“It’s a prank! Marry me!” Why Russian men plant drugs on their brides-to-be

Extreme marriage proposals have been a business in Russia for several years now. BBC correspondent Nina Nazarova attended one of them and talked with the groom, the bride, the participants, and scholars about why people do them.

It is August of 2019. Anastasia Karamzina (at her request, her real name is not being used) is flying from her Siberian hometown of Barnaul to Saint Petersburg. She is supposed to be met at the airport by her beloved, Sergey Urzhanov (his name has also been changed), a young officer in one of the Russian security, military, and law enforcement agencies. However, this morning Urzhanov texted her to say he’d been summoned to an urgent meeting with his boss and so a friend of theirs would pick her up instead.

            Anastasia Karamzina and the friend have made it all the way to the building in Petersburg’s Nevsky neighborhood where Anastasia and Sergey’s one-room apartment is. But right in front of the entrance to the building’s inner courtyard, a van with tinted windows blocks their car.

            Armed men in black balaclavas and special forces uniforms rush out of the van, drag the friend from the driver’s seat, and lead Karamzina away. Then they open the trunk of the car and began searching the young woman’s things. In a small black suitcase they find a plastic bag of white powder.

            “You are suspected of illegally transporting and attempting to illegally sell large amounts of narcotic substances.”

            Karamzina, a fair-haired beauty in a frilly peach dress, gives a hesitant smile and says, almost inaudibly: “There must be some mistake. That’s not mine. It’s really not.”

            “Then whose is it?”

            “I wasn’t carrying anything, I really wasn’t. They wouldn’t have let me on the plane if I was.”

            “Quit playing the fool. You think this is funny?”

            “No! It’s not funny. I swear I don’t know what that is.”

            The interrogation lasts a couple of minutes. The men cut open the bag of white powder. There’s a little pink box inside.

            “And what is this?”

            “I don’t know,” mumbles the young woman.

            One of the special forces troops suddenly falls on one knee. He pulls off his balaclava, revealing himself to be Anastasia’s boyfriend Sergey. “Marry me!” he breathes.

 

A few extra kopecks

 

The special forces troops are fake. Sergey Urzhanov wanted to propose to his girlfriend and hired a special company that arranges “special-forces-themed events.”

            Prices start at 700 rubles, which is how much it costs for a half-hour photo session with one soldier in the industrial city of Naberezhnye Chelny in Tatarstan. If a client wants to simulate a raid—say, for someone’s birthday—or a bust at the office, then a visit from an entire group will cost around 10,000 rubles in the more distant regions of the country, while in Petersburg, according to the creator of the Special Forces Show, Sergey Rodkin, it will be somewhere between 30,000 and 60,000 rubles. There is no upper limit: “You can come up with something that costs a hundred thousand, anything from flying in on a helicopter to driving up in an armored personnel carrier.”

            Rodkin, 36, explains that he came up with this means of income in 2010. “At first we were just messing around, having fun for free, we’d go to our friends’ weddings. Gradually we started taking it more seriously, and a year later we were already getting money for it.” In 2015 he trademarked “Special Forces Show” and started franchising. As of today, there are 14 Special Forces Show franchises all over the country. A couple of years ago, a Special Forces Show even opened in Crimea.

            The agency produced its first special-forces-themed marriage proposal in 2014. Dmitry Chernykh, an entrepreneur from Saint Petersburg, was the client and says he helped develop the idea. As Chernykh tells it, the idea came to him out of nowhere: “I didn’t see it anywhere, I didn’t hear about it anywhere, I thought it up all on my own.” Today he has his own business producing retail equipment, but back then he was a nightclub promoter and knew Rodkin from Rodkin’s work as an event organizer.

            As per the script, men in special forces uniforms from the Economic Crime Unit burst into the restaurant where Chernykh was celebrating his birthday. He was arrested, while his girlfriend was pressed into serving as an attesting witness. As valuables were being removed from his pockets, it turned out that one of them was a ring. Chernykh emphasizes that Rodkin requested that the restaurant owner, as well as customers of a certain age, be let in on it in advance so they wouldn’t get worked up. 

            The operation was lightning-fast. “They actually charged me less because they got through it all so quickly,” Chernykh recalls with a smile. Nevertheless, his future wife was still in shock an hour later and could only fully grasp what had happened after some time had passed. “Afterward she kept asking me, ‘What did you do that for?’ ‘Well, so you wouldn’t say no,’ I said,” laughed Chernykh.

            Rodkin’s franchise isn’t the only one of its kind. There are similar companies all over the country, with names like Surprise Show, Extremer, and Special Forces for Your Party.

            Documentation shows that entrepreneurs usually get their companies licensed for business activities in the category of performing arts and theatrical productions. But often there are former special forces officers among the company employees. “No matter how you slice it, you can’t get by without the former special forces guys, otherwise you won’t know all the specific details and you can’t do the job,” explains Rodkin. For instance, the manager of the Special Forces Show in Naberezhnye Chelny, Ramil Mukhametov, says that he used to be a marshal with a rapid response team, adding that the minimum qualification for all his employees is that they’ve served in the army.

            Both Sergey Rodkin and regional entrepreneurs claim that event organizing isn’t their permanent job, since there aren’t enough orders from clients. They ran six events in Saint Petersburg in the summer of 2019. In Tatarstan there are around fifteen “special operations” a year, and a little more than ten a year in Penza. “It’s hackwork for fun, just a hobby, to pull in a few extra kopecks,” Rodkin explains. Special Forces Show employees refused point-blank to say where they work the rest of the time.  

 

A real, true love

 

            The Special Forces Show’s services cost 23-year-old Sergey Urzhanov 30,000 rubles. Taking into account the ring and other expenses, the entire betrothal set him back a total of 70,000 rubles. He saved up for it for two months.

            The idea occurred to him out of the blue. “At first I talked with the Pulkovo Airport FSB [Federal Security Service] guys,” Urzhanov recalls. “They didn’t give the okay, so I decided to talk with the traffic police, and then I had second thoughts and just googled it and found these guys, easy.” Urzhanov didn’t approach his own colleagues from the government security service in which he works (his exact place of employment is being withheld at his request): “My colleagues might actually break something. They’re pretty scary.”

            Urzhanov smiles and says that Karamzina is “a real, true love, my first and, I hope, my last.” The two of them grew up together in Barnaul. He describes the beginning of their relationship: “I messed around for eight years, couldn’t bring myself to tell her how I felt, made these clumsy little attempts. But then I got my act together, and I just came over and laid it on strong. We arranged to meet, we met, we got in the car, and I told her I wasn’t going to let anybody else have her. Period. Done. We’ve been together ever since.” 

            “Seryozha was the one who was attracted to me, for a long, long time, and at first I didn’t feel that for him. We didn’t even have any real dates, just went for a walk a couple of times. But then I went to see him and he goes, ‘I’m not letting anybody else have you.’ So, you know... it was funny,” his fiancée recalls.

            Karamzina is taking distance classes in the philology department of a pedagogical university and doesn’t have a job yet. “I hope she won’t get one,” adds Urzhanov. “I think a girl should stay at home and keep house, cook and clean, raise the kids, and the man should earn the money to support it all. I don’t really want my girl to work from morning till night and then have to come home and take care of housework, kids, all that stuff as well.” 

            His beloved agrees. “In our family my dad’s the wage-earner and my mom takes care of the housework and the kids. My dad gets home and everything’s cozy and clean, everyone’s waiting for him. It’s great. I want my family to be like that too.”

            Sergey Urzhanov hasn’t seen his own father since he was very little. He was raised by his mother and grandmother. After he graduated from high school he went into the army. After his obligatory service he wanted to stay on as a contract soldier, but it didn’t work out.

            Urzhanov served his military duty in Moscow, in the Ministry of Internal Affairs’ Internal Security troops. He stood on Red Square, linking arms with other troops in a human barricade, during the celebration of the first anniversary of the annexation of Crimea. He has been deployed to protests. “We went out to all these, let’s just say, non-mass protests and broke them up, chased people away.” He no longer remembers exactly what kind of protests. “We didn’t get a ton of information. They just brought us somewhere and said, stand there, link up, barricade this off. We didn’t get into details, that didn’t interest us much. The main thing is that we did our job. At first it was strange, but when it’s your regular job, you just, you know, that’s your living, so it gets to be easy.”

            Urzhanov isn’t eager to talk about his current special forces job. “There are times when it weighs on you. We get one day on, three days off, and sometimes I haven’t had enough time to shake off the job when I’m back on for a day again. Sometimes it’s hard, just mentally, but we get by. We do our job.”

            A young man runs up to where he’d arranged to meet the Special Forces Show. He’s disheveled, in a hoodie and fashionable grey sweatpants. That morning he’d made a “decoy,” a dense, heavy half-kilo brick of powdered sugar in a plastic bag. Inside it was a little jewelry box with the ring.

            “Why don’t you do a cake, a restaurant?”

            “We thought about that, but we didn’t really get anywhere with it. You’ve gotta stand out somehow.”

            “Don’t you feel bad, scaring her?”

            “Of course I do, really bad. That’s the only thing I’m worried about. But the good part, I hope, is that afterwards we’ll watch it together and laugh.”

            Urzhanov had insisted on arresting his beloved with his own two hands. He’s now given a black uniform without insignia, a service cap, and a balaclava. According to the script, he has to pull Karamzina from the car and continue holding her by the shoulder.

            Urzhanov has set up a GPS tracker on his friend’s phone in advance so he can watch the car drive home from the airport in real time. One Special Forces Show van is waiting in its assigned spot in the apartment building’s inner courtyard. The second van, the one Urzhanov is in, is standing by at the nearest intersection so that it can drive up behind the car his girlfriend is in. The vans communicate by walkie-talkie. The Special Forces Show employees have a brief exchange: “understood,” “ready and waiting.”

            Urzhanov is clearly worried. Karamzina left two months ago to visit her parents in Barnaul and he hasn’t seen her since. The entire previous day has been spent in preparation: Sergey has bought fruit and champagne, cleaned up the apartment, decorated it with balloons, and set the table. He even watched a YouTube video so he could make sushi rolls for the first time in his life. He wants her to be amazed.

            While Anastasia was in the air, Sergey called her parents and told them he wanted to propose to their daughter, asking them whether “such a turn of events is permissible.” “Sure, it’s all up to you,” they replied.

            Now the young man concentrates on the blip moving on his phone. The car with his girlfriend begins to turn onto their street. Sergey pulls the black balaclava over his face and nervously turns to the BBC correspondent: “Is it on straight?”

 

Special forces, everybody face-plants the floor, and drugs

 

“Nobody puts any real thought into it, they all have the same crappy idea, that some special forces guy comes in and makes everybody go flat on the floor and finds drugs,” complains Sergey Rodkin, dissatisfied with his clients’ lack of creativity. “But that’s not a plotline.” According to Rodkin, there could be a million different plotlines, with guns, arrests, stolen cars... “But everyone who calls wants the same thing: special forces, everybody face-plants the floor, and drugs. But then you start to get a sense of who people are, what they do, so then you show them how to improve their idea,” says the entrepreneur.

            Rodkin describes this kind of uniformity as “lack of education,” explaining “this is all people see.” He’s not far from the truth. Article 228 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation is regularly referred to as the “national” article in the mass media, since drug possession and drug dealing cases are the most numerous cases in the country. Around a quarter of Russia’s incarcerated population is serving time for narcotics crimes.

            Many of those charged under article 228 insist their cases were fabricated by the police. The case of journalist Ivan Golunov in summer 2019 is symbolic of this issue. Golunov’s is the most famous example, but it isn’t the only one: news media regularly broadcast testimonies of people who had illicit substances planted on them. Based on an analysis of court sentences, Novaya Gazeta editor Andrey Zayakin estimates that over the past ten years “there must’ve been around ten thousand falsified cases related to heroin alone.”

            Psychologist Polina Soldatova believes that the emergence of the Special Forces Show franchise and similar companies demonstrates that the siloviki [the security, military, and law enforcement agencies] have become such a significant, fundamental part of Russian society that people need some way to reflect on the phenomenon. “Humor is society’s way of reacting to what’s happening. Both these pranks and the Free OMON bot [a Telegram app that adds OMON riot police officers to any picture] are ways of accepting as part of your reality the fact that siloviki could show up at your door anytime and nobody would be surprised, that guns and illicit substances are planted on people but nobody bats an eye. People need this to somehow come to terms with their reality. This turns it into a joke, people are glad that it’s not prison, thank god, it’s just marriage.”

            At least some of the Special Forces Show’s clients regard siloviki in their entirety as an utterly unpredictable entity. Alexander, a manager in the city of Penza, hired a local company to propose to his wife in 2017. When asked whether he’s afraid of the police, he cheerfully opines, “Well, we live in Russia, where you can do nothing, just sit at home in your tiny little village, and they’ll still find something to pin on you. In our country they can come after anybody and arrest them for no reason. Nobody’s safe from that, absolutely nobody.”

            Franchise owner Rodkin, though, dismisses the idea that there are problems. “They don’t plant stuff on somebody for no reason, somebody who’s just walking down the street. As I understand it they plant stuff on people who need to be locked up. And if someone needs to be locked up, then it means that person’s no saint, it means that person did something.”

            Special Forces Show performers can simulate planting a gun as well as planting drugs. A man in Ryazan, for example, decided to celebrate his wife Yulia Koroleva’s thirtieth birthday by sneaking a pistol into her purse and ordering a “special operation.” Or the company can stage an anti-corruption raid, which is the marriage proposal Alexander from Penza chose: “It’s a normal everyday thing to have to pay a bureaucrat a kickback or bribe. It’s no more unusual than, say, stepping out to get a snack.”

            Sergey Rodkin and his regional colleagues are also regularly invited to offices to portray Economics Crimes Unit officers. They’re called on to perform at weddings, birthdays, and even children’s parties.  

            Rodkin, for his part, says that he personally prefers big events that are more like role-playing games.    

            “Six years or so ago some Afghan war veterans ordered an event, although it wasn’t a prank, it was just for their own enjoyment. They had a whole series of military scenes: ride around in an armored personnel carrier, do some shooting, chase some mujahideen guerrillas.”

            “Where did you get the armored personnel carriers and the guerrillas?”

            “We just dressed up, we have the uniforms. And an APC’s no big deal. Here in Petersburg we’ve got everything, you can rent a tank or an APC or whatever.”

 

As soon as it hit her that she was really in trouble, we started congratulating her

 

“I was really worried, I was upset. It was really scary. Nothing like that has ever happened to me,” says Karamzina with that same hesitant smile, describing her reaction. According to her, she didn’t understand what was going on even once she saw the little jewelry box. “Everything was going around and around in my head, I was scared, I didn’t even realize there might be a ring in there.”

            “Do you know how much time you might have gotten if there really had been drugs in there?”

            “No, thank goodness, I really have no idea.”

            “Up to twenty years for an especially large amount,” says her fiancé, beaming.

            Sergey Rodkin, the Special Forces Show’s creator, approves of Karamzina’s reaction. “She did good. You could tell she was scared, but she kept it together and didn’t start screaming.”

            But at one point Rodkin complains, “Women have started acting strange lately, I just don’t get it. They’ve all gotten so educated. The guys are more or less doormats, it’s not that they get scared exactly, it’s just that if they’re not drunk then they behave. They’re calm, normal. But these women, they put up a fight. I mean nobody touches them, you know, no force is applied, and so they all get overly smart. They talk a lot, they argue, they try to prove it wasn’t them. About half of them are like that.”  

            “How do they try to prove it?”

            “Lawyers, phone calls, ‘I’m not going to talk.’ The guys are simpler, but these women, they start talking your head off. What we end up with as far as our dialogue, the exchange with them, is, how should I put it... it doesn’t subdue them.” 

            Still, Rodkin specifies, regardless of the victim’s reaction, “the people who are running the show have all the leverage anyway.” The essence of what is happening doesn’t change, the only thing that changes is the duration. When people try to stand up for their rights, it takes longer to scare them.

            Rodkin points out that smiling is a common defense mechanism, so the victim’s psychological state needs to be evaluated based on things other than smiling: “Disconnected speech, answers that make no sense, no logic, she starts losing it, she starts sweating... she’s smiling, but you can tell by her eyes that she’s flustered. You look at her hands and see them shaking.”

            Rodkin reflects on Karamzina’s reaction: “The girl broke right away, so what’s the point of dragging it out? She’d already gotten her fill of emotion. You can either bring her to tears, but that’s not what we’re going for, or else she recovers and figures out that what’s going on is nonsense. If we’d pushed her just a little bit more, she’d’ve started crying, and that’s probably not good. We got it just right: as soon as it hit her that she was really in trouble, we started congratulating her.”

            “Don’t you think it’s cruel to do this to people, regardless?”

            “Depends how you do it. The way we do it, it’s not. But you get these know-nothing schmoes who try to do it, and a lot of the time they’re really cruel, and it turns out really bad. When people get hysterical, or start sobbing, that’s not the way it should be. It should still be a celebration.”

            In practice, the initial reaction after the end of the show is often shock and anger. “Are you out of your mind? Get out of here!” said one stunned young lady in Bashkiria to her boyfriend, who’d arranged a special operation with a shootout for her.

            Alexander from Penza enjoys recalling the reaction of his future wife: “She was so scared she gave her full name, but that was it, after that all she could do was cry hysterically. Just picture it, a bunch of guys with assault rifles run up, and they also had some kind of grenade, they’d decided to embellish the plot. I had no idea. Afterwards she grumbled, ‘You had to go and give me a heart attack as your way of popping the question, were there really no regular, normal ways to do it, why were you so barbaric, what kind of fiend are you?’ You know, all those little phrases you ladies like.”

            Yulia Koroleva from Ryazan went further, telling her husband to “Go **** yourself!” and bashing him in the head with the bouquet. In an interview with the Special Forces Show recorded a few days later, the birthday girl, now laughing, recalls that after the fright her heart didn’t stop hammering until dinner later that evening in a restaurant.

            “But what’d you do that for? I was terrified,” a different girl asked her fiancé.

            As part of her research, Alexandra Arkhipova, anthropologist and lecturer at the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, conducted interviews about marriage proposals. According to the researcher, male respondents often admitted that they were scared of proposing, so they tried to do it in a way that was not serious or direct. “Men are very afraid of outright rejection and will do anything to reduce the psychological risks: they speak as though they were proposing to a third party, they propose it in a humorous way, or they stage it as a miniature theatrical event,” explains Arkhipova. “A narcotics raid is also a play, a theater piece, it draws out all the emotions the person is afraid of expressing. This scenario, due to its stressful content, redirects the threat onto itself, and by doing this it lowers the stress of a potential rejection.”

            Another way it has cultural meaning, according to Arkhipova, is that it replicates a violent scenario where the woman is a victim who is then rescued. “The woman is deliberately placed in a situation where she’s helpless, then the magical plotline of rescue plays out: the potential husband also seems to be a victim, at first, but then all of a sudden he turns into the savior who offers his hand and heart. In Russia this plotline is still regarded favorably.”

            In the five years he’s been doing this job, says Sergey Rodkin, only one woman has rejected her suitor’s proposal. Special Forces Show directors in Naberezhnye Chelny, Penza, and Ryazan affirm that in their experience there has never been a single rejection.

            This doesn’t surprise psychologist Polina Soldatova: “The woman ends up surrounded by a bunch of armed men, who don’t put away their assault rifles until someone asks her if she’ll marry him. The answer ‘yes’ is guaranteed.”

            According to Soldatova, the ones who have fun in these situations are the ones who have power, that is, the clients who ordered the prank. “The victims smile and laugh from relief, from a sense of gratitude [to the world] that the cops aren’t real. There’s nothing funny about it for the person who is first subjected to intense stress and who then, on top of that, has to say thank you when somebody tells her what a creative partner she has.”

            You can find YouTube videos posted by regional Special Forces Shows where during the prank people’s arms are twisted behind their backs, their heads are forced down, they are pushed to the ground (or floor), they’re searched, or they’re flattened onto the hood of a car. Soldatova explains that it may not be so easy for people to shrug off this violence and degradation. 

           

You have to be accountable

 

The way Sergei Rodkin proposed to his own wife was “the most regular everyday way,” in a café. He didn’t even have a ring. “My wife wouldn’t like [the Special Forces Show], I know that. And so I didn’t do one for her,” the entrepreneur explains.

            According to Rodkin, the first question he always asks his clients is whether the girlfriend will like this format: “You have to know what you’re doing it for, whether the girl will think it’s trendy and interesting. It wouldn’t be for my wife, and that’s why I didn’t do it. You have to be accountable. If people don’t like something, but you do that thing, then how are they going to feel about you?”

            Yulia Koroleva’s husband, who simulated planting a gun in her purse for her thirtieth birthday, explained his motivation in a video as follows: “It’s actually really hard to surprise Yulia because she’s had more than enough of both positive and not so positive emotions in her life. And that’s putting it mildly. Every year I have to rack my brain for how to provoke some kind of emotion in her.”

            “What does this tell us?” reasons psychologist Polina Soldatova. “It tells us that people are under profound stress, which makes them extremely tense and ready for anything. And what this says to me is, don’t shock your girlfriend. Take care of your girlfriend instead.”

            Dmitry Chernykh’s special forces marriage proposal in 2014 was the first of its kind. Last year his wife divorced him.

            “We did two beach vacations a year, went to Europe once a year,” recounts Chernykh, implying that they lived well. He didn’t set up any more special forces pranks, but he “tried to make our life full of surprises, because I’m a spontaneous guy myself.”

            As for the cause of the divorce, Chernykh calls it “a lousy combination of circumstances,” then goes into more detail about what he means by that. “The baby really had an effect on her. When we met, my social status was pretty low, I’d only just started a real job. And then things started looking up, I worked harder and I played harder.”

            Chernykh says that he invited his wife to come along every time he went out, but she always said that there wasn’t anyone for her to leave the baby with. It is true that for various reasons neither of the baby’s grandmothers helped the young family out, and his wife didn’t want to get a babysitter for a baby who was still so little. “I’d say, ‘Don’t you understand that I work? I work from morning till night, I need to unwind. Why don’t you come with me?’” Chernykh recalls, describing their fights. “But she’d say, ‘I don’t want to leave the baby with some stranger.’ There was always some kind of justification.”

            “At some point, she said something along the lines of seeing how I’m out partying and ditching my family, I must not actually need a family,” Chernykh recalls awkwardly. “So after I came home from yet another night partying with my friends, she kicked me out.” 

            The last time Chernykh surprised her was on her thirtieth birthday. By then they were already divorced. “I rode up on a motorcycle wearing a motorcycle helmet—it was raining and she didn’t recognize me because my visor was fogged up—and I gave her a trip to Holland with our son. She wanted to see the tulip fields in bloom.”