Czech Republic: The rise of the mail-order Russian groom

Petra Procházková

Lidové noviny

Russian brides are passé, said Petra Procházková. Now it’s Russian men who are wooing women’s hearts all over Europe’s matchmaking websites. It may seem unlikely—after all, Russian women tend to see their men as “drunken layabouts and filthy primates.” But in the eyes of foreign women, Russians are “real men, at once romantic, kindhearted, and mouthwateringly manly.”

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Czech and other European women are tired of the West European males on offer, “these bespectacled intellectuals or bland, boring bankers.” We have our own intellect and education—we don’t need a partner who reads nonfiction in bed. What we need “is a he-man, one of those real guys with a rugged complexion, weather-beaten by the Siberian winds.” In surveys that measure this sort of thing, Russians currently come in third among the most attractive men in the world, “right after Italians and Americans.”

So even though many of them “dress like mobsters” and have absolutely no taste, they can afford to be selective in choosing their ladies. European men, take note. “Women find a buttoned-up, humorless miser to be a far worse mate than your garden-variety Russian drunk.”