[Syrian-Russian unions were especially common — and not
just for geopolitical reasons, husbands and wives said in interviews. Many
Syrian men felt genuinely transformed by their time in Russia Middle East . Mahmoud
al-Hamza, who met his wife, Nadezhda, in a Moscow
By Ellen Barry
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Olga Kravets for The New York Times
Roksana Dzhenid with her husband Wael, in Moscow. With her, she said,
he escaped the intense family ties of marriages in Syria.
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This
unusual diaspora offers some insight into the many-stranded relationship
between the two countries, one that makes the Kremlin reluctant to cast off Syria ’s president, Bashar al-Assad. Russia has strategic interests in Syria , including arms contracts that amount to $700 million a
year, and a tiny port on the Mediterranean
Sea that is its last military
base outside the former Soviet
Union .
But there
is also a human factor, set in motion 50 years ago when social ties were forged
among young people who met in college. Walk into any government ministry or
corporate headquarters in Syria and you will almost certainly find men who spent their 20s
in Russia ; many brought home wives and raised children in
Russian-speaking households.
“They are
wives of the elite, who can have some influence, but it’s a soft influence,”
said Nina Sergeyeva, who until recently led an organization of Russian
expatriates from her home in Latakia. “The elite of Syria , the men, are very oriented toward Russia .”
As the
conflict in Syria continues to defy a diplomatic solution, there are an
estimated 30,000 Russian citizens living there , most women and children,
Russian government officials estimate. This is an issue that Moscow has confronted before in the Middle East ,
when the collapse of Soviet-allied governments left Russian citizens stranded.
But it has not faced anything on these proportions, or in the age of social
media,when the plight of ethnic Russians could prove a serious embarrassment to
Moscow .
“Based on
the recent experience of evacuation from Lebanon and Palestine in recent years, problems always arise
— though there we weren’t talking about thousands or tens of thousands of
people, but several hundred,” said Yelena Suponina, a Moscow political analyst
specializing in the Middle East. The task of evacuating Russians from Syria , she said, “would be 100 times worse.”
The
Russian population in Syria is the result of an experiment begun in 1963, when the
socialist Baath Party came to power. The Soviets provided
education to top students from Asia , Africa and Latin
America , throwing them together
with Soviet classmates in work brigades and “evenings of friendship.”
The goal
was to forge a global, pro-Soviet intellectual elite; the immediate result was
weddings. Young women emigrated as the wives of doctors, professors and
officials; “the Soviet side said farewell to them and essentially gave them up
for lost,” said Natalya Krylova, a historian who has published widely on
Russian populations in Africa .
Syrian-Russian
unions were especially common — and not just for geopolitical reasons, husbands
and wives said in interviews. Many Syrian men felt genuinely transformed by
their time in Russia ; they also sought to avoid paying a bride-price as is
customary in the Middle East . Mahmoud al-Hamza, who met his wife, Nadezhda, in a Moscow park in 1971, said that in order to marry a Syrian, “you
need an apartment, you need to pay money, you need to buy gold, and for a
Russian woman you just need a wedding ring.”
Soviet
women had their own reasons to pursue Syrians — nondrinkers who, thanks to the
Baath Party’s ties to the Communists, traveled freely in and out of the Soviet
Union. A new wave of marriages followed the Soviet collapse, as young women
sought a way out of economic chaos.
“Let all
the world hear this: Russian men, maybe not all of them, but more than half of
them are gigolos,” said Roksana Dzhenid, who
married Wa’el, a businessman, in 2000, and lives with him in Moscow . He benefited too, she noted, by escaping the intense
family ties that come with a Syrian bride.
“If there
is a quarrel, what will a Russian woman do? She will cry,” she said. “Maximum,
she will go to her friend and say, ‘He is such and such.’ And what will an Arab
woman do? She will gather a posse of all her relatives. She may run at night to
her husband’s mother and sister and start yelling.”
Taha Abdul
Wahed, a journalist who married a Russian woman and lives outside Damascus , said the phenomenon was so visible that in recent years,
even young men who have never set foot in Russia have started “to call us very seriously and say, ‘Help me
marry a Russian.’ ”
Russian-Syrian
families were drawn into a bitter conflict 16 months ago, when Mr. Assad’s
government began a harsh crackdown on antigovernment protests. The opposition
has since become an armed insurgency. Russia blames outside elements for the bloodshed and stands
staunchly behind the government, continuing to supply Syria with arms and blocking international efforts to force Mr.
Assad from office.
The
Russian Orthodox Church has also defended Mr. Assad’s secular government,
arguing that it protects religious minorities and acts as a bulwark against
radical Islamism.
In
February, after Russia blocked a United Nations Security Council Resolution
calling for Mr. Assad to leave, the top representative of the Orthodox Church
in Syria complained to Interfax that his parish was melting away as
Russian families left Syria , the embassy had closed its school and, he said, “our
women are insulted out loud in some districts of Damascus .”
A Russian
consular official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said about 9,000
Russians have officially registered with the embassy, though upward of 30,000
citizens are believed to be in Syria. He said there are currently no plans for
evacuation, but said that if the need arose, buses would be sent to cities to
transport Russian citizens to safety.
Such an
operation would be especially daunting, because a vast number of the expatriate
wives come from Ukraine , Belarus and Moldova , countries that would almost certainly turn to Moscow for assistance with their own citizens, Ms. Suponina said.
She said she knows dozens of families who have quietly flown out women and
children to Russia in recent weeks. Officials, she said, “are paying more and
more attention to this.”
“You can
criticize them for some mistakes, but nonetheless in Moscow they understood long ago that this is a very painful
question,” she said.
Among the
thorniest aspects is that, after 50 years of intermarriage, the line between
who is Russian and who is not may be difficult to find, if it exists at all.
Svetlana
N. Zaitseva, who spoke by telephone from her home in the Syrian port city of Tartus , was 19 when she met her husband, a linguistics student
living in the same dormitory in what was then Leningrad .
She and
her friends had only the dimmest idea of what life was like in other countries,
she said. In the Soviet Union , “it was like the entire world was our friends, brothers
and comrades.” Six months after the two met, she said, “I realized that we
loved each other and could not live without one another.”
“From the
height of my age, I must say that it’s of course better to marry someone from
your own country,” she said.
But that
decision is long past for Ms. Zaitseva, 62, a mother of three and grandmother
of four. She is clinging to the hope that the conflict will end; but even if it
escalates into war, she said, she would still choose to stay in Syria to the end.
“It cannot
be otherwise,” she said. “We have become part of this place. Our children are
here, who are citizens of Syria , and our grandchildren. Everything here is ours.”
