Should you find yourself snagged by a Russian Bride, chances are that you’ll wind up at Zags.

The Russian registry office is a wonderful Soviet institution that you can still enjoy today. Most provincial Zags ‘Palaces Of Marriage’ are on the ground floor of ugly concrete blocks and hard to distinguish from dry cleaners or nondescript restaurants.

In recent years, one or two Zags have been painted valentine pink and fitted with piped wedding music. Now sometimes the registrars dress up like waitresses, or there’s a state-of-the-tacky quill pen for signing the register. But it’s still a mostly Soviet affair, where the highlight is getting a notarised, apostilled document and, much more important, your passport back. At Zags, you’re obliged to hand in passports with the marriage application. This is so that, if you do ditch the bride at the altar - I mean desk - you can’t skip the country.

If it doesn’t seem at first like a special day, it’s because it was never intended to be.

The Marxists saw no place for marriage in the new Soviet Union. Engels’ idea was for children to be brought up communally by State paediatricians, leaving women free for important factory work. In the early 1930s, A. V. Lunacharski, Russia’s Commissar of Education, wrote: ‘Our problem now is to do away with the household.’ L. M. Sabsovitch agreed, and suggested that ‘the family dwelling could be completely eliminated, to be replaced by individual rooms for individual persons.’

But somehow, Russian bridepower overcame advanced intellectual thought and marriages at Zags survived, even if they do look more like funerals. Especially when the big black Mercedes stops by the war memorial and dumps all the bouquets in the snow.

A traditional, Politburo-style Zags.

One of the new, ‘tacky pink interior’ Zags.

Before attending a wedding, I asked my friend Grigory about all the intricate Russian customs and traditions. ‘Oh, just shove them some money’ he said. ‘We used to wish couples health and happiness and so on. Now it’s just prosperity.’

The redeeming feature of Russian weddings is the party that follows. It is said that, in early Communist times, two days were often allowed - as a concession to make up for the loss of Christmas. Odd. Since Christmas has been restored, Russian weddings can now last 3 - 5 days.

Perhaps a Russian wedding can be best compared to what they say about the Sixties - if you can remember it, you weren’t there.