Brides From Belarus

Maya Chirkova has paired Belarussian women in the city of Hrodna with foreign men for 15 years. She claims that 95 percent of men who come to Hrodna through her agency, Gimeney, find a wife and has tallied some 400 marriages to men from Western Europe and, recently, North America. Affiliated with La Strada International, the European network against trafficking, the agency also employs a psychologist to train the staff, and Chirkova takes personal responsibility to screen each woman for her catalog. In fact, she operates more like a traditional matchmaker than like a broker and even introduced her only son to his wife—a former client who had been determined to find a French husband.

Her agency is not a stereotypical meat market where repugnant Westerners purchase young Slavic beauties for trophy wives. Chirkova’s female clients are of all ages and professions, and she insists that they have as much authority over their choices as the men do. Natalia, a 31-year-old personal trainer, convinced her French fiancé, Filip, to lose 53 pounds and encouraged him to adopt a more modern sense of fashion.

Women from Hrodna officially outnumber men 1.4 to 1, although locals claim the ratio is much higher. The women I photographed are Chirkova’s clients. Their stories dispel many conceptions of marriage agencies and reveal the deeper social conditions particular to both this specific region and Belarus as a whole, where men are spoiled by a plethora of beautiful women, and the Western concept of feminism is relative to Belarussian reality.