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ABSTRACT
Since the early 1990s, marriages between Russian women and Turkish men have become more common. Today, Russian brides have the top place among marriage migrants in Turkey. This study aims to reveal the actors, places, motivations and mechanisms of these marriages, which have changed the social fabric significantly. The study emphasizes the direct effects of political-economic structures on mixed marriage and marriage migrations. In this study, in-depth interviews were held with Russian brides and their Turkish husbands in İstanbul and Antalya. The results show that this 30-year-old marriage pattern has evolved substantially over time, mirroring the two countries’ political economy, and has created its own system that diverges from the global trend in several ways.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Luis Eduardo Guarnizo and Marta Bivand Erdal who gave a chance to discuss our paper's earlier version with other scholars. Many thanks to three anonymous referees for their valuable feedbacks. We are appreciated to Furkan Palabıyık and Edward Whitney who helped us about proofreading of the latest version of our paper. Also, we gratefully acknowledge the support from the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Adams and Ghose, “India.com”; Breger and Hill, Cross-Cultural Marriage; Charsley, “Risk and Ritual”; Constable, “International Marriage Brokers”; Cottrell, “Cross-National Marriages”; Koelet and de Valk, “European Liaisons?”; Lievens, “Family-Forming Migration”; Piper, “International Marriage in Japan”; Rodriguez-Garcia, “Mixed Marriages”; Takeda, “Reflexivity”; and William, Global Marriage.
2 Ryabov, “Russian Wives.”
3 Johnson, Dreaming of a Mail-Order Husband.
4 Lauser, “Philippine Women,” 90.
5 Charsley, “Risk and Ritual.”
6 Lievens, “Family-Forming Migration.”
7 Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, Distant Love.
8 Piper, “Labor Migration.”
9 Özgür and Aydın, “Spatial Patterns” and Piper and Roces, “Introduction.”
10 Ekiz-Gökmen, “Türk Turizminin Yabancı Gelinleri.”
11 In addition to this, those coming from former Soviet countries such as Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan stand out in this list. More generally, it shows that marriage with Russian-speaking women is common. This is not surprising because of the mobility between these countries and Turkey is very intense. According to records of TurkStat, the number of women from these countries living in Turkey is over 100,000. These women live in all cities in Turkey, especially in the metropolitan cities such as Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir, and touristic cities such as Antalya and Muğla. Although some of these women are not ethnic Russians, people in Turkey think that they are all Russian because they speak Russian. However, it can be said that even though the language in which women speak is the same, they differ in many ways and show great diversity. In this study, we just focused on ethnic Russians who come from Russian Federation.
12 Bloch, “Intimate Circuits.”
13 Although studies show that these values have started to be transformed in some families (see Akyıl, “Family Value Transition”), many families intervene in the selection of their children’ partner choice and want a bride or groom who is Muslim (see Konda, “Turkish Culture”). In addition, traditional families often demand a religious marriage as well as a formal marriage. Although desirable, women who are not Muslims do not need to change their religion for the religious marriage ceremony. Also, Muslims believe that religion is passed from father to children. Therefore, children born of these mixed marriages are considered to be Muslims. This is also an important reason why Muslim women are not supported by their families when they want to marry with non-Muslim men.
14 In this study, we have used the word Turkish to include all men living in Turkey regardless of ethnicity. When there is an emphasis on an ethnic group (for instance, Kurds), this has been specially noted in the text.
15 Constable, Romance on a Global Stage, and Piper and Roces, “Introduction.”
16 Glorius and Friedrich, “Transnational Social Spaces,” 170.
17 Marriage does not only bond two individuals legally, it also acts as a bridge between families and therefore between social structures and cultures.
18 For example: Bloch, Sex, Love and Migration.
19 Sudjic, “The City.”
20 Özgür and Deniz, “A Migration System,” and Özgür et al., “The Immigration of Russians”
21 DeVault and Gross, “Feminist Qualitative Interviewing.”
22 İçduygu and Karaçay, “The International Migration System.”
23 The all-powerful patriarchal structure institutionalizes to stabilize the secondary position of women and continues to shape the society (Kandiyoti, “Bargaining”; Memiş et al. “Housewification”; and Özyeğin, New Desires). In today’s Turkey, where neoliberal transformations continue and no systematic effort is made to eradicate socio-economic inequalities (Önder, The Economic Transformation, 336–43), men have to provide for the family, and therefore have an active role in the decision to migrate while women are given a dependent position. So, gender asymmetry in Turkish society is produced, represented and reproduced through a wide variety of cultural practices that extend beyond household, class and labor market (Kandiyoti, “Patterns of Patriasrchy,” 307).
24 Kim, “Gender Politics”; Kulyasova, “Effects of Immigration”; Nikolko and Carment, Post-Soviet Migration; Remennick, “Women with a Russian Accent”; Yükseker, Laleli-Moskova Mekiği; and Zueva, “Gendered Experiences.”
25 Kirschenbaum, Small Combrades. As the Soviet Union needed female work power, women started to work full-time but no change occurred in their traditional roles in family life; on the contrary, they were expected to combine and meet their ‘responsibilities’ in both areas (Silverman and Yanowitch, New Rich, 57) While men maintained their role as the ‘bread-winner’, women had to take on motherhood and home-making as if this was second-nature to them (Ashwin, Gender, State, and Society, 329). In short, despite the Soviet equality discourse, gender inequality extended into this era as well (Chenoy and Kumar, Re-emergiing Russia, and von Bremzen, Sovyet Mutfak Sanatı). Feminists state that the indirect discrimination of Soviet socialism was replaced by explicit and direct gender discrimination in Yeltsin’s Russian Federation after the collapse of the Soviet Union (Silverman and Yanowitch, New Rich, 74–75). Even if all gender inequality, when the USSR collapsed, women ‘survived’ better than men (Ashwin, Gender, State, and Society, 329).
26 Aydın, “Post-Sosyalist Ülkeler.”
27 Yükseker, “Trust and Gender.”
28 Yükseker, “Shuttling Goods.”
29 Yükseker, Laleli-Moskova Mekiği.
30 This showed that the negative features they heard about each other were wrong in many respects, which had the effect of bringing the two groups closer together.
31 Koelet and de Valk, “European Liaisons?,”112.
32 Houston et al., “Places of Possibility,” 704.
33 The relative lack of social barriers to migration facing young and single Russian women, compared to their male peers, gave them the opportunity to migrate permanently, thus paving the way for marriages. See White, “Internal Migration,” 565.
34 Bailey et al., “(Re)producing”; Carling, “The Human Dynamics”; Cheng and Choo, “Women’s Migration”; and Friedman, “Marital Immigration.”
35 Heyse, “Deconstructing Fixed Identities,” 68.
36 Suzuki, “Tripartite Desires,” 128.
37 Fan and Huang, “Waves of Rural Brides.”
38 Chenoy and Kumar, Re-emeging Russia, 211, and Kiblitskaya, “Once We Were Kings.”
39 Johnson, Dreaming of a Mail-Order Husband.
40 A very popular Turkish TV serial in the 1990s focused on men wanting to go work in Russia primarily to become familiarized with Russian women, and portrayed these women as the initiators of sexual intimacy with men. Of course, this stereotype was a remnant of the image of Russians and was exacerbated by the increase in the number of Russian speaking women in the sex industry around these times. It may be assumed that this stereotype would have made it more difficult for Russian women to become wives in Turkey.
41 Grisword, “Russian Blonde in Space.”
42 TurkStat, Tourism Statistics.
43 Manderson and Jolly, Sites of Desire, and Pflugfelder, Cartographies of Desire.
44 Deniz and Özgür, “Rusya’dan Türkiye’ye Ulusaşırı Göç.”
45 Halidov, “Rusya’nın Yumuşak Güç Araçları.”
46 Heyse, “Deconstructing Fixed Identities.”
47 Bridger and Kay, “Gender and Generation,” 34, and Luehrmann, “Mediated Marriage,” 857.
48 Constable, Romance on a Global Stage, 75.
49 Lu et al., “Multiple Mobilities,” 414.
50 Osburg, Anxious Wealth.
51 Longo, “How Gender Norms”; Morrice, “British Citizenship”; Mühleisen et. al., “Norwegian Sexualities”; Sheu, “Full Responsibility”; and Shipper, “Introduction.”
52 Charsley, “Marriage Migration”; Constable Romance on a Global Stage and Cross-Border Marriages; D’Aoust, “A Moral Economy”; Eggebø, “A Real Marriage?”; Fernandez, “Moral Boundaries”; and Kim and Kilkey, “Marriage Migration.”
53 Morrice, “British Citizenship,” 598.
54 Hill-Collins, From Black Power to Hip Hop.
55 Nagel, Race, Ethnicity, Sexuality.
56 Kim, “Citizenship Projects”, 455; Kim, “The State”; Kojima, “In the Business of Cultural Reproduction”; Yuval-Davis, “Women and the Biological Reproduction”; and Yuval-Davis and Anthias, Woman-Nation-State.
57 This occurred after a Russian jet shot down along te Syrian border by Turkey because it violated Turkish airspace. Afterward, Russia has applied trade sanctions on Turkey, prevented Russians to go on holiday to Turkey, and suspended the application of a 'visa at the gate’ which facilitates short-term visits by Turks to Russia. On the other hand, the everyday life of Russian brides in Turkey was depicted more frequently in Turkish media during this time. Reports showed the social cohesion of Russian brides. Municipalities also helped Russians to carry out cultural activities in city squares and municipal halls.
58 Suzuki, “Tripartite Desires,” 125.
59 The associations established have a great impact on this, because they both opened courses and produced materials for language education.
60 Bloch, Sex, Love and Migration.
61 Fan and Huang, “Waves of Rural Brides.”
62 Robinson, “Marriage, Migration.”
63 Constable, Cross-Border Marriages, 10.
64 Buunk et al., “Age Preferences for Mates,” and Fitzgerald, “Who Marries Whom?”
65 Thai, “Crashing Dreams,”148.
66 Massey, Space, Place and Gender.
67 Mahler and Pessar, “Gendered Geographies of Power.”
68 Spatial diffusion is a phenomenon spreading through geographic space (Mayhew, A Dictionary of Geography). Russians first turned to distant cities, but the presence of Russians increased in cities close to each other. Therefore, we have called their mobility pattern spatial diffusion.
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Notes on contributors
Ayla Deniz
Ayla Deniz is an assistant professor in the Department of Geography at Ankara University. Her research focuses on transnational migration and feminist geography.
E. Murat Özgür
E. Murat Özgür is a professor in the Department of Geography at Ankara University. He works mostly on population and urban geography. His publications have appeared in various edited books and journals.