#6532
#13 - JRL 6531
Washington Post
November 2, 2002
Un-Altared States
Terror-Inspired Red Tape Is Keeping U.S. Men and Their Foreign Fiancees Apart
By Ken Ringle
Washington Post Staff Writer
When Osama bin Laden engineered the terrorist attacks of 9/11, it's doubtful he was intent on thwarting Cupid. But one of the less-noted aftereffects of the war on terrorism has been an abrupt halt in the U.S. importation of male-order brides.
That may not mean much to you, but consider the angst of Chris Petterson of Bend, Ore., whose fiancee, Larissa Negulyaveva, sold all of her belongings so she could move there from her home in the Russian city of Voronezh.
Since July 22, when the State Department sharply tightened security checks on all nonimmigrant visas from Russia, Negulyaveva has been living in an empty apartment in Voronezh, waiting. Now the Russian winter is coming on, but the State Department says these things take time, and Petterson is climbing the walls. Last month he left for Russia to see her. It's not much, but it's better than living off e-mail.
So common is Petterson's situation that a Derwood, Md., systems engineer named Russ Kent has formed a nationwide Internet group called Free the Fiancees (www.familyvisasfirst.com) in an effort to make the State Department take the shackles off romance.
"We've got hundreds of women in limbo," says Kent, 49, whose own Internet fiancee, Amisa Kuramshina, 42, is pining away in the wilds of Tatarstan with her two teenage sons. "These women aren't terrorists. We've already filled out reams and reams of paperwork just to apply for a K-1 [fiancee] visa. This is the woman of my dreams. The U.S. government has put my life and hers on hold, and nobody can say when things are going to change."
This week Sandy Booker, 49, of Oklahoma City, was believed to be among those killed in the Moscow theater seized by Chechen gunmen. Friends told the Associated Press that Booker, an industrial electrician for General Motors, was in Russia attempting to speed up visa arrangements for the Russian fiancee he had met by mail.
Stuart Patt, a spokesman for the State Department's consular affairs section, says he has "certainly heard" from Kent and his bride-bereft counterparts and sympathizes. But he points out that the stricter security checks for all nonimmigrant visas have been in place only a little more than three months -- not a long time in the universe of bureaucratic paper-shuffling.
"It takes a long time to get these reviews completed," he said. How long? "I can't say."
However long the logjam lasts, it has turned the spotlight on one of the less-noted aspects of cyber-global communication: Thousands of American men, though outnumbered by women in their own country 51 percent to 49 percent, have been keyboarding abroad in their search for wives. The Internet has become an electronic version of Yenta the matchmaker, hooking up Russian, Asian and Filipino women in particular with those American males unhappy at what they see as the woefully conflicted psyche of the contemporary American female.
"Some . . . will feel we're a bunch of losers who went to Russia because we couldn't get women here," said John Lanzetta, 42, a financial planner from Swedesboro, N.J. "The truth is . . . the American women I dated either don't have any idea what they want from life or are carrying too much baggage from previous relationships. Their careers, children and need for independence leave little if any room for a serious, committed" marriage.
Natasha Spivack, 50, of Bethesda, who for 10 years has made a business searching her native Russia to find wives for American men, agrees. Her customers, she says, tend to be looking for a wife focused strongly on home and family.
"These are very beautiful, very glamorous women, most of them sophisticated professionals and many highly educated," Spivack says of the Russian and Ukrainian women she recruits. "They find American men more open and considerate than many Russian men and more willing and able in the uncertain global economy to take on the psychological and financial burdens of marriage and children. But what really unites them with these men are traditional values" -- values common in the United States before the feminist revolution of the 1960s and '70s.
Lanzetta, like several of the 30 would-be husbands interviewed, went looking for his own Russian woman after meeting one married to a neighbor. Finding her ideas and attitudes "so refreshing" compared with those of the women he knew, he says, he began browsing more than a dozen Internet Web sites devoted to matching Russian women and American men.
He restricted his search to women age 26 to 42 who could speak English, corresponded with several and quickly discovered that male and female roles "have much clearer definitions" to Russian women: "Simply put, the man provides and the woman nurtures." Like many other Internet swains questioned, he also found Russian women "more mature" than American women, possibly because "life is more difficult in Russia."
The Russian woman, he says, "looks to the family as the most important thing in her life. A career is secondary and unimportant unless it benefits the family."
Lanzetta found his "soul mate" in Omsk, Siberia -- a 27-year-old engineer named Lyudmila Chernyakhovskaya with high intelligence, movie star looks, a keen sense of humor and "an honest, straightforward personality."
Russian women, Lanzetta believes, are also much more concerned with their appearance than American women tend to be nowadays. "I was at a restaurant today and a woman walked in wearing a pair of sweat pants and looked like she had just woken up. I thought to myself that Lyuda would never go out in public like that."
If his fiancee is "less aggressive, more feminine" than the American women he knows, Lanzetta says, she is nothing close to a doormat. Russian women, like their American counterparts, "still strive to control the relationship but they do it with feminine wiles instead of strong-arm tactics."
If Lanzetta's story is fairly typical of the Free the Fiancees bridegrooms, a number of others reflect the increasing commerce between the United States and the former Soviet Union.
Sean-Paul Kelley, 31, a Russian-speaking investment banker from San Antonio, was working in St. Petersburg last fall, lonely and annoyed that his girlfriend in the States had brushed off his offer for a ticket to meet him in Paris.
Idly surfing at an Internet cafe, he kept getting interrupted by the pop-up personal ads for which the Russian Web is famous. He had closed about five of them, he said, when up popped a photo of a slender, brown-haired woman whose sea-green eyes he found stunning.
" 'What the hell,' I thought to myself," he remembers. "I'd never done anything like this and I am sure my anger at the ex was part of the motivation. Anyway, I sent Tanya an e-mail."
Tatiana B. Zhiltsova, 21, wasn't convinced that Kelley was an American until he began e-mailing in English. He was hoping for a date in St. Petersburg but discovered she lived in Ukhta, more than 600 miles away on the other side of the Urals. "It's about 40 to 50 miles north of Syktivkar," he sort of explains.
They didn't get together that visit but exchanged a lot of "very funny" e-mails, and when he returned to Russia in January, she met him at the St. Petersburg airport. He says it was love at first sight. They spent a week and a half together. He flew back to Russia three weeks later just to spend the weekend with her.
Soon he was commuting over the North Pole regularly. He flew to Ukhta, met Tanya's parents. They were wary, but warmed to him when he spoke Russian. He proposed. Tanya accepted but "was more than happy to stay in Russia," Kelley says. "Her goal in life was not to snag an American man."
On Oct. 6, Kelley's 32nd birthday, they had planned to be honeymooning in Hawaii. Instead he was on the phone to the State Department trying to free his fiancee.
If Kelley looks at his romance with youthful exuberance, other American men and Russian women tell of edging toward marriage with great care, often after one or more marriages, sometimes with children involved. Many of the women are in their thirties and forties, and advertise themselves as doctors, accountants or other professionals.
"The one thing you can say with absolute certainty is marrying someone from another country is not something you do lightly," says Kent, the Free the Fiancees founder. "All the serious Internet sites for this sort thing emphasize that it takes a lot of money, a lot of paperwork, and a lot of patience to go through the process leading to a K-1 visa."
The State Department has to have proof that a couple have spent time together, proof that neither has a spouse. There are health requirements and other bureaucratic hurdles. But after handing in the extensive preliminary paperwork, a fiancee applying before July 22 usually picked up her visa the same day. Now that process has stretched into months.
Stuart Patt of consular affairs concedes that even as Russian, Chinese and Filipino fiancees have been cast into limbo, some from likelier terrorist climes like Yemen or Saudi Arabia have been approved, as have many student visas. But that's a function of a significantly lower number of applications and a much smaller backlog, he says. "It's really comparing apples and oranges."
Though most of the protest has come from men pledged to Russian women, he says, an even greater backlog exists in the Philippines, where 2,633 K-1 visas were granted last year and 3,153 this year before the freeze went into effect. The comparable figures for Russia are 1,811 and 1,451.
While Patt says he looks on the boom in fiancee applications as an electronic update of the age-old tradition of mail-order brides, there are differences. These women are not being sent to marriages arranged by their families, Natasha Spivack says: They are coming on their own. And most of the Russians, she adds, have other life options.
World Press Review reported in 1993 that 10,000 Russian women applied to international marriage agencies each year and that many Russian women would like their daughters to marry a foreigner. Spivack, who travels regularly to her offices in Russia and Ukraine, says that number has stayed relatively stable.
Why do the women continue to come?
"Some Russian women coming to U.S. thinking it is all 'Santa Barbara,' " laughs former Muscovite Oksana Gromova Stambaugh of Arlington, referencing the "Dallas"-style U.S. soap opera, which was wildly popular in Moscow in the 1990s. "They get off plane here in fur coat and find husband with small apartment and little Honda and say, 'What is that? Where swimming pool?' "
Stambaugh, 49, had few such illusions when she immigrated here in 1994. She was not eager to leave a stable and relatively comfortable life as an oral surgeon and medical school professor in Moscow. But she was divorced with a teenage son and "my cousin had some little talk with me" about joining Spivack's Encounters International to meet men. In Russia, she insists with a laugh, the high point of her social life was when a patient would stammer as she extracted his teeth: "You beautiful woman. Sometime you want to go ice fishing with me?"
Partly as a joke and partly out of curiosity she began answering the men who wrote to her. One was William Stambaugh, now 66, a retired Air Force colonel in Arlington. During his years in the Strategic Air Command he had planned nuclear retaliation against the Soviet air force, in which Oksana's father was a lieutenant colonel. They've been married now for seven years.
What did he have in common with a woman who had been a committed communist most of her life and was still a commissar when the Evil Empire fell?
"She's just more like women used to be in this country," he says. "Home and family are the most important things to her."
"And I always wash windows!" she says with delight. "He say I'm only woman in America who wash windows."
Oksana Stambaugh is not shy with her opinions ("Let the man get a word in edgewise," protests her husband good-naturedly). She is still put off by the back-slapping informality of many Americans. She doesn't understand why most American men don't stand when a woman comes into the room or open a car door for her. In Europe, men routinely kiss a woman's hand upon being introduced, she says.
But Stambaugh is from a generation in the United States when such courtesies were still common. The couple are so clearly in sync that she's not only an American citizen, she's also a fellow Republican.
If the Stambaugh marriage is going strong, Natasha Spivack concedes that 10 percent of her 250-odd marriages -- and Internet marriages generally -- end in divorce.
She says some Russian women are "gold diggers"; others are con artists using the Internet and hard-luck stories to suck money overseas from men they never plan to marry. Others she describes as "desperate," consumed with their childless state and the ticking of the biological clock.
But she says a large number of her recruits are women for whom finding a husband in America offers both a personal adventure and a career opportunity beyond what they can anticipate in Russia.
Lanzetta says the risks of deception aren't bad, but the visa holdup is.
After corresponding for months, he and his fiancee finally met in person for the first time last April in Prague. "We spent a little over three weeks together and just seemed to have everything the other needed."
The certain knowledge of their destiny, however, emerged only the last night they were together, he says.
"It was late and we were packing to go home," he remembers. "I had asked her to marry me . . . she had said yes," but tiny shreds of doubt still flitted through his brain.
"Then as I was closing my suitcase, the zipper broke. I looked at her and said, 'I won't have time to buy a new bag. If only I had a roll of duct tape.'
"Lyuda disappeared into the other room and returned smiling. 'Will this do?' she said. In her hands was a roll of duct tape.
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