of Anatoly Ivanovich’s male clients, but he tried to arrange several meetings and they all fell through. During another visit, he showed me the profile for Natalya, someone he’d been working with for several years and hadn’t yet found a match for. I was intrigued why someone would stay with the same matchmaker for several years if the matches he brought in kept not working. So I asked if I could meet with Natalya.
Anatoly Ivanovich seemed suspicious that I wanted to meet Natalya. And with good reason. She was gorgeous and, according to her profile, she seemed smart—a biology teacher. But he arranged it anyway.
As I walk to the small café near the Pushkin statue in downtown St. Petersburg where we are supposed to meet, I imagine a grand Anatoly Ivanovich chess move: suspecting me of trying to get around the agency’s aversion to foreigners with this elaborate writing-about-love-in-Russia thing, he acceded to my request to meet Natalya because he had a hunch that she and I might just be a good match. And maybe this fantasy of mine is right. Maybe on some level I am hoping to meet Natalya and to fall in love with her.
Natalya has a perfect French manicure, a fresh bob, a stylish black and white skirt. She looks nothing like anyone I might imagine needing Anatoly Ivanovich’s help in finding a partner.
So, perhaps a little too enthusiastically, the first question I ask is why she utilizes him.
“Anatoly Ivanovich is the kind of man who is really interested in his work,” she says. “He really wants people to find each other, and is ready to teach them what’s necessary. Usually a person has a problem, that’s why they can’t find a partner. Anatoly Ivanovich helps to solve that problem. For me, my goal was not to necessarily find a husband but someone who will be a good match for me, with whom I can feel comfortable and confident. That didn’t happen. Other people find their second half. He marks them with hearts.”
“If he is such a good matchmaker, isn’t it surprising that you’ve been with him for several years and haven’t met someone?” I ask.
“I met different people and sometimes maybe from the first time you meet, that’s not someone you’re looking for because something in the person’s behaviour may be crude. One time is enough for me to understand that I don’t want to see this person again. If you find someone normal who you can hang out with, then maybe they have their own reasons or fears not to like me. Maybe I’m not who they’re looking for. Sometimes there are people who I met six months or a year ago through Anatoly Ivanovich and from time to time they get in touch and give me a call. They are good people, but I didn’t have any feeling in my heart.
“And this is only one of the ways of going through this process with him. I’m still in control, and I make the decisions whether I like this or that person or not. You can meet people in a club or in a restaurant, but Anatoly Ivanovich is just a way of meeting people to broaden your circle of communication.”
Natalya is nearly thirty. She comes from a small town in Ukraine and moved to Petersburg three years ago to stay with her sister and take advantage of opportunities in the big city. She is a biology teacher by training, but since her divorce and her move she has had a hard time securing a new teaching position. She’s recently been working at a kiosk in the market.
“You seem very independent, and comfortable with your independence,” I say. I am not sure if I’m flirting with her or simply proposing stupid and insulting topics for discussion.
“Yes, these ideas are a sign of our times and, personally, I would rather have a man who would take care of me, but because this type of man is extinct, I have to take care of myself and not rely on anyone. Moreover, women are more responsible. A real man is a man who you can rely on, but now it seems that men can manage to take care of themselves and organize their own little worlds somehow, but they have a lot of fears, and they’re not responsible enough to be able to also take care of a woman. I mean, he can make sure he has clean socks and a few cans of beer, but taking care of children and summer vacations for the whole family is already beyond him. They run away from responsibility.”
“What in your opinion makes a real man?”
“He must be responsible and he has to be mentally and spiritually healthy, not a pervert. He has to be attentive and caring and, if possible, honest. Cultured.”
“This is difficult to find,” I suggest in my most attentive, caring, honest, and cultured voice.
“Yes. But I’m a diamond also.”
“Do you think the idea of love in Russia right now is different than it was before—say, during the Soviet times?”
“I wouldn’t make any distinction between love before and love now,” she says. “Love is always the same. There are a lot of definitions of love. One of them is when two people are looking in the same direction.”
She explains that primarily she is looking for someone to communicate with, and only then for love.
Communication keeps coming up in her answers, and I start feeling kind of sad. Yulia and I had never been able to communicate. On our first date, I had asked would she mind if I kissed her, and she said yes, which I read as yes, she would mind. So I got up and left, figuring she wasn’t interested.
And my attempts at improving communication down the road were misunderstood. At one point, I bought her a book called Wedded Strangers: The Challenges of Russian-American Marriages. I had intended it as a way to open things up between us. She became offended when I gave it to her, and it had sat on her shelf unread ever since.
Natalya tells me about her divorce. “When I was marrying him, he was great, very attentive. He put me up on a pedestal, was very loving, but then he became a member of a religious sect, and they explained to him that family is not important and family is an obstacle on the path to his spiritual development. So his personality and his values changed completely.”
“I’m glad that you got out of that situation,” I say.
I don’t bring up my situation. I am still wearing my wedding ring, but this isn’t always clear in Russia, because Russians wear their rings on the opposite hand. Every time I hear about someone else’s relationship problems, they are always much more dramatic than mine—involving a scandal or a religious sect. Part of the problem is that, while I know that things are over, I feel guilty for knowing that things are over and for not doing more to make it work. On the other hand, staying in it seems to just be prolonging the misery for both of us.
“Sometimes a person finds herself in a situation that feels like a swamp and there is no hope and then the person either perishes in that swamp or gets up and tries to do something,” she says.
“I know exactly what you mean,” I say. “I hope that Anatoly Ivanovich finds you someone great.”
“Me too,” she says.
It occurrs to me as we part that I could try to set her up with Igor. But he isn’t exactly the cultured diamond in the rough that she’s looking for. He can clean his socks and acquire bottles of beer, but his “man is first” mantra would not go over well with her.
And also, it doesn’t seem like a good idea to interfere with the matchmaking of a parachute infiltrator who studied with Hugo Chávez.