As a rule, men rarely order catalogue placement as a separate service, and foreign marriage agencies include this service as part of the package - for example, when a man buys 10 or more addresses, he can put his profile in the catalogue for free.
This means that men in the catalogues most likely already have a correspondence with some of the women, even if they had no contacts by the time they submitted their profiles. If a man listed in the catalogue is not corresponding with any of the women, that means that he is either unpopular, or not very serious about his search.
Agencies print catalogues every 3-6 months, and the information in them happens to get outdated even before their publication. The majority of the catalogues do not provide you with the address of the man, just his number and the address of the agency. Many marriage agencies offer women to send just one photo and a letter, promising to make multiple copies of them and to send them to men. In fact, for agencies catalogues are another way of attracting female clients, because by the time your letter reaches the agency, the man would be most likely involved in a relationship. The most popular men listed with catalogues get hundreds of letters, so your chance to be noticed is very small.
Thus, catalogues mostly serve as a bait - both for Russian and foreign marriage agencies. It is just a showcase, and all the quality goods are already sold.
Some Russian agencies also place profiles of men in their catalogues, and send them to those interested by prepaid mail. Or it is sent free of charge, but you have to pay for men's addresses. Everything said above also concerns these catalogues: the men are either "shabby" or unavailable. Never buy addresses from catalogues.
The only case in which a catalogue could be useful is when it was received by email, and all the data in it is less than 10-20 days old. This catalogue probably would not be printed as a brochure, more likely in the form of profiles with photos on regular paper.