This is the cover of The eXile Issue #6, published in April 1997.

Few weeks ago, one of my party comrades brought me a present, a few military pennants. I hang them here and there in my apartment. One, with a sword, clenched fist, words “detachment of special task force” and slogan “The best form of word is action” I have hanged over my work-table. It hang there for sometime, then one day I suddenly noticed the name of detachment below. “Vitiaz” - it said. I immediately removed pennant from the wall. As those “vitiazes,” bastards, tried to kill me in the evening of October 3, 1993. Only my luck prevented me from been killed. After taking over the sky-scrapper of Moscow’s Mayor’s building (the former building of Soviet of Economical Mutual Help, or COMECOM) in afternoon on October 3, opposition masses, and me, among them, stormed the buses, awaiting for some reason near the Mayor of Moscow. (more…)

It’s happened to all of us at least once; out late at night, drunk, carrying a hundred bucks or so, and suddenly stopped by a couple of hulking cops and asked for documents. You don’t have them with you, so you make a deal, pay a “fine,” and move on. No matter how often it happens, that’s as far as it goes-right?

No. What most foreigners don’t know is that there is always another variable in the equation of these encounters, and that variable is a place called the Center for Social Rehabilitation #1, or TsSR. It’s a real building that exists in a place where you can easily find it, on the 24th kilometer of the Dmitrovskoye Shosse- and what it is, in effect, is a secret prison for foreigners with visa problems.

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Two Fridays ago, The staff of the eXile was shocked by the appearance of the Moscow Tribune’s “Time Out” nightlife section-a new club listings page which included snappy, no-holds-barred descriptions of bars and clubs making liberal use of such phrases as “it sucks,” “whores,” “cool,” and “16 Tons is the King Of Moscow’s Club Scene!” (more…)

Hockey is a tough sport; on the ice, Russians are said to play more of a finesse game than the Canadians, but off it, they seem to be a few Maple Leafs up on the competition. Soon Russian hockey officials may start wearing green lights over their heads so that assassins will know when they’ve scored; the latest victim was none other than Valentin Siych, the President of the Russian Hockey Federation, murdered on April 22 at nine a.m. The assassin used the by-now cliche method of the bullet in the head at nine a.m. in the victim’s own podyezd; Siych was on his way to be interviewed by Komsomolskaya Pravda. (more…)

There’s been an ever-growing competition, particularly among Moscow’s male expats and the women who keep company with them, to prove their decadent credentials. Each carries with them their CV of perversions and drug binges, and brags about their decadent ways like investment bankers boasting about “doin’ deals.” You can’t go a week here without hearing some expat tell you about his drug problem, his 2-on-1, whore-hopping, girlfriend-swapping, the pair of handcuffs, the Trainspotting-esque life (incidentally the most predictable, sentimental, Social Democratic film of them all!), and so on… Coat and Tie has now become Coke and Tie-Me-Up, and it’s losing its appeal fast. (more…)

This is the cover of The eXile Issue #5, published in April 1997. (more…)

Great idea for a horror movie; the support staff of the Russian Duma goes away for a weekend to a cabin on a lake, only to be murdered one after another by an axe-wielding psychopath in a hockey mask. Low-budget, great action- a sure winner, right? Only problem is, it’s already been done! Since November, 1996, four assistants to Duma deputies have been murdered in Moscow. The most recent to go down was Yevgeny Shklayev, assistant to “Narodovlastiye” deputy Sergei Shashurin. The other three were all, coincidentally, assistants to LDPR deputies: one with two prior rape convictions, another whom police called a member of the Solntsevo gang, and a third whom MUR detectives called a known mafioso from the Smolenskaya gruppirovka. (more…)

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It’s been a rough week for Russia’s Prime Minister, Victor Stepanovich Chernomyrdin. How rough? Well, as it turns out, he’s not worth 5 billion dollars, as alleged by United States’ Republican Congressman Henry Hyde. Nuh-uh. Hyde was just behaving like the anti-Russian that he is. Rather, according to a recent Russian government press release, the second most powerful man in the C.I.S. makes a paltry $703 per month.

“Seven hundred and three dollars?! Shame!” (more…)

On the walls of ugly sleeping quarters of Moscow, of all those Tchertanovos, Khimki-Khovrinos Belyaevos and Orekhovos, on the old fences here and there still possible to find the faded away posters. Young attractive woman, wearing some strange-looking, museum Egyptian-style head decoration. With a one hand she is squeezing some sort of scepter. Maria Davy Christos. (more…)

On March 27, when news first filtered into Moscow that 39 members of the Heaven’s Gate cult, a gang of Trekkoid computer geeks in San Diego, had “shed their containers” in a suicidal bid to reach the “Higher Level,” eXpats all over the city thought the same thing: man, people at home must really be bored. For eXpats, the news was life-affirming. For many of us, our best excuse for being here is that it gives us, however erroneously, a sense of being a participant in a society where people lead real lives and have real problems. More than one of us has suspected that if we were to go back home, there would be only one road to take to escape the sanitary life the West has to offer-get on the net, and die.

Now, suddenly, we had 39 solid reasons to be sure we were right to move here. (more…)

This is the cover of The eXile Issue #4, published in April 1997. (more…)

On March 26th, communist leaders Gennady Zyuganov and Anatoly Lukyanov been seen entering dacha of famous writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn at Serebryany Bor. What for? We now know what for.

Exclusive resort area of “Serebryany Bor” near Moscow in pine growth on the bank of Moscow River is very prestigious land. Ministers, generals, high-ranking officials, all the mighty and wealthy of Russia having their summer residences, their “dachas,” at Serebryany Bor. To live there means to have special social status. (more…)

It seems that driving in Moscow is getting more and more dangerous all the time. On Sunday a high-speed ring-road collision of a new Mercedes 350 SL and a black tinted-windowed Chevrolet Suburban threatened to disintegrate into an even more deadly encounter between the drivers of the two vehicles. (more…)