Moscow Bites!

It wasn't until I returned to Moscow in January--after six long weeks in New York City--that I noticed the new and dramatic symptoms of the Russian financial crisis. I flew in on a Saturday afternoon on a flight that normally would have been packed with foreigners and Russians returning from the holidays. Instead, my Delta flight, which cost half what it did a year ago, was so empty I was able to stretch out in the middle three seats.

When I arrived at Sheremetyye-vo-2 Airport. I waited a mere ten minutes at passport control. Until last fall, the congested, chaotic passport line was always ready to explode into middle-aged, briefcase-jabbing violence. Entrepreneurs. swindlers. lawyers, perverts, fly-by-night salesmen, multinational reps--they would pour out of the airplanes every day, power-walk down the drab hallway and gather at the top of a wide stairwell, where a mob of passengers from four other flights stood waiting, entrenched. You saw the greed boiling over in their determined expressions and twitching mouths. The Westerners were landing in increasing numbers to tap their share of Russia's easy riches, as well as its famously easy bitches. As the frenzy picked up steam, each of them felt that every second lost was an opportunity lost, that the man who cut in line in front of him might be the man who scooped him in securing a regional bond issue. or who nabbed the gazelle-legged brunette from one of the gentlemen's clubs in downtown Moscow. In such a state of mind, even the most avuncular-looking travelers tend to lose their cool. They would start jostling wildly to keep their rightful places in an undemarcated line. unsuccessfully fending off such seasoned line-pinchers as the Russian. Indian and Chinese traders who crowded in with them. On really crowded days, a balding, bespectacled European might suddenly transform himself into a soccer hooligan, shouting, shoving and threatening. All because Russia was the biggest story, the easiest buck and the most seductive ride of the decade.

Not anymore. Nowadays, no one comes to Russia. It doesn't even register a blip on the global-economy screen. By defaulting on its debts, which Russia seems to be doing (no country ever has defaulted on both its external and domestic debts). Russia is assured of being fucked solid for at least another five years, maybe more. The Westerners have packed for good. Many lost everything they had made. All that remains is a bittersweet memory, a stained resume (continued on page 172)Moscow (continued from page 86) and at least one stubborn sexual disease that no two doctors can agree on.

I scored a taxi ride for about $ 15, compared with the precrisis rate of $50 to $60. The taxi mafia, who used to stand around the airport exit like gulls waiting to pluck freshly hatched tortoises, moped in front of the arrivals door, listlessly soliciting travelers for a fare. The once-gridlocked streets were barren, even for a Saturday, No major accidents on the way home, no roadkill, No superfluous road-construction work, either--there's no money left in the budget for such things.

The expressions on people's faces had changed from just six weeks earlier. When we stopped downtown to change dollars into rubles, I saw that the black marketers had lost their aggressive charm and cunning and had settled into a resigned emptiness. Before, they pimped you hard for that extra five or ten rubles. Now it was like, Why bother? The ruble falls in value every day, the banks have ceased to operate, businesses have closed. At the same time, no one is starving to death. So why bother fighting anymore? It's a waste of energy.

When I was in Manhattan, The New York Times ran an article headlined Moscow: There's Nightlife after the Iceberg. It said that Moscow's decadent club scene was left unfazed by the August 1998 crisis. Knowing firsthand how the Times has botched nearly every Yeltsin-era story by at least 180 degrees, I found the headline intriguing. I'd left Moscow in early December. It was already clear that the era of wildly irresponsible decadence had ended, and that the club scene as we'd known it was in danger of imploding. I skipped through the article and saw that it focused on the alleged continued success of the Jazz Kafé, a pretentious basement bar and disco that in 1997 instituted the first ultrastrict, London-style face control in Moscow. But the Jazz Kafé had been eclipsed by two other Pentagon-strict superexclusive clubs, even before the crisis. I hadn't been to the place in a year, but eager-to-be-cool people who'd gone last summer had already described it as sad, second-rate and dying.

Reading that Times piece scared me. I assumed it was as accurate as all the lies the media had told about the booming, reformist economy in Russia. I also assumed that if the Times had published a piece about how the Jazz Kafé was as "ultrahip" and "uninhibited" as ever, then the Jazz Kafé was dead and nightlife had dropped to Salt Lake City levels.

I was partly right. The Jazz Kafé was stark empty when I checked it out. So was another imitation-Paris club, Galereya, which had become the "anyone who's anyone" place to be among hip New Russians and swinging expats last summer, after it was learned that Galereya's door policy was even stricter and more humiliating than Jazz Kafe's. The manager said business is down and many clients can't even afford a drink.

Now that last year's neo-Eurotrash elite are broke dorks with Beemers they can't afford to gas up, and nearly the entire cash-rich expatriate community has fled town, Moscow is left with a sharply divided society. On the superrich end are unabashed flathead gangsters with their arm decorations; on the other, the submerging so-called middle class and the near penniless masses of young people who now have to be more clever in coming up with ways to live their lives as recklessly and as romantically as possible. Moscow has reverted to the beautifully dim, alien city I arrived in five years ago, with one big difference: Today there is no optimism about the glorious future. And there's no growing influx of foreigners--none at all, not even on the far horizon. As one top Western banker, whose institution racked up tens of millions in losses during last year's crisis, said, "Why would we ever think of coming back here? It would take years, maybe a decade, to earn that kind of money back. But after seeing how everyone from the government to the central bank to our own partners blatantly lied to us and stole from us, I'm convinced that if we came back, we would probably get burned out of another couple of hundred million sooner than we'd make anything. So there's no logic in investing here anymore."

I had been in New York with Matt Taibbi to hawk a book we had written about The eXile, the English-language biweekly we founded in early 1997, just as the Moscow boom started to enter emerging-markets mythology for its fast money, hard living and opportunities for sexual losers. It was thought that Moscow was home to some 100,000 English speakers--our target audience.

Our newspaper's fortunes reflected the national crisis. In August 1998, Prime Minister Sergei Kiriyenko declared a moratorium on Russia's debts. The eXile's bank collapsed, taking several thousand dollars with it, probably to some Cayman Islands bank account. Our newspaper's advertisers--mostly bars and restaurants--also lost whatever money they had in their bank accounts. Their clientele--expats, middle-class and upper-middle-class Russians--suddenly found themselves without bank accounts, without businesses, without money or jobs. Billions, it seems, vanished, just like that. Our own revenues dropped about 60 percent and we had to fire personnel and cut salaries.

Two months later, the tax police, the scariest mafia of all, raided us. Luckily, our clients coughed up enough money to our bank account--which the tax police promptly cleaned out--to get us all off the hook.

The drug market, which just last year made Haight Street seem like Sesame Street, has also dried up. The story is that the Colombian Mafia cut a deal with the Russians a few years back to move second-rate coke at prices more than double those in America. Because it was so expensive, coke was the drug of choice with the imitation Eurotrash crowds. Ecstasy--also at New Russia-friendly inflated prices--could be found at most discos. Heroin use supposedly rose 500 percent last year alone; everyone here knows of at least one friend of a friend who became a junkie and dropped off the map.

Prostitutes have also suffered. Street whores can be bought for under 1000 rubles, or $40, an hour; they used to cost $150. Callgirls listed in the back of newspapers can be negotiated to under $100, or almost half the price they were a year ago. That's still a lot of coin by my standards, and a shitload by most Russians' new, broke standards.

Goddamn it, I wanted something to happen! I was jonesing for some Moscow decadence. After those six weeks in Manhattan, six of the most uneventful, stifling weeks I could remember, I was pent-up. After New York, I needed a cathartic blowout consisting of free booze, other people's drugs and a sloppy, regretful fuck--the kind of blowout that would end with a Sunday morning run to the local pharmacy for 500-milligram bullets of azitromicine, an antibiotic powerful enough to disinfect even the most carbuncle-decorated sexual organ. Azitromicine is so powerful that most American doctors hesitate to prescribe it for fear of unleashing mutated Neisseria gonorrhoeae bugs that could chew a hole through a woman's pelvis.

But that was all fantasy born of frustration. The reality was that Moscow had become quieter and dimmer, its edge dulled. There's little of the overt desperation I had selfishly hoped for, I thought my sexual opportunities would soar through the roof as suddenly impoverished dyevushki (Russian girls) shifted their focus away from their insolvent Russian men and made a long-term bet on an American citizen like me. What other choice is left?

The first thing I did when I got to my apartment was call Krazy Kevin McElwee, The eXile's film reviewer. We decided to go to a suburban live music club called Svalka, which caters to younger, unpretentious Russians. Svalka was one of those solid midlevel clubs that was guaranteed just last fall to be packed from about 11 P.M. till dawn. But on the second Saturday in January, the place was a morgue. We split for Territoriya, an unnecessarily trendy techno café near the Kremlin--ten morose raver types looking way too sober for our tastes. Off to the A-Club. named by The Face as the best club in Moscow in 1998. Dead. Christ, neither of us even likes clubbing, and this is turning out to be a disaster. Next, down to Respublika, near the former KGB headquarters--a few tired faces, some people dancing to the same fucking songs they danced to two years ago, not a single patron purchasing a beer or cocktail. Respublika owes The eXile $1300 in back debts. But since it charged no cover at the door and no one was buying drinks that night, I kissed that $1300 goodbye.

By this time, I was a bitter mess and Kevin was exhausted. We parted ways at about four A.M. That Times article about Moscow's booming nightlife was no longer a nuisance--it was downright inflammatory.

The next weekend, Matt Taibbi returned to Moscow. We decided not to fuck around with marginal clubs and headed straight for the Hungry Duck, which, last year at least, was probably the most hedonistic bar in the world. At the peak of its popularity, this place instituted a most barbarous program: ladies' night. The concept was simple, though dangerous, considering the clientele: From seven to nine P.M., only women were allowed inside, and they all got to drink as much as they wanted for free. I worked as guest barman on the first night. It was such a screaming mess that I gave up, grabbed a bottle of some generic gin and sat in the corner pounding it. About 400 females, mostly proles with greasy hair, cheap Polish blouses and Vietnamese denims, greedily pumped themselves full of as much free, low-quality gin and vodka as they could. They weren't shy about demanding one drink after the next: A sweet-looking blonde with a pimple on her chin might curse you in the rudest, lowest Russian to get her six fucking shots of vodka, now! Now! After the two hours were up, few of them could stand.

A male striptease act was part of the entertainment, the highlight of which was a Nigerian stripper engaging in rough sexplay with a teenage girl chosen at random from the audience. She would eventually give in to the ritual, which always ended with the African ramming his fingers up her box to the gleeful cheers of the crowd.

When nine o'clock hit, the men who'd been kept at bay were let loose. Off-duty cops, pasty businessmen and common perverts pummeled one another over semiconscious prey. The fights turned quickly into temple-stomping boot-thrashings on the floor, and more often than not, at least one drunken girl would get caught in the middle, bleary-eyed and confused as Sergei's bloody teeth got knocked into her hair.

Matt and I figured that even with a crisis, the Duck couldn't possibly fail us.

We weren't there more than five minutes when two busloads of Omon troops, the government paramilitary forces, raided the Duck. The soldiers carried machine guns; others wore leather jackets and flashed badges. They blocked all the exits and began searching documents. Being Americans, Taibbi and I slipped out with relative ease. When we returned a couple of hours later, there weren't more than ten people in the club. One manager told me that the Omon troops have been raiding the Duck on an almost weekly basis for months now.

So that's it. The thrill is gone. The explanation is a Marxian formula: When the easy, amoral money goes, the easy, amoral hedonism goes with it. Moscow Babylon is giving way to Moscow Brezhnevon. Back then, life was easy. You gathered with your friends in your smelly apartment doorway, drank whatever vodka you could get your hands on, smoked weak Kazakh shake and screwed whoever was left standing after a few hours. She'd get an abortion a few weeks later, and everything was dandy. That scenario may not be quite so exciting as 1996-1998, but it's still a better option than seeing book publishers for six weeks in Manhattan. So that is why, five years on, I'm as determined as ever to stay in Moscow. Even if they close down our newspaper, attach my balls to a cheap Soviet car battery and force me to denounce Western imperialism, that's still a better option than the horribly bland, safe world I left behind.