The Siberian Version of ‘The Bachelor’ Offered Anything But Love

Shortly after American Charlie Eddy arrived in Irkutsk, Siberia in 2016, he was greeted by a camera crew and 14 women.

The recent college graduate, accompanied by wanderlust and a Russian language degree, found himself at the center of a reality show called A Free Heart, with a familiar structure to the United States-born The Bachelor franchise: each week there was a date with one (or all) of his many hired suitors. The number of people on each date depleted every week, when Eddy eliminated a potential bride by way of a “rose ceremony” (again, a concept yanked from The Bachelor)—an elimination ceremony where only the women who were handed a flower would continue on in the competition. But the show didn’t result in a bride for the then-23-year-old. Instead, it was an unexpected lesson in the differences between the country and his American roots.

On the premiere night of the filmed love-thirsty competition, the first woman to march out to greet Eddy called herself Dasha. She had hair so blonde that it looks almost tortured, like the bleach and dye had to beat her true hair color into submission. The enormity of her breasts belied the nasal affectation of her soft girl-like voice, with which she asks him questions about his life as a springboard to talk about her own. She called herself an aerobics instructor (who did not seem particularly fit), and reported to Eddy that she could only rap, not sing. She offered a flashdrive with photos of herself, which the main contestant promptly lost.

One by one, the women filed in to meet Eddy, each accompanied by gifts to hand off to their shared eye of affection. Sparkly dresses glistened like the beading sweat they continuously wiped off under the attention of the set lights and an almost cripplingly particular cameraman.

The first of several women by the name of Katya pranced in next, her face crumpled by nervousness. She handed Eddy a box of spices, each representing a quality Eddy might want in a woman, such as salt for domesticity. She rattled off their names and meanings so quickly that the man–fluent, but not a native Russian speaker—lost track. Asked to choose which spice represents the quality he most prizes in a woman, he selected peppermint at random. She seemed disappointed.

Eddy was soon surrounded by women shrieking to be heard, wildly gesticulating to hold his attention. And to the local babuskhas watching the show, the American seemed charmed, charming, a regular Lothario. The center of the show also had a talent for keeping a straight face. He was smiling, but uncomprehending—four years of academic Russian had not prepared him for the 14 women clamoring for him. He later reported that he was frozen to his chair during that first meeting, afraid he looked like an incontinent who has discovered he needs to change clothing immediately.

The first rose ceremony came with the realization that the show somehow didn’t have access to enough roses, so they used huge daisies instead. And the daisies wouldn’t stand up on their own, so they were threaded with a wire that made literal the farce holding up the whole operation. A solemn Eddy doled out the wire-threaded daisies, making careful eye contact so the multiple Katyas, Nastias, and Dashas would know which he was talking to until he inevitably came up one short. She who stood daisy-less had to leave. Unsurprisingly, the show’s producers had input into who Eddy kept around. They, predictably, wanted to keep the ones who would make good television, which is how Eddy ended up spending weeks with a woman he despised, who told him she had seen their future together in her tarot cards.

Eddy is objectively handsome in a vaguely Eastern European way—with wide-set eyes and sharp cheekbones. He had a few girlfriends in college, but it would be unlikely for any of his peers to have guessed that he would participate in a televised dating game. Rather, they would recall him as cerebral, a man was oftentimes found jotting inner-thoughts in his journal.

Both his friends and acquaintances from his tranquil hometown in Northern California describe the teenage Eddy with remarkable uniformity: creative, ironic, eccentric, precocious, sporadic, promising, long-haired and a very good piano player. He managed to be both loud about his opinions and enigmatic, with a deflating tendency to introspect. He was–and is, according to a close friend–”consistently inconsistent.”

In the months before he graduated from undergraduate school at Grinnell College in Iowa, Eddy was awarded the school’s John Mohan Fellowship for continuing education in Russian language. While he had loose plans to travel to Moscow, Russia to improve his language skills he developed via his Russian degree and semester abroad, new friend Tatyana had other plans.

The Russian-American woman he met through the fellowship had a friend who wanted a young man’s help promoting his restaurant through the unlikely vehicle of reality television. For The Bachelor knock-off, Eddy would share center stage with another American export: product placement. So in August 2016—with precious little information and no plans to get married–Eddy set off for what the Lonely Planet describes as the “de facto capital of Eastern Siberia”, on the shores of the deepest lake in the world.

Eddy’s month as a reality television star began in earnest when he met Tatyana’s friend Andrei for the first time at a restaurant in the Moscow Radisson Hotel, a converted Stalinist tower. Andrei owned a restaurant-club-karaoke bar in Irkutsk called Sky Lounge, which required a little out-of-the-box marketing. (Along with several other Siberian oligarchs, Andrei also co-owned a local ice cream factory, a helicopter company, and a jade mine; all of these would figure into the dates on A Free Heart.)

“[Andrei] wasn’t like the other oligarchs. He had blue suede shoes, a paisley shirt, Donald Trump hair, little gold teeth in his mouth, and wants to take photos in front of every sports car,” Eddy remembers, nearly six years after his TV stint. “The other oligarchs are just normal, suit-wearing people.”

Eddy had landed on Andrei like his golden goose, the rare Russian-speaking California boy who he was willing to pay for the cachet of his American accent. But Eddy refused, as work in exchange for pay went against the terms of his visa. Upon his refusal, Andrei instead offered him 10 Gucci shirts. Eddy said his bags were too tightly packed for ten shirts. So, he did the show for free, which is something he was perhaps initially proud of, but three years later is neither rich nor rule-abiding enough to justify.

At that first meeting, Andrei told Eddy: “Girls love it when you hold them down. You’ll just pour champagne on their head. They love that.” This is when Eddy, appalled, realized how far out of his comfort zone—previously confined to books and drinking—he would be treading. That conversation, he reports, replayed in his head “every minute of the goddamn day.”

Beyond the Russian language, Eddy also studied acting throughout his young life. He was an actor, but at no point did he refer to A Free Heart as an acting exercise. “Anthropological experiment” was the term both he and Tatyana preferred.

In 1960, mid-Cold War, President Dwight Eisenhower planned an unprecedented visit to the Soviet Union. And on his way to Moscow, he scheduled a stop in Irkutsk to gaze upon Lake Baikal. But the Soviets were presented with a problem: the city was 60 kilometers from the lakeshore, with no easy route between the two. Moscow, therefore, commanded that a road be built, and planned President Eisenhower’s trip with such exactitude that he drove nowhere else in the city. And he reportedly said, as the Irkutyani love to repeat, “Mighty fine roads!”

The road is still preserved in perfect condition, though nearly every other road in the city is ravaged with potholes. And everyone in the nation believes they know why: one time, a US president visited the city in the middle of nowhere. Still, what is less known is that Eisenhower had a companion on his trip, his best friend from military school. This best friend fell in love in Irkutsk, and brought his bride back to America with him. The cross-Atlantic pair were Eddy’s grandparents. And generations later, after being tracked down by the owner of Sky Lounge, the international reality TV star decided to retrace his grandfather’s steps to find a true love of his own…or so goes the myth of A Free Heart.

His supposed familial ties to Irkutsk were central to the show’s success, which he recited dutifully on a Siberian morning talk show. And this was bolstered by Eddy’s personal faux-narrative: that of a 28-year-old millionaire on the precipice of Hollywood stardom, and the son of a Silicon Valley magnate. The first night they met, Andrei posed Eddy in front of sports cars in Moscow, Russia and shared the photos far and wide on social media, as evidence of the myth.

“My impression was that the Irkutyani would believe anything on TV,” Eddy said, who was actually no more than 23 years old at the time. “Maybe their culture wasn’t so different, after all!” Strangely, sources say President Eisenhower’s trip never actually happened. The Soviet Union reportedly shot down an American U-2 on a reconnaissance mission, mere days before the scheduled trip. The roads, regardless, have remained pothole-less.

“Siberia is not like you imagine–it’s not a grey wasteland dotted with concrete buildings. It’s more of a tree-peppered, cultural wasteland with totally normal-looking buildings, but it’s all…a little bit different,” Eddy says of his first impressions. Irkutsk is a city of under a million people, like a Soviet Des Moines, surrounded by birch trees. Sky Lounge, as it turns out, is across the street from the Irkutsk airport, and so was the first thing Eddy saw upon touching down. The four-story building is fronted by two elephant sculptures, covered in fake grass.

As future dates unfolded, Eddy became more and more adept at keeping a straight face; now, he reports, he can remain placid through anything. For one date, A Free Heart followed the reality show script and took to the beach, the ladies bravely showing up in bikinis and heels despite the chill of a Siberian summer, like some Lake Baikal version of Love Island. And then they raced, à la Survivor, to a pile of objects to use as props to dance with.

The youngest contestant–yet another Katya–got there first, and emerged not with a toy (as Eddy had assumed she would) but with a cabbage. She very gamely posed with it. Dasha ended up with binoculars, Nastia with a hammer and hard hat, and the other Katya–perhaps most bizarre of all–with a Kalashnikov rifle. The producers took drone footage of the girls spinning with their props, saying things Eddy couldn’t understand, and posing for other photography in the lake’s dirt-like sand.

On another outing, the girls sang karaoke at Sky Lounge, which is the encounter Eddy now says he remembers most vividly. Many of them attempted to sing in English, which was catastrophic in the case of Alya, a girl Eddy had affection for, but had to kick off after she forgot half the lines to “Yellow”, by Coldplay. (He divulges now that he was completely charmed by her performance, but the pretense of the show required that he dismiss those who were least impressive in that week’s date.)

One of the several Nastias was an opera singer, and she also sang in English, “some kind of space opera about everlasting love and eternal time blah blah blah”. In the footage, Eddy seems both impressed and baffled by the scene. “Every parody or trope of woefully Americanized other cultures trying to do American stuff just flashed before my eyes. I was laughing, but they edited it so it didn’t look like I was laughing at her, which I’m grateful for,” he says.

Katya, meanwhile, sang a Russian song from the nineties, by a pop-punk band called Kombinaciya, a double-entendre that means both “combination” and refers to a woman’s frilly slip. The lead singer looks and dresses a bit like Madonna in the “Material Girl” era and Katya—wearing a similar ensemble—performed their hit American Boy, much to Eddy’s delight. A rough translation of the lyrics includes the line: “But somewhere my prince with his citizenship/ Is gonna whisk me away…American boy!”

Throughout, the star of the show appeared to have committed to the anthropological experiment of it all. He makes out with the girls, stages fights, rides on horses, eats a traditional congealed chicken fat dish, runs through fields, dives into the Angara river, endures a strip tease (which ended before total nudity, he is quick to note), all with minimal obvious mortification.

But the strangeness of the show and the foreignness of the place got to him. Being that Andrei refused to allow the star to drink any alcohol on the show or in general, he began to seek out other avenues to numbness. He took to reading Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, which includes a 100-page diatribe about the fluctuating cost of silver that bored him to near-oblivion. “I seriously cannot recommend a more boring book to you than The Wealth of Nations,” he told me. “I would end my evenings, like, in the fetal position, on the couch, under my three varieties of floral wallpaper in my Soviet apartment with its shitty balcony and fish in the fridge. I don’t know why I was doing that, but I think it speaks to my mental state at the time.”

The show ended a month after it started, precisely as expected. The last three standing (Dasha, and two Katyas) took a limousine to an expansive and picturesque Soviet monument on the river. If you looked over the wall, Eddy said, “it’s just like a wasteland of weeds that aren’t maintained, because it’s also Siberia.”

Eddy walked the three girls to the edge of the water, and hit all his marks. Instead of a bunch of daisies, he had just one ring. Andrei’s jade mine also produced feonite, a diamond-like rock, softer but nearly as shiny. The producers set Andrei-mined feonite in silver, and Eddy—full of speeches and adulation—gave it to Katya of the box of spices, Katya of the ‘90s karaoke performance, Katya of the Kalashnikov.

Watching the show, this all feels positively true. Eddy puts the ring on her finger, and we believe for a moment that he wants to marry her. She is glowing, happy, and the camera gets several shots of them kissing and embracing at sunset. And later, Eddy told me his affection for Katya was real, or at least as real as the manufactured relationship could have been. He called her “genuinely smart and cute and intelligent and funny.”

But he also immediately felt sorry for her. The first thing he told her when the cameras stopped rolling was his true age. Katya, in turn, told Eddy that she had left her husband right before the show, because she had felt nothing for him. “No one does this thing because they’ve had a seamless and perfect life,” Eddy said. “No one wanders onto Bachelor of Irkutsk.”

Eddy arrived in Siberia expecting absurdity, an expectation confirmed by Andrei’s gold teeth and rampant sexism. His stint on the show was made easier when he saw its players as producer-concocted caricatures: a confident busty blonde and sweet traditional brunette making eyes at him while the cameraman captures the golden hour.

But then they began to take human shape, beyond the mild flirtation and nonsensical competitions. Eddy left Irkutsk with affection for many of the contestants, who told him about their lives in between countless takes of batting eyelashes and darkened dancefloors. It is unclear whether they knew from the beginning that Eddy did not plan to marry the winner. I asked him if Katya knew that the proposal, the ring, everything was for the purposes of promoting a club. “I guess I don’t know,” he said, as if this is the first time the thought has occurred to him. “Maybe she learned in that moment.”

Charlie Eddy still isn’t a 28-year-old Silicon Valley millionaire—he has two more years to make that happen. He is working in construction near his Bay Area hometown, building a house for the sister of the CEO of a multibillion dollar multinational corporation: “I am literally the opposite of who I purportedly was,” he reports. He regularly participates in performance art shows in San Francisco.

And he still speaks Russian every chance he gets. He speaks it well, well enough that the Muscovites he encounters assume he’s from a former Soviet bloc state. The slang and curse words he picked up on the set of A Free Heart have proved especially helpful, like when he ranted with a Russian Lyft driver who hated Stalin about the governments of their respective countries. In this way, Grinnell’s language fellowship continues to pay dividends.

“And every single Russian I meet says ‘get a Russian girlfriend, that’s the best practice’,” he writes to me in a recent email. “And I’m always like ‘you don’t know the half of it.’”