To Russia For Love

Union. Add to Russia’s demographic bias towards women its rampant alcoholism, high prison numbers and near million-man conscript army and you can understand why it isn’t exactly raining eligible bachelors on the streets of Moscow.

British men on the other hand, it would seem, are on the run from female liberation in the UK. All the men I speak to about their other halves said they found the quiet strength and femininity of the Russian women preferable to their pint-downing, man-eating British counterparts.

"Russian women are stronger," says Glaswegian David. His Russian wife tells me this stems from perestroika times, when women went out to win the bread leaving their men at home, where they hit the booze. Whether the new economic stability will break them from such a spell is as yet uncertain. But in the meantime, foreign bachelors will have to cater for domestic demand, and it’s the British who seem to be plugging the gap.