From Russia, With Love

A breeder sets off- alone - to a country she's never been to before in search of a new cat for her breeding program. She found not only her cat, but friendship and a completely new outlook on the country.

- Lucy Drury

When I first said out loud that I was thinking about going to Moscow in January 2019 by myself to pick up a new kitten, my 38-year-old daughter, Linda, suddenly became the over-protective parent. My daughter-in-law also jumped on the bandwagon. While I had traveled extensively in the U.S., with a couple of trips to Canada and the Caribbean, the idea of their mother going by herself to Russia, of all places, did not sit well with them.

However, what I told my family was: “I am not exactly going to be by myself. My friends Nikolay and Svetlana will meet me at the airport.”

Linda was not buying it. “Internet friends!” she exclaimed. “You would have never let me go meet someone half a world away whom I had met on the internet!”

That was likely true, I admitted. However, I pointed out to Linda that she was not my mother and these two were not exactly random internet friends. I had made their acquaintance two years previously when I first decided to start my own Siberian cattery. I had a couple of males from my mentor that I could use if I focused on color points, but finding a breeder-quality girl that was a great match for my boys proved a bit difficult.

The Perfect Girl

And then I stumbled across a Facebook post by Olga Korbasova, who owned the Taiga Star cattery in Tula, Russian Federation. It was a picture of three blue lynx point Siberian kittens about eight weeks old, two of them with white mittens. I fell in love with them immediately—they were exactly what I was looking for. But importing from Russia?