THE RUSSIAN CYBER-BRIDE AS GEOPOLITICAL

FANTASY
IAN KLINKE
School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, South Parks, Oxford, OX1 3QY, UK.
E-mail: ian.klinke@ouce.ox.ac.uk

Received: May 2014; accepted November 2014

ABSTRACT
This article unpacks the fantasy of the Russian online bride and its striking contamination with
geopolitical language. Drawing on critical geopolitics and psychoanalysis, it explores the
economy of desire and anxiety that accompanies British men’s quest for sexually available
‘traditional’ housewives that are still untouched by ‘modern’ feminism. The paper argues that
these men desire the slippery substance of Easternness -- an ideal object of desire which is too
elusive to be conquered or held. The paper thereby inverts existing accounts of the sexualised
nature of the geopolitical gaze to expose the traces of geopolitics in sexual fantasies
themselves. In doing so, it formulates the basis for a triadic understanding of otherness.

Key words: geopolitics, psychoanalysis, gender, Europe, Russia, fantasy

Fragile, gentle and sweet creatures with
sharp teeth. I wouldn’t call my female friends
humble and meek, the character’s [sic] hard-
ened by the severe climate and the difficult
life in Russia (Daria, pictured naked, in Tur-
genev 2012, Talking to Russian brides: In
Which Way and What About).
You cannot draw boundary lines in your
heart (Asimov 2010, Russian Bride: A
Quick and Dirty Guide to Meeting and
Dating Russian Women).
COLONISING EASTERN CYBERSPACE
Driven by questions of geopolitics and new
forms of colonialism, Geographers have long
developed an interest in the mobile frontier
between Western and Eastern Europe. In
doing so, they have drawn attention to new
dynamics of core and periphery that have re-
emerged after the demise of the Soviet Union
(Aalto 2002; Armstrong & Anderson 2007).
The East is often constructed as an inferior
‘learning’ position that is ‘modernising’, eager
to catch up with its Western master (Neumann
1999; Kuus 2006, 2007, Melegh 2006; Behr
2007). It is no coincidence that Kuus has
detected within these discourses the traces of
‘orientalism’ (Kuus 2004; see also Jeffrey
2011). Like other colonial imaginations, these
visions of Eastern otherness have a gendered
and sexualised dimension to them and traf-
ficked women from the former Soviet Union
or British stag party tourists in Riga can easily
be read as symptoms of a hierarchical political
economy and an orientalist exoticisation of the
other (Thurnell-Read 2012). But what about
another gendered figure that has emerged on
this boundary between Western and Eastern
Europe after the Cold War – the Russian
cyber-bride? How should we make sense of this
particular cultural phenomenon?
Cyber-brides are commonly understood to be
women from poorer economies who have
signed up for an international matchmaking
website to meet and marry men from richer
economies who in turn pay the agency to get

Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie – 2016, DOI:10.1111/tesg.12175, Vol. 107, No. 2, pp. 189–202.
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access to these women. The phenomenon has
its roots in the nineteenth century when mail-
order brides first appeared along the North
American frontier (Enns 2005). They emerged
again after the Vietnam War and the closure of
US military bases in the Philippines during the
1990s as well as in post-Cold War Europe
(Enloe 2000). Both the more traditional ‘mail-
order brides’ and the more recent ‘cyber-
brides’ seem to appear where patriarchy and
capitalism meet the dynamics of colonisation
and post-colonisation (Zare & Mendoza 2011).
Although there is no reliable data on the
extent of the Russian cyber-bride, there is
quite clearly an economy around it, as wit-
nessed by the many marriage agencies that
offer their services online. Although cyber-
brides are not actually sold, they are clearly
subject to a language of commoditisation in
which potential Russian brides are advertised
online with the help of feminised or sexual-
ised images rather than personal narratives
(Zabyelina 2009). In this way, Elena’s Models,
one of the key players on the market, places
the cost of meeting a Russian online bride at
$3,500. In an attempt to disperse moral objec-
tions, its website explains that ‘anything in this
world can be obtained in exchange to [sic]
certain amount of time, money and effort.
Anything! Including a Russian bride, if you
want one’ (Elena’s Models 2012a). While
women are therefore dehumanisingly offered
‘for sale’ on web catalogues, men normally do
not have to upload their own images and
therefore operate from a detached and voyeur-
istic perspective within the visual economy of
the Russian mail-order bride trade. More
importantly, there are no websites on which
Russian men buy Western women, Russian
women purchase Western men, Western
women acquire Russian men, nor do any web-
sites offer same sex partnerships between Rus-
sians and Westerners. International marriage
agencies seem to work only in one combina-
tion: man from the Western core meets
woman from the Eastern periphery.
While the Russian cyber-bride is relatively
easily comprehensible through existing post-
colonial and feminist approaches in Human
Geography,1 I would like to argue that there
is another story to be told about the preva-
lence of this particular fantasy. I first note
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IAN KLINKE
that the fantasy of the Russian cyber-bride is
strangely littered with geopolitical language.
I then argue that this geopolitical contamina-
tion is neither accidental nor reducible to a
fantasmatic prop, but hints at the content of
the desired object: Easternness. Often arriv-
ing in the temporal guise of backwardness or
tradition, Easternness is an elusive substance,
the quest for which is filled in with a distinc-
tive mixture of enjoyment and anxiety. It is
so desirable because it can only be encircled
but never attained. If the popularity and
resilience of this desired object among West-
ern European men is to be understood,
these fantasmatic qualities must be grasped.
In fleshing out these claims, the paper
goes on a journey through the discursive web
around the Russian online bride. Instead of
analysing Western European framings of Rus-
sian brides as a whole, it closes in on British
men’s endeavours to find Russian brides on
the internet.2 Although it is informed by femi-
nist critiques of critical geopolitics as perpetu-
ating an interest in men (Sharp 2000), the
paper remains within the orbit of the critical
geopolitics project. While existing feminist
work has investigated the wide array of moti-
vations and strategies that motivate women to
sign up to international matchmaking agen-
cies (Constable 2003; Luehrmann 2004;
Schaeffer-Grabiel 2004; Johnson 2007; Patico
2010), this paper is interested in the mail-
order bride as a male fantasy. In this, the
paper is not about Russia or Russians but
about the crisis of western masculinity and
the ways in which the fantasy of the Russian
cyberbride has tried to cover up this lack.
The paper draws on material from seven
British-based websites on which Russian women
are offered, articles from five British online news
portals and six forums. The paper looks at the
following UK-based websites: russianhearts.co.uk;
happycouplematch.co.uk; harmonydating.com;
intromoscow.co.uk; romanticadventures.co.uk;
russianwomen.org.uk and singlewomen.co.uk as
well as reports on Russian cyber-brides on the
BBC, Daily Mail, Guardian, Sun and Telegraph web-
sites in the period 2002–2012. Furthermore, it
examines threads on a number of UK online
forums that have discussed online brides: Over-
clockers forum; Real Russia Forum; Russian
meeting place forum; Russian world forums and
THE RUSSIAN CYBER-BRIDE AS GEOPOLITICAL FANTASY
UK business forum. Finally, the paper dissects
a number of self-help guides on how to marry
a Russian bride and documentaries that were
frequently discussed by users on the online
forums. Special attention is paid to threads in
which the topic of discussion is not so much
the technical details of how to obtain a fiance
visa or how to get the best deal on Moscow
hotel prices but the motivations of these men.
The analysis of forum posts is used to tap into
audience interpretations of geopolitical fanta-
sies. As the veil of anonymity allows users to
express their desires and anxieties compara-
tively freely, they give the analyst access to
layers of discourse that would normally remain
remote.3 Before exploring the Russian cyber-
bride in more detail, the paper lays some con-
ceptual foundations.
GEOPOLITICAL FANTASY
As those familiar with critical geopolitics will
know, this paper is not the first to explore the
concept of geopolitical fantasy. In the existing
literature, the term often denotes an under-
standing of geopolitics that is somewhat
removed from reality – a pursuit of something
that is no longer or not yet attainable.
O’Loughlin (2001), for instance, discusses
geopolitical fantasies as territorially expan-
sionist and revanchist discourses that are so
excessive in their demands that they lack
wider public support. Although Dodds (2003)
reads fantasies as fictions located at the very
heart of the mainstream, his analysis of 1960s
James Bond films similarly emphasises their
function as a fantasmatic crutch which helped
British audiences to get over a loss of empire
and international status. O  Tuathail (1996,
p. 89) mentions fantasy only in passing,
yet also understands it as exaggerated, para-
noid and hysterical accounts of global politics
through which ‘unconscious fears and
desires’ bubble to the surface. Although, like
Dodds (2003), he uses the term to describe
fictional phenomena, his reading goes further
and links fantasy to the scopic and totalising
regime of the geopolitical gaze itself and the
desires of those ‘wise men’ who write geopol-
itics. Continuously, he points out the sexual
underpinnings of the geopolitical gaze as an
191
objectivising and feminising device which is
based on a quasi-pornographic distinction
between the active subject of the seeing geo-
politician and the passive object of the seen
landscape or map (O  Tuathail, 1996, 2001).
Though lacking a fuller understanding of
the relationship between discourse and enjoy-
ment, O  Tuathail (1996, 2001) comes close to
a psychoanalytic interpretation of the geopol-
itical gaze as fantasy, a reading which is able
to grasp the economy of fear and desire
around the geopolitical eye. Engagements
between psychoanalysis and geography are
not new and have given birth to a number of
interesting interventions into a range of
debates, including topology, landscape and
affect (Social & Cultural Geography 2003; Pile
2010; Blum & Secor 2011). However, attempts
to psychoanalyse geopolitics are so far rather
rare. This paper thereby takes up Nast’s
(2003) suggestion that critical geopolitics
move beyond its dyadic take on Self and Other
and into the realm of triadic conceptions of
otherness. Psychoanalysis works with a whole
range of triadic conceptualisations, which
emerge from the Oedipal triangle, such as the
Freudian id-ego-superego, the Lacanian
imaginary-symbolic-real or the subject-other-
Other distinction. In political geography M€ uller
(2013) has started to lay the groundwork for
such a move by arguing for a theory of dis-
course that can also explain why only some of
them ‘stick’. In unpacking the paradoxical
interplay of lack and jouissance (enjoyment), he
discusses fantasy as that which fills in the lack in
the symbolic order and something that always
needs to remain unfulfilled if the process of
subjectification is to continue. This paper takes
up this lead by elaborating on the question of
desire and its object in order to understand the
phenomenon of the Russian cyber-bride.
Fantasy is one of the fundamental con-
cepts of psychoanalysis, for it is in fantasy
that its central object of analysis is encoun-
tered – the unconscious. Given the repres-
sed, unpredictable and contradictory nature
of the unconscious, the relationship between
fantasy, desire and anxiety is not a straight-
forward one. Fantasy is not simply the place
where desire is realised, rather, it is a fic-
tional space where desire is staged in com-
plex ways that need to be deciphered. The
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key to an understanding of this relationship
between fantasy and desire is the role of
lack.
Fantasy as a mise-en-scene of desire is more
a setting out of lack, of what is absent,
than a presentation of having, a being
present. Desire itself coming into exis-
tence in the representation of lack, in the
production of fantasy of its becoming
present (Cowie 1990, p. 80)
In this sense the object of desire is not some-
thing to be realised, but to be encircled.
Proximity to the realisation of desire pro-
duces feelings of anxiety rather than pleas-
ure, and fulfilment even causes the subject’s
symbolic reality to disintegrate. Fantasy can
be a narrative of loss, which provides enjoy-
ment to the subject not just by satisfaction
but by a failure to achieve satisfaction. This
can be more or less visible to an observer,
but it will be present in some form. In order
for desire to be kept alive something must
remain unfulfilled.
The clue here is Lacan’s concept of the
object petit a (or ‘little other’), which emerges
in fantasy. ‘What precedes fantasy is not real-
ity but a hole in reality, its point of impossibil-
 zek 1997, p. xiv).
ity filled in with fantasy’ (Zi
Making itself known through emotions of
lack, deficiency and unfulfilment, this hole
assumes the form of the object petit a and func-
tions as an unattainable object of desire in
the fantasy. It is that thing which is the target
of our desire, but that can never be attained.
Although it appears accessible, it always seems
to slip away. The subject locates and targets it
in some desired object that stands in for it,
but which is never quite enough. Once it has
attained this object, the subject realises that it
would have needed something in excess of
this object to satisfy its desire.
The Russian cyber-bride functions as an ideal
fantasy because it encircles an object petit a that
seems initially accessible and conquerable but
that is nonetheless elusive – the slippery sub-
stance of Easternness itself. Cyber-brides are
either stylised as too transformable or too
uncontrollable to be attained. Incidentally, the
internet is full of stories of men who describe
themselves as ‘still looking’, others again have a
long history of meeting Russian women with-
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IAN KLINKE
out finding ‘the one’, of talking about the issue
without actually having been to Russia or hav-
ing signed up with an agency. Even men who
have already successfully ‘bought’ their brides
continue to fantasise online about new mail-
order brides, as witnessed by a comment on
the Real Russia Forum (2011): ‘Girls old
enough to be a granddaughter . . . OOPsie, no
more can do, me forgot, me now married’. It is
in this circular practice of fantasising before
and beyond reaching the supposedly desired
object (marriage), of effectively postponing the
realisation of the fantasy, that desire reveals its
insatiableness.
Crucial to a psychoanalytic reading of
desire is the concept of ‘the big Other’ –
located in what Lacan calls the symbolic –
the realm of law, language, culture and
authority in the relation to which the subject
is constituted. Although there is a subjective
dimension to each fantasy, fantasies are also
clearly intersubjective and it is no coinci-
dence that popular cinematic fantasies have
attracted so many psychoanalytic studies.
Given the mimetic nature of desire (we learn
from society what to desire), we can get an
understanding of how particular fantasies
become collective, often tapping into wider
societal and political power relations that
make up the fabric of the symbolic order.
However, this intersubjective nature of fanta-
sies does not necessitate the subject to ever
fully assume the fantasy. Many fantasies will
remain ‘foreign’ to us ‘for they are struc-
tured by a language which is only tangen-
tially or asymptotically our own and they may
even be someone else’s fantasies at the out-
set’ (Fink 1995, p. 13). In what follows, we
will see that many men who search for a Rus-
sian bride online are seemingly critical of the
illusions at the heart of their quest; it is as if
they want to shake off the desire constructed
in them by the big Other but are not quite
able to.4
While the big Other constructs our sym-
bolic reality and regulates our enjoyment, it
does so always in incomplete and lacking
ways. Fantasy should be thought of not as
the opposite of reality (because reality can
be found at the level of the big Other) but
as something that emerges to mask the
inconsistencies in this reality (Zi zek 1991).
THE RUSSIAN CYBER-BRIDE AS GEOPOLITICAL FANTASY
To understand the Russian cyber-bride, it is
important to grasp how the subject always
assumes that it is the big Other that emerged
to deprive it of its pre-Oedipal relationship
to and levels of enjoyment. In this sense
‘[f]antasy provides a rationale for the inher-
ent deadlock of desire: it constructs the
scene in which the jouissance we are deprived
of is concentrated in the Other who stole it
 zek 1997, p. 43). It is argued
from us’ (Zi
here that the fantasy of the cyber-bride has
primarily emerged to cover up the crisis in
traditional masculinity in Western societies of
the late twentieth and early twenty-first centu-
ries. The big Other (modern, feminist West-
ern society) is seen to have stolen the
(traditional, pre-feminist) enjoyment from
these men and located it far away, in
Europe’s East. It is only through the quest
for Eastern femininity that a traditional West-
ern European (and North American) mascu-
linity can reconstitute itself. According to
this logic, the East is once again Western
Europe’s ego ideal, ‘the point from which
the West sees itself in a likable, idealised
 zek 1990, p. 50).
form, as worthy of love’ (Zi
EYING (UP) RUSSIA
While a cursory look at the fantasy of Russian
cyber-brides reveals its permeation with the lan-
guage of commodification, it is also strangely
contaminated by the mythology of geopolitics.
In dazzling ways the personal scale on which
Russian women are eyed up is related in cyber-
space to the national and global scales on
which Russia is eyed geopolitically. What hap-
pens between a British man and his commodi-
fied Russian bride seems to be intimately
intertwined with the international relations
between Western Europe and Russia.
Littered with determinist geographical log-
ics, the language of exploration and a quasi-
Mackinderian fascination with virgin lands
(Kearns 2010), mail-order bride fantasies pro-
duce a God-like view from nowhere in which
the gaze of the potential cyber-groom
abstracts itself from the beautified landscapes
it sees. In this way, agencies lure their cus-
tomer in with the promise of a female demo-
graphic surplus (Elena’s Models 2012b), ‘an
193
unharvested garden of feminine charms as yet
unexplored by the men of the world’ (Single-
women 2012a). In doing so these fantasies are
often underwritten by military-strategic lan-
guage that invokes the Cold War’s binary
logic.5 And so, in the opening pages of The
Russian bride guide, the author describes Rus-
sia as ‘a mysterious territory, which, as the
USSR, was a sixth of the world’s landmass’.
When the country ‘began to open up to the
West’, he would ‘see enchanting Slavic Rus-
sian women on the television’ and ‘wanted to
see these mythical women in their natural
habitat and their spiritual homeland’ (Smith
& Maslova 2008, p. 1). Clearly, the passage is
laden with an exoticising and sexualising ori-
entalism. It is as if this scopic curiosity
extends simultaneously to the geographical
landscape and the ‘natural resources’ inhabit-
ing it – as if they were one. As one matchmak-
ing website puts it:
Nature endowed this land with unique
beauty. Here, side by side with the moun-
tain ridges you will find beautiful lowlands
stretching far and wide with large
expenses of grassland plain alternating
with thick wild forests. The charm of this
landscape is accented by numerous rivers
and lakes that are plentiful to this region
and home to a[n] array of varied game
and fowl. But of course the main treasure
of this land is to be found in its beautiful
women (Singlewomen 2012b).
In a vanity-published biography of one voy-
ager this geopolitical gaze is used to legitimise
his choice for Eastern Europe. In quite the
same way as a Western energy corporation
might think about access to natural gas or alu-
minium he frames the issue in terms of conti-
nents and geographical distance:
African women are hardworking and very
pretty, but they are quite inaccessible geo-
graphically. [. . .] How about an Asian or
Oriental woman? [. . .] Asia is a long way
to go and so is most of America, particu-
larly South and Central America (Zaika
2011, p. 32).
While within these narratives different geo-
graphical scales are constantly collapsed into
one another, the global scale holds a
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194
privileged position and gives away the geopol-
itical gaze at the heart of the Russian cyber-
bride fantasy. Take, for instance, the National
Geographic documentary ‘Email order
brides’, shown on BBC Knowledge in 2011. As
an animated plane flies over the globe show-
ing political borders, a red star blinks up over
a Southern Russian city – Tolyatti. Images of
an industrial city and the wide and wintery
landscapes around it follow, accompanied by
pulsating synthesiser sounds. One of the cou-
ples the documentary follows around is shown
on a date in a military museum. ‘Here, among
old USSR jets, tanks and submarines’, the nar-
rator explains, ‘James and Uliana’s relation-
ship continues to develop’. In the end the
narrator zooms out again and frames the
issue in terms of globalisation. ‘As the world
is shrinking’, he explains, men are increas-
ingly able ‘to find their brides on nearly every
continent of the planet’.
Interestingly, in these storylines, observa-
tions are often made from an aeroplane,
symbolising both the privilege of spatiotem-
porally compressed travel and the Olympian
position of geopolitics itself, of hovering
above the geographical map. Looking down,
the protagonist of How to Marry a Russian
bride muses in a passage stiff with phallic and
racialised language:
A thousand years ago a Nordic king called
Rus sailed his ships deep into what is now
Russia, along her great rivers. He gave his
name to that country. Then the Vikings
were conquerors, traders and settlers. Now
a thousand years later it is the turn of
Dave, Ted and Steve. Those ancient Vik-
ings – who brought blond good looks to
many Russians – came with a sword in one
hand and silver, jewellery and furs in the
other. [. . .] But although Dave, Ted and
Steve aren’t blond and don’t have any
swords or furs, they’re still traders (Coin
2009, p. 76).
Again, there is an obsession here with access-
ing, opening up, invading and conquering
both the ‘virgin’ Eastern landscape and the
women who inhabit it. The geopolitical
nature of these fantasies is further underlined
by references to the Cold War and the Soviet
Union (Daily Mail 2009, 2010). Frequently the
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IAN KLINKE
quest for a Russian bride is read in forums
and newspaper articles through the experien-
ces of James Bond for whom the iron curtain
had never been more than an inconvenience
to his love life. As the author of one self-help
guide writes, ‘[o]nce the “iron curtain” came
down, the beauty and personality of women
from former Soviet Union countries was
revealed’ to a broader population (Parakhina
2012). Newspaper articles on Russian brides
tend to be peppered with military language
that establishes connections between love and
geopolitics. The Telegraph (2003) describes a
city ‘where the Soviet Union made its vast
arsenal of chemical weapons’, only to note
that it is today ‘fast running out of marriagea-
ble men’. In an article titled ‘Invasion of the
Russian gold diggers’, the Daily Mail (2007)
anxiously writes ‘[t]here seem to be more
Russians in Chelsea than were at the Siege of
Stalingrad’.
Like other forms of geopolitical writing,
discourses on cyber-brides are based on a
strong subject/object distinction that claims
to open up a deeper and more objective
layer of knowledge. But whereas critical geo-
politics would point out the positivist roots of
political geography at the heart of this disen-
gagement, psychoanalytic arguments would
add that there is an enjoyment of detach-
ment at play.
And you dear reader have the pleasure of
merely being a bystander, a disinterested
party, whose future does not hang on a
chance meeting in a hotel ballroom in Mos-
cow; whose affairs will not be profoundly
shaped by what happens here. Instead you
can perhaps learn from their mistakes
(Coin 2009, p. 76, emphasis added).
It is maybe here that we can begin to under-
stand the idea of geopolitics as a porno-
graphic gaze. The detachment is not so
much an emotional one but an enjoyment of
that very disconnection that draws the voy-
euristic eye of the geopolitical subject closer
to its object without coming too near. Inci-
dentally, a look over internet forums reveals
that the fantasy of the Russian cyber-bride is
pervasive even among men who never
actually intend to ‘buy’ a bride, men who are
only involved as spectators. Like other
THE RUSSIAN CYBER-BRIDE AS GEOPOLITICAL FANTASY
fantasies, the mail-order bride is so pervasive
because it is set up around a desired object
that cannot be attained. This object is
implied by the fantasy’s geopolitical form
and, in particular, by the way in which it
invokes the historical impossibility of con-
quering or controlling the vast Eurasian
plains and those who inhabit them.
THE CONQUEST OF EURASIA’S
HEART(LAND)
Whereas the previous section has exhibited
the traces of geopolitics in the fantasy of the
Russian cyber-bride, I now turn to a discussion
of the role that geopolitics plays in this fan-
tasy. I suggest that the fantasy’s geopolitical
form is not coincidental, but hints at the con-
tent of objet petit a: the elusive substance of
Easternness itself and the impossibility of its
conquest. While the fantasy promises to
restore Western masculinity, it is always
already filled in with anxieties as to whether
this can be achieved, particularly the (mutu-
ally exclusive) fears that these women will
never be conquerable or that they are con-
querable but will quickly lose their desirability.
Two of the key motivations for a cyber-
bride are of course autophobia, the fear of
solitude, and gynophobia, the fear of women
(as independent subjects). In response to
this, Anglo-Russian online matchmaking
agencies often try to sell a dream in which
love is secure and controllable by men. They
urge them to ‘[i]magine a place where the sit-
uation is reversed’ from home. They create a
secure space where their ‘choice of friendly,
attractive women is almost limitless’ and the
man is ‘in control of the situation’ (Romantic
Adventures 2012b). Many men who look for a
Russian woman are also time-travellers, seek-
ing in the East a space where gender relations
are frozen in the past. In this sense Eastern-
ness stands in for that which is backward, but
this backwardness often comes in the guise of
‘tradition’. British men often desire a subser-
vient femininity in online brides that is
untouched by Western feminism and they
fantasise about a ‘traditional’ life that is more
‘Russian’ than it is ‘Western’. In this way, the
matchmaking website IFM Russian introduc-
195
tions (2012) states that it is important to
understand that Russian women ‘retain their
femininity and give priority to traditional fam-
ily values’.6 Real Russia Forum (2009) por-
trays their woman as ‘well educated,
feminine, smart dressers, slim, sexy, family
orientated, hard working and caring about
their husbands and home’. They are opposed
to ‘feminist [. . .] English/Western women
who are selfish, binge drink[. . .] and only
care for what they can get out of you’. Web-
sites like Romantic Adventures (2012a) sym-
pathise with men who cannot find a partner
in the UK and blame feminist or overweight
British women. Russian women are effectively
stylised into sexually available housewives. As
one participant explains, his work colleagues
all think of Russian woman as a cook, a
cleaner and ‘something that rymes with door’
(Overclockers Forum 2006).
In these discourses the ‘modern age’ is
understood as one of ‘confusion’ that can
only be contained by marrying a traditional
Russian wife (Romantic Adventures 2012b).
The reason for this is, as one website puts it,
that ‘Russian women are still happy to be
women’ and ‘are really different from west-
ern women’ in that ‘they do not want to be
men or compete with men’ (Happycouple-
match 2012).
[E]ven though life does go on and the
world changes every day (even in Russia),
one thing that is still strong in every Rus-
sian woman, is tradition. [. . .] This is the
way women of Former Soviet Union were
raised, from generation to generation. It
is the way of thinking that has gotten
stronger year after year, decade after dec-
ade. So their soul and mind are not will-
ing to nor are they ready to have a life
‘revolution’ and march towards feminism’
(Parakhina 2012)
When a member of the Russian Meeting
Place Forum (2008) wallows in nostalgic fan-
tasies about travelling ‘back to the 50’s or
60’s when [. . .] women were women and
men were men’, another ensures him that
the ‘pool of “traditional” women’ will
‘remain bigger in the FSU’ given the inability
of feminism to establish its ‘all extensive
reach’ outside of the ‘West’. A third
C 2016 Royal Dutch Geographical Society KNAG
V
196
participant explains that women in the USSR
were now ‘too busy’ for ‘modern Western-
style feminism’.
An explanation for this desire for unspoilt
(‘virgin’) Easternness could come from the
function it fulfils within the Western gaze
upon itself. It is perhaps no surprise that the
autobiographical protagonist in Chasing Skirt
fantasises about bringing his bride to the UK
in a way that reduces her to a passive and
na€ıve spectator that makes possible the per-
formance of Western wealth and middle-class
masculinity. The following passage empha-
sises the ‘speed’ of travel in the West, which
is made possible by modern roads and the
latest in automotive technology.
I had daydreams of having her with me all
the time, I imagined her by my side as I
whisked her away from Heathrow airport
in my Volvo, speeding in style and com-
fort around the M25. I wondered if she
had ever seen anything like the roads that
we enjoy in our country, if she would be
impressed by the speed and the comfort
that we enjoy on English roads. I mused
that she would be wide eyed at the sight
of my house and would see me in a differ-
ent light when I introduced her to my
family and friends (Zaika 2011, p. 116).
An active but lacking Western masculinity, in
other words, depends on a passive feminine
Easternness to be fully reinstated in the sym-
bolic order.7 In order for this fantasy to be
sustained, it needs to imagine itself from the
perspective of a traditional Russian woman.
In this way, the fantasy of the Russian online
bride promises to fill in the hole in the sym-
bolic order of contemporary Western mascu-
linity, which is seen to have deprived men of
their female counterparts. In more psychoan-
alytic terms, the Big Other, that realm of
paternal authority in which the subject must
be installed, has hidden away the key to their
enjoyment of femininity. It is only in the East,
the fantasy promises, that these Western men
can recover their masculinity by finding a
more feminine Eastern counterpart.
Yet, this pursuit is filled in with two types of
anxiety that emerge precisely from these
women’s Easternness and that draw on two
deeply sedimented geopolitical narratives that
C 2016 Royal Dutch Geographical Society KNAG
V
IAN KLINKE
have negotiated Western Europe’s encounter
with the East: the fear of the East and the
logic of Eastern modernisation. Russian
cyber-brides are either construed as danger-
ous objects that emerge from a fundamentally
different space or malleable objects that are
willing to westernise but in doing so lose their
desirability.
In 2010, a BBC Newsnight report on Rus-
sian women who boost their search for rich
husbands through pole dancing classes came
to the following pessimistic conclusion:
The attitudes of young women like this,
their almost fanatical desire to find a rich
husband shows just how different Russia
still is [. . .] where despite appearances
most are still deeply conservative and still
prefer to have a powerful man in charge
at home and in the Kremlin.
It is the word ‘still’ that gives away a concep-
tion of backwardness that is associated with a
lack of transformability. Russian cyber-brides,
it is implied, are strange and dangerous crea-
tures born into a distant and unfamiliar
space that is still marked by the Soviet past.
In order for Anglo-Russian internet mar-
riages to ‘share a future’, they ‘have to
survive her past’, to quote the cover of the
2001 British-American film ‘Birthday girl’, in
which the protagonist, a na€ıve British bank
clerk, gets kidnapped by his cyber-bride and
her criminal friends. Although the film has a
predictably happy ending, it casts Russian
internet brides as a source of unpredictability
in the UK.
Scamming stories play a key role in this nar-
rative. After all, ‘[a]n apparently sexy internet
Svetlana may actually be Hairy Boris or Fat
Yuri in disguise!’ (Smith & Maslova 2008,
p. 6). In this way the Daily Mail declares fake
the story of ‘beautiful women’ from ‘the Ural
Mountains’ who are ‘desperate to leave their
impoverished homelands’ and instead speaks
of uncontrollable and ‘sinister Russian mafia
rings’ (Daily Mail 2008). A 2006 Channel 4
documentary called ‘Diary of a mail order
bride’ supports similar fears, as does the
Guardian, which quotes ‘experts’ that ‘the vast
majority of “email brides” are scams designed
to lure Western men into parting with cash’
(Guardian 2002a, 2002b). As AJUK explains
THE RUSSIAN CYBER-BRIDE AS GEOPOLITICAL FANTASY
on Overclockers Forum (2006), Eastern Euro-
pean women ‘may look stunning on the web-
site, in reality they will have one leg, a
moustache and fifteen alcoholic kids’. On a
different forum, a character called Wiz from
Surrey urges forum members to think ‘a lot
before going this route . . . as there are no
guarantees for success’ (Russianworldforums
2011). The advice to stay away from such mar-
riages is implied in a string of prominent
abuse and murder stories that involve men
who were looking for brides in the former
Soviet Union (Guardian 2003; 2007; Daily Mail
2011; BBC 2012).
In this mutation of the cyber-bride fantasy,
proximity to the brides’ backwardness causes
anxiety; it is precisely their Easternness that
makes them unreliable and dangerous part-
ners. In this vein, men are often unsure
whether the fruits of enlightenment progress
could be brought to Russia, as a rather inter-
esting conversation in the UK Business Forum
(2011) reveals. After a character called John-
Locke1 asks the forum whether anybody
would fear a Russian bride might murder
them in their sleep, another, tellingly named
‘Progress’, responds ‘Why do you think so?’.
This latter response is indicative of a second
fear. Unlike a first group of men, a second
group is obsessed with their transformability
but worry that they will soon lose their East-
ernness upon contact with the West. The East
emerges here as a space that is too easily
developed, controlled, modernised, civilised,
Europeanised once it comes into contact with
the West. As one observer puts it,
Russian girls have a lot of potential to
look beautiful, and when they come over
here to live, start earning some money
and learn how to dress nicely, they look
lovely . . . but catch them in their natural
habitat (insensitivity intended) they’re
rough as’ (Overclockers Forum 2006).
Turning a new wife’s Soviet teeth ‘gleaming
white’ is another of these modernisation proj-
ects that are discussed by men who wish to
purchase a Russian bride. The Russian bride
guide explains that it is ‘not unheard of for
some of the more impecunious of chaps to
attempt to surreptitiously examine their
potential women’s teeth, hoping to mitigate
197
this expense in advance’ (Smith & Maslova
2008, p. 25). There seems to be an obsession
with cleaning and whitening that is typical for
colonial encounters. Russian women are seen
to want to swap their typically post-Soviet
‘world of grey apartment blocks with rusty
balconies and filthy hallways’ for a life in the
West (Coin 2009, p. 237).
While many cyber-grooms are captivated by
Russian women’s desire and ability to leave
their Easternness behind, this transformabil-
ity threatens the existence of the desired
object itself. These women will no longer be
Eastern once they are contaminated by the
West. Incidentally, many men worry that
their bartered brides will no longer deliver
what they promised once they have moved to
the UK. There is a disappointment at play
that these women become materialist West-
ern subjects. Complaining about his Russian
mail-order bride’s wish to be bought a house,
Yas786 states on Overclockers that he
‘treated her like ****’ after which ‘she left of
her own accord’. Other men fear that their
brides will no longer wish to live with them
once they have found their feet in British
society and have acquired the right to stay.
Tabloids like the Sun confirm this male posi-
tionality, giving a voice to those who are dis-
appointed at having spent money on a wife
who has moved out as soon as her two year
residency requirement has expired (Sun
2010). Vinnvinny from Middle England
moans on Russianworldforums (2011): ‘If I
buy an iron, toaster or washing machine
then I get a guarantee so why not when I
buy a bride?’.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
This examination of British discourse on Rus-
sian cyber-brides has sought to expose the
cyber-bride as a geopolitical fantasy which
produces enjoyment in the Western gaze
through an encirclement of the object of
Easternness. In shifting attention from the
macro-scale geographies of contemporary
European geopolitics to the micro-level of
geopolitical encounters between Western and
Eastern Europeans, this paper has extended
existing work that has highlighted the
C 2016 Royal Dutch Geographical Society KNAG
V
198
popularity (Sharp 1993) and everydayness of
geopolitics (Dittmer & Gray 2010; Pain &
Smith 2008). By exploring the way in which
discourses on love and sex are permeated by
geopolitical language, the paper has tried to
invert the more established argument that
geopolitics is gendered.
Moreover, the case of the Russian cyber-
bride can be used for a second inversion,
one that helps to expand dominant concep-
tions of gendered otherness in critical geo-
politics. To the degree that Russian brides
are desired precisely for what the West is no
longer (traditional femininity, untouched by
modern feminism), it can be argued that the
other’s otherness is actually valorised in ways
that exceed a mere exoticisation. It is not pri-
marily the foreignness and exotic strangeness
of Russian internet brides that makes them
desirable to Western European men but their
familiarity – they are imagined as docile, sex-
ually available housewives from the past.
Ideally, Western women should become once
again like Eastern women. The story about a
superior Western self that imposes itself
upon its inferior other has to be complicated
in the case of Russia. What can be observed
here is the inversion of the geopolitical gaze
from one that seeks to transform the Eastern
other to one that aspires to model (part of)
the Western self on the Eastern other.
The psychoanalytic distinction between the
big Other (Western society) and the little
other (the elusive object of Easternness),
explored in this paper, further problematises
dyadic or dialectic conceptions of self and
other. Easternness, it has been argued, covers
up the lack in the symbolic order of Western
masculinity. The crisis of masculinity has
produced the subject of the gynophobic
cyber-groom who is eager to find his lost
enjoyment in Europe’s East. Although he is
motivated by the desire to conquer Eastern
femininity, the attainment of his desired
object is prevented by its evasion or dissolu-
tion. In this way, the fantasy of the Russian
online bride persists precisely because its
object of desire is too slippery to be held.
Once the object is attained, it leads to disap-
pointment and the desire to find a new
object. While the subject is thereby con-
stantly denied fulfilment of the fantasy, at a
C 2016 Royal Dutch Geographical Society KNAG
V
IAN KLINKE
deeper level, it can continue to desire, either
by approaching the next potential bride or
by gazing at it from a safe distance. This is
precisely why so many cyber-grooms seem to
be caught in a seemingly endless pursuit of
their little other.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Alex Boican, Felix Ciuta,
Jason Dittmer, Virginie Mamadouh, Anna Toro-
pova as well as audiences in Trieste, Frankfurt, Bel-
fast and London for their comments and
suggestions. I am also grateful to my students with
whom I have had the pleasure to discuss some of
the issues raised in the paper. Finally, I have to
mention three men whose names I have forgotten
and who felt the need to discuss their online brides
with me and the other course participants during
an introductory Russian language course at Maas-
tricht University in 2003/04. The crucial question
only dawned on me a few years later: what had geo-
politics been doing in their stories of love and
marriage?
Notes
1. Given the particular libidinal economy around
the Russian online bride it is understandable
that feminists have traditionally approached
mail-order brides either as objects that are
placed on the market to increase profit margins
(Chun 1996) or as fragile and threatened
bodiesthat get trafficked into the international
sex industry (Hughes 2004; Poppy Project
2009).
2. A few disclaimers are needed. Although a cur-
sory look at German websites produced similar
results to British ones, it needs to be recognised
that the selection of a different Western Euro-
pean nation might have brought to light dissimi-
lar geopolitical metaphors and logics. Of
course, the experiences and discourses of Brit-
ish men -- chosen here as an example for West-
ern European men -- are difficult to disentangle
in cyberspace from those of North American
men and in many ways they offer similar pat-
terns of engaging the East.
3. Dodds (2006, p. 121) discusses a number of
important methodological problems associated
with the study of online communities, particu-
larly questions of access. In the case at hand the
self-selection of wealthy men from industrialised
THE RUSSIAN CYBER-BRIDE AS GEOPOLITICAL FANTASY
countries is however already implicit in the phe-
nomenon of the cyber-bride. A limitation that
does need to be recognised is that very few vocal
members often dominate forums while the voi-
ces of the many read-only members are not
heard. I have left forum posts in their original
spelling and grammar with exceptions only
where this broke the flow of the article.
4. There seems in place a wider fascination
with the cyber-bride that could at some level
involve not just those who are enchanted but
those (men and women) who are repulsed by
it, too.
5. It is interesting to note that British framings of
Ukrainian brides tend to be far less contami-
nated by geopolitical language than those on
Russian brides, as witnessed for instance in
Marina Lewycka’s UK bestselling novel A Short
History of Tractors in Ukrainian (2005).
6. Note that unlike Thai or Filipina brides, Russian
women tend to be advertised online as middle-
class and educated (Luehrmann 2004).
7. Even nuanced treatments of mail-order brides
that take the perspective of the potential bride
tend to reproduce the subjectivity of a na€ıve
and passive Russian woman. In Pawel Pawlikow-
ski’s film ‘Last Resort’ (2000) a Russian mail-
order bride is stood up by a British man and has
to seek asylum. The story largely unfolds
because of the actions and deliberate inactions
of men around her.
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