by ubertop on Sun Nov 24, 2013 4:42 pm
Summary … (article)
Porn Ukraine – Wicked Wiska?
Graham Phillips / September 7, 2013
There are several rather fascinating things that come up from the news that former Ukrainian porn star Anastasia Hagen-Gryshai has been granted a permanent residency visa in the Czech Republic. In a not-widely-known-fact about a country where beautiful women are a celebrated national symbol, with videos of them simply walking down the street stimulating millions of YouTube views and all manner of carnal comments, pornography is illegal in Ukraine. It’s a situation which puts Ukraine in the same bed as Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Iran, Sudan even. Whisper this if you will, this makes Ukraine more oppressive than Russia on the matter, actually, it puts it cheek by jowl (if reading this after 9pm, insert ruder body parts) with Belarus. It all came about in 2009, when flaccid president Victor Yushchenko, flailing in a failing country with the economy falling 15% that year, sought a quick fix to get his fast drooping popularity up. He hit on banning pornography, surprisingly a popular move in an Orthodox Ukraine actually quite conservative, at least politically, despite the raunchy rep, or rap. No joke either, with stiff potential jail penalties for any connection or consumption of the erotic industry.
Perhaps the most surprising thing about Anastasia Hagen-Gryshai, to hardened porn viewers who have been enjoying her oeuvre for the best part of 10 years, is that she’s only 27. Hagen, Gryshai to give her maiden name, is best known as Wiska, having appeared in dozens of X-rated productions over the years. Actually, one X really doesn’t cover it, Wiska has been a very wanton young woman indeed, not for her is DP an acronym for Ukraine’s eastern Dnipropetrovsk. Originally from now Belarus, as of her (depending on source) either October or November 17 1985 birth, then the Soviet Union, Anastasia (Nastya) spent most of her life in Ukraine’s Crimea, in the port / resort town of Feodosiya. It was there she met her husband Oleksandr (Sasha) Hagen (his surname is also listed as Kondratenko, let’s stick with Hagen), 17 years her senior.
Sasha, seeing Nastya sitting on a bench with a friend from a restaurant window, taken by her beauty, rushed out to make her acquaintance, taking his age down by 8 years in the process. They married in 2001, with virgin bride Nastya still at school. Sasha soon introduced his teenage bride to swinging parties, with her initially reluctant to participate, doing so by her words to keep her oversexed husband happy. In late 2002, Sasha’s business ran into trouble. He had owned a security-door manufacturing firm for 15 years, but it started to be picked on by Ukrainian police, and then a lawyer who he suggests was in league with them placed a large order but when the products were made found fault and sued Sasha for 80,000 hryvnia (around £6300, a large sum in a country with an average annual income of around half that). Sasha defended himself in court, but lost and the judge imposed a lien on the family house to recover the sum.
With clouds gathering in Crimea, the couple and their baby fled to Kiev in 2003, renting an apartment there. Although the young family initially attempted to live a happy life in Ukraine’s capital, Sasha could not let his anger at what had happened to him go, and when an order to torch the BMW of his adversary lawyer was traced back to him, he was sentenced to 8 years in a Lviv prison in mid 2003. Quite a severe charge given the car had actually failed to catch fire. Here in Lviv he describes himself as being detained in hellish conditions, beaten by prison guards, at one point almost killed. Meanwhile, his wife, still only 18, was living in Kiev, in poverty with a small child. Becoming desperate having failed to find sufficient modelling work, and that she had already participated in home-made porn at the Crimean swing parties making it a step rather than jump, she contacted porn producers in St Petersburg through the internet. Without telling her husband, the teenager travelled out of Ukraine for the first time to shoot her debut porno film in Russia.
So it was, her career commenced in 2004, with Nastya making an immediate splash in such titles as Gooey Buns 8, Hardcore Climax 7 and Nasty Prospects 5 of that year (mainly in Russia). The newcomer went through a few monikers - Vuiska, Wika, Anastasia G, Melody, Mila, Nastia, before selecting the stagename Wiska, enjoying that this translates from Russian as ‘temple’, but from Ukrainian as ‘plummet’. When Wiska told her husband of her new career he was, perhaps predictably, excited. She went on in her line, appearing in dozens more movies, then conceiving their 2nd child (born 2008) on a conjugal visit to her husband’s prison. Sasha’s sentence was eventually reduced on appeal, to 5 years, and he was released in mid-2008. Yet he emerged from prison with no business, 57,000 hryvnia still to repay and a government claim on any income of his, putting even more onus on his wife as breadwinner, with her throwing herself into work. Wiska went after the big money, going in for hardcore, multi-partner, extreme porn. Nastya has described herself as actually coming to enjoy the experience, even going into intimate detail in interview of the pleasure afforded by the oversized dimensions of the male actors. Her total earnings from the industry are believed to be in excess of $600,000, representing near a decade’s worth of work. In terms of how big a star she was in the porn world, authorities on porn generally class Wiska as mid-ranking, no ingenue, nor superstar Silvia Saint – whom Nastya once met. She caught the tail-end of the glory years of porn, with amateur and guerilla having latterly made glossy, studio-produced video porn almost obsolete.
Nastya claims she turned her back on the industry in 2011 although there does seem some evidence of activity right up to 2013, including 2012′s Pregnant Amateurs while she was carrying the couple’s third child. In fairness to her, these could have been released after the event. Nastya has stated she never participated in pornographic activity on Ukrainian territory, instead travelling to Russia and the Czech Republic (somewhat of a global hub in modern porn) for work. It was a 2007 interview with TSN.UA in Ukraine which shot her to fame in her home country. The expressive individual then began giving more, and more open, interviews to mass media. However this tactic seemed to backfire, with what she describes as a ‘stone wall of alienation’ coming up between her and the world, with her parents and elder sister almost disowning her and best friend severing ties. That said, Nastya did say that former schoolfriends reacted calmly, even calling her a ‘star’. In interviews, she accused those casting admonishment and judgement on her of hypocrisy, and said she had no remorse over her career decision. However, her media exposure and new-found celebrity profile that came with it aroused the attention of Ukrainian authorities who began arraigning her on charges relating to child abuse, never proven. Then the 2009 porn outlawing empowered authorities to pursue her more directly.
Nastya’s home was searched by police several times, with pornography reported as being found on her husband’s computer, and she found herself frequently stopped in the street for supposedly random police checks. In 2010, Nastya began planning to retire Wiska, and get out of porn and Ukraine, with her talking of writing a book, as her porn idol Jenna Jameson had done, ‘Life in Ukraine – Scrapbook of a Porn Actress‘. Surprisingly, despite their strident anti-porn stance, in September of 2010 FEMEN staged a protest in support of Wiska, and her book plans, featuring Nastya joining the girls both in FEMEN t-shirt, and topless. The alliance was particularly unlikely, as Nastya has actually been a fairly strident spokesperson in favour of porn, listing the advantages of it as international travel, meeting interesting people, being treated like a star, and handsome, healthy men with mammoth appendages. She has also stated she considers a porn career both ethically acceptable, and compatible with being a good mother and loving wife, which she has given as her main goals.
Unable to continue living in Ukraine under what amounted to a witch-hunt, Nastya fled to the Czech Republic in late 2010, appealing for political asylum, Ukrainians otherwise requiring a Visa to live in the Czech. Her husband did not join them, instead returning to live in his native Russia, it is unknown how much he has visited his wife and sons. For 18 months, mother and children lived in a facility for asylum seekers, in Moravia, as Nastya spent her time filling in the numerous forms required to apply for political asylum. In 2012, using all of her porn earnings, Nastya managed to afford a small house in the village of Český Brod, sending the 2 older children to the local school as more asylum requests were rejected, with subsequent appeals. After yet another appeal knockback, Nastya, despairing in December of 2012, took to staging her own protest outside the Czech parliament in Prague. With the words “Save my Children” scored on her bare chest, and her youngest with her, the FEMEN-inspired stunt certainly got attention. But in August of 2013, again another asylum request was rejected.
The Czech ministry stated at the time that despite legitimate concern that if the former porn actress returned to Ukraine she would face persecution and arrest, with a potential sentence of up to 7 years ironically the same as imprisoned former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, she did not meet political asylum criteria. It was reported that Czech authorities were nervous about what would have been the first granting of EU asylum to a pornographic performer. Some have argued that it doesn’t exactly reflect kindly on a Czech which had been granting her Visas for years to appear in its porn films, and where she had paid a substantial amount of tax, that in her time of need she found the door slammed – in December last year having 15 days to leave the country. In her last roll of the dice, Nastya applied for permanent residency through her children, on special humanitarian circumstances and given the family’s near 3-year tenure in the Czech. It was backed up by letters from their new Czech hometown, children’s teachers and church officials. To the relief of all, including the Czech authorities who had been facing increasing censure for their rejections, the residency request went through and as of 2nd September 2013, Nastya and her family are legal Czech residents.
What comes next for the ex, exiled erotic actress is uncertain, but with a financial necessity to find work (the book is yet to come out), Nastya has pledged that she will seek employment. In what sphere is unclear, though she now speaks Czech and manifestly has experience of integrating with teams. So Nastya has a new home, a new life, and the Czech has just about saved face. Who emerges looking worse from all of this rather sordid affair, is Ukraine. At the time of its passing, Yushchenko said the anti-porn legislation would protect women. 4 years on, you can find more members in an average Wiska video than those who voted for Yushchenko in the last election. And his legislation has hounded out of the country a mother of 3 who has done nothing more than, going by hits on her videos, give pleasure to many millions.
There are claims the witch-hunt against Wiska has been motivated by business and political enemies of her husband’s, his wife’s work a scapegoat to come after him. There certainly haven’t been other such high-profile lynch mobs, and you hardly need to look hard to find ample evidence of scores of other Ukrainian women employed in the porn trade. There’s little question though that one individual, Anastasia Hagen-Gryshai, and her children have been the victims in all of this. Interesting that pornography can only legitimately be used in Ukraine for “medicinal purposes”. It’s truly a sick system right now
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