A nation's worst-kept secret: the women lured to Lebanon with a one-way ticket into slavery

Up in the hill town of Bhamdoun, newly restored for an army of Kuwaiti tourists, the mayor says Maameltein is a dirty name. Drive half a mile up the road from the old port of Jounieh and you can see why.

The "Super Night Club", "Swing", "Cobra", "White Nights" and "Excalibur" don't leave much to the imagination. Pictures of young women in stockings and suspenders make it clear that this is not family entertainment. Indeed, the hundreds of Russian women wearing out their young lives on this coastal strip are the worst kept secret in Lebanon.

Five years ago, they were Czechs and Hungarians. But as European wealth has spread east, the new poverty belt of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine is supplying the Middle East with women – in Cyprus, in Dubai, in Lebanon.

The customers here are mostly seedy, retired bankers and middle-aged businessmen, Muslims and Christians – although Maameltein is a Christian town – who have to spend $150 (£98) to meet two girls at the cabaret strip and then choose whom they want to meet the next afternoon. Rates are between $50 and $100 and one can only say that the Russian women are infinitely more pleasant than their clients. Told that a journalist wants to interview them – that all he wants is to hear their story – Natasha and Tatiana (their real names) wanted lunch. "Fish," they chorused as we drove to the sea.

Natasha is from Gorky, a bright, pretty woman of 24 who wants to complete a degree in modern languages next year, who speaks careful, accurate English, who hates her alcoholic father and who has told her mother she is in Moscow. She has only been in Lebanon two months and, when I ask her how she can stand her life here, she looks at me seriously.

"You have never been without enough money, have you?" she says. "You cannot imagine what it is like to have no money. Without money I cannot live in Russia, I cannot have an apartment, I cannot eat, I cannot study. I need money so much."

Tatiana is the same age but looks older. She is tired and coughs a lot during lunch, eating chips and red mullet and drinking white wine. She studied at a technical institute outside Gorky; her parents are dead. It is her second six-month stint in Lebanon, bar girl by night, call girl by day.

"I didn't know what this job was until I got here," she says. "I thought all I had to do was to dance and drink with men and sit with customers. My boss didn't tell me, the girls did. But I couldn't leave. I had to pay for my ticket, for the blood tests, for the visa. I couldn't get the extra cash any other way."

It is a cruel, circular trap. An "impresario" in Russia – I failed to discover how this name found its way to the girls' bosses in Russia and Lebanon – puts an advertisement in his local paper, asking for women who want to work in floor shows and "ballet" and earn $450 a month. They are given a one-way air ticket, a Russian blood test and their Lebanese boss arranges an "artist's" visa and a Lebanese blood test – the stamp of bureaucracy is one of the more sinister sides to all this. Only when she reaches Lebanon is the girl told that she will have to pay for the ticket ($300), for the Lebanese test ($100), for the apartment she will share with another girl, for the return ticket. Of the $70 a client pays for meeting a girl, she gets $5. So she's broke the moment she arrives.

Tatiana once fell in love. The boss didn't like that. He didn't want jealous males. Natasha simply thinks of the money she can take home. "I will never be able to speak of this there. In Russia, we have to be different people. Women who do this there are called dirty whores. When I get my degree, I can live a normal life, get a proper job. I want to teach children. I like children." And men, I ask her? What about men? Doesn't this make her hate men? Both young women thought this perplexing. Tatiana liked Lebanon, the weather, the food. It was a job. It was her decision to return. Natasha, who was friends with Tatiana before she came and knew what the "job" involved, insisted she did not feel trapped. "I can do what I want," she said. "I can go to the beach – if I ask my boss's permission."

When I suggested that they were victims of the worst side of men, Natasha disagreed. They were the victims of the collapse of the Soviet Union, she said, of a way of life – free schooling, free universities, free apartments – that had been taken from them. Men in Russia were drunk and often aggressive, she said. Arab men were much milder, often more intelligent. Yes, she said, she had brought books with her to keep up her English, although her choice was oddly old-fashioned. She had brought the novels of Jack London and John Galsworthy's Over the River. She had read all of Pushkin's poetry and Tolstoy's War and Peace.

If Russia's greatest export is now white slavery, few have gained more than money. Tatiana says that some of the Russian women have psychological problems after a few months, they become alcoholics or take drugs – and then take their problems home. The luckiest, all agree, was a beautiful young woman from Omsk who arrived on the Maameltein strip only to find that one of her first clients was a European diplomat based in Beirut who fell in love with her. And she with him. He paid her nightclub with a backhander of $15,000, married the girl and both now live in western Europe.

For the rest, it is a darker world. In Lebanon, I could not find a single humanitarian organisation interested in helping these young women or offering protection. It is the "boss", the nightclub owner, who controls their lives, who decides that they must work in the bar from 7pm until 1am, then sleep till lunchtime and spend the afternoon with clients who picked them up the previous night. The authorities visit the clubs to make sure the girls are there each evening – thus ensuring that they cannot possibly be involved in prostitution.

I said most of the men sounded pitiful. Tatiana shrugged. "We have a saying in Russia. 'If a man doesn't pity himself, why should I pity him?'"