Vera Melekhova was fascinated by the romanticized view many of her fellow Russian women had of foreign men — in contrast to their stereotypes about the home stock as rude drunks who "beat up their wives."

So the journalist from St. Petersburg set out to learn why so many entered into intercultural relationships in Toronto — where such opportunities abound, in contrast to more homogeneous Russia — and the challenges they face.

"Some of these women have had bad experiences with Russian guys and they believe that foreign men are better. Sometimes they can't even communicate in the same language with these guys, but they fall in love with them anyway," notes Melekhova, host of a Russian program on Rogers Television.

"But being in an interracial relationship is tough, because of all the cultural differences between them and a (Russian) community that's quite closed-minded about it."

Melekhova's exploration has been turned into an hour-long documentary, titled Lovers on the Bridge, airing at 9 p.m. tonight on OMNI Television, showing "the realities of modern-day romance" for immigrant women from the former Soviet Union. The Russian-language edition will be broadcast at 8 p.m. tomorrow.

Arvind Chugh, a Kenya-born South Asian Canadian, and wife Tamara Sai Tsibulevskaya know that reality very well after a decade together.

The Etobicoke real estate agent met the biologist from Krasnodar during a 1996 spiritual retreat at an ashram in Bangalore, India. Two days later, he proposed and she said yes. It was their shared devotion to their guru, Sathya Sai Baba, that they say brought them — and keeps them — together.

"All I knew was he's my husband. I had this feeling of joy, energy and calmness inside me that it just spread and took over me," recalls Tsibulevskaya, 50, who joined him in Canada in 1997.

Language and drastically different upbringings can stress a relationship at times, says the Toronto couple, one of seven profiled in the documentary.

For example, Tsibulevskaya, brought up under Communism, in contrast to her husband's roots in a freewheeling capitalist economy, finds the shallow schmoozing that goes on at the business functions to which she accompanies him annoying and "hypocritical."

"It irritates her with the expression, `making money,'" Chugh, 53, explains with a chuckle. "To her, making money is like trying to grab money from people without effort. She likes earning money with labour and effort. Sometimes the slang and cultural expressions can create misunderstanding.

"In the West, we have this sales-oriented culture, which is alien to her," he adds. "It's just that we all have different mindsets. It's all part of socializing that ties into lifestyles and cultures."

`Many people, including some ... close friends, said our marriage wouldn't last.'

Mila Hagley, married 11 years

During the isolated Cold War years in Russia, Melekhova says, foreign men carried the allure of the "forbidden," and some women fantasized that they were better. Marrying one was seen as a way to escape oppression, fuelling a lucrative trade in mail-order Russian brides.

"There's so little exposure to diversity in Russia. We didn't — and still don't — have many Indians, Arabs or black people there. When you don't have the exposure, you have your own imagination of what these men are like," she says.

Mila Hagley (nee Pinkhasik), whose family moved here from Belarus in 1980, recalls how tough it was to overcome her community's bias against non-Russians.

It took her and her Grenada-born husband Derrick six years of courtship before they came clean to her parents.

"Where they came from, the population was 100 per cent white. We just weren't sure how they would react," says the 38-year-old Richmond Hill mother of three boys.

Her parents were shocked initially, worrying "how their friends in the Russian community would think." Being part of a Jewish minority persecuted in the former Soviet Union, they feared the couple would face a double-whammy of discrimination.

Yet they liked Derrick, a denturist, so much that they eventually encouraged the marriage and booked a North York Russian banquet hall for its first intercultural wedding.

"Still, many people, including some of my close friends, said our marriage wouldn't last because we're of different cultures and we had nothing in common," says Hagley, now married 11 years. She says they still get stares on the street and at community events.

"I think a lot of pressure on any interracial relationships actually comes from outsiders. I've heard the grandfather of a friend say if she'd ever date a black guy, he'd go and kill him. He didn't care if he'd go to jail."

Another woman featured in the documentary, who asked to be identified only as Iryna, has dated both Russians and Canadians and feels the latter tend to be more passionate lovers and better communicators.

She ran a matchmaking company for several years for Greater Toronto's 200,000-strong Russian community. Like their peers, Russian women hope for security, status, happiness and love in their relationships, she says. But they're more willing to marry outside the community than men — who she says ask "almost 100 per cent" to be matched up with a woman from their own background.

"Russian women tend to be more family-oriented and the majority of my female clients didn't mind to date diverse Canadian men. They are much more open to possibilities than Russian men," says the 43-year-old former Muscovite, who is married to a fourth-generation Scottish Canadian.

"But things will change now that there is more freedom in Russia and people can travel to see the outside world and make their own choices. They become more open-minded."