Russian exile offers escape route on a marriage-go-round

Press, 29 August 1986, Page 21

Russian exile offers escape route on a marriage-go-round

CHRIS MOSEY

reports from Stockholm on the operations of a

man with a chequered past who specialises in marriages of convenience.

East-West marriage broker, Alexander Balmages, points to the bullet holes in the wall of his kitchen and laughs. “Someone wants to stop me,” he says. "Afraid? Hell, no. I’m not afraid. Let me tell you, I have lived for nearly 40 years and I have achieved something with my life. I sleep well at night, my friend. “But I’ll tell you something else: if they do get me, a hell of a lot of people are going to come to my funeral.” Gunmen have fired twice on the flat in the drab Stockholm suburb of Varby Gard where Balmages, a 39-year-old Russian exile, organises marriages of convenience for Soviet citizens who want to come to the West. The first shooting was on December 17 last year. The second, was on March 18 this year. Who fired? "Don’t ask me. That’s what I asked the Swedish police. Listen, I don’t know — I don’t want to know, believe me.” Possible answers include: 0 Agents of the Soviet K.G.B. anxious to stop his marriage brokerage activities. ® Soviet dissidents in Stockholm who accuse Balmages himself of being in the pay of the K.G.B. © Nordic mobsters out to settle old scores. Balmages is a big man with

hooded, careful eyes, muttonchop whiskers, and hands the size of hams. He freely admits to a decidedly chequered past on either side of the Iron Curtain. Back in his home town of Tallinn, capital of the Soviet republic of Estonia, “I did a bit of everything — worked in a factory, studied at technical high school, ran a shop, worked the black market.” And when he was jailed for 2y 2 years for violating currency regulations, he claims he bribed his way out of prison. Then in 1963 his father changed television aerials so the family could pick up programmes from Finland. “That changed the way I saw things,” says Balmages. “I decided I wanted out.” This was how he began his now famous marriage-go-round. He married a Finnish girl who volunteered purely to help him get out of Estonia. In 1979, he

arrived in Helsinki, the Finnish capital, where he claims to have studied at the University but also admits to having smuggled valuable icons out of the Soviet Union. “Look, the Finnish police took away my work permit. I had to do something to pay the rent,” he says. He denies claims in the Finnish press that he masterminded a celebrated bank robbery in Helsinki carried out by two Estonian exiles. Balmages came to Stockholm five years ago. From here he claims to have arranged hundreds of marriages of convenience between Westerners and Soviet citizens anxious to get out, most of them Jewish. For justification, he cites the example of the former Swedish Prime Minister, Olof Palme, who was assassinated earlier this year. In 1949, Palme married a Czechoslovakian woman just to enable her to come to the West.

They divorced after her arrival in Sweden.

A marriage arranged by Balmages costs $12,000, and the Western “partner” travels to the Soviet Union three times. The first is to get to know the future marriage partner, the second to make arrangements for the wedding, and, finally, for the wedding itself. Comments such as this cause wry grins among Balmages’ critics. Ants Kippar, who runs a Stockholm organisation helping Estonian prisoners of conscience, maintains that Balmages is helping the K.G.B. to recruit spies. “The K.G.B. turns a blind eye to his activities because they can use him to sneak out their people in this way, through marriage, without arousing suspicion,” says Kippar. Balmages dismisses such attacks with contempt. He claims connections with an underground organisation in the United States

which helps Soviet Jews to get to the West. In the murky and secretive milieu in which he operates, rumour and suspicion abound. But whoever is backing him, he is certainly functioning as an East-West marriage broker. And the operation seems extremely slick. “He fixed everything,” says a 20-year-old Swedish woman. “I didn’t even have to go to the embassy to get a visa.” In March last year, the woman travelled by air to Moscow from Stockholm, along with three other women. They stayed in the Hotel Russia. There she met the man she was to marry. “He was sitting in the restaurant. I went in and asked, ’who’s the one who’s going to marry me? and he said, ‘That’s me.’” In June, on her third trip, the couple were married. The woman says she did it purely for the money, but claims Balmages undercut her on the amount originally promised.

She estimates it will take between one and two years to get permission for her “husband” to leave the Soviet Union. “Then we’ll have to stay married for a while for the benefit of the Swedish authorities. After that I don’t think there’ll be any problem getting a divorce.” — Copyright London Observer