Seven years ago, when the MMM pyramid scheme collapsed in Russia, the American expatriate community here in Moscow more or less collectively laughed out loud. ... Some six and a half years later, the tables have apparently turned. If a number of published reports are to be believed, Sergei Mavrodi has made a comeback— only not in Russia...

      There is a grand conspiracy going on here. It’s a feel-good conspiracy, a conspiracy of optimism that is designed to make Putin’s Russia appear to be on the right track. And through a combination of repetition and co-optation, it’s working...

      According to biologists, complete set of human body cells is changing every seven years. So, seven years old boy is absolute stranger to new born baby of the same name, who was born seven years ago, no one cell have survived! Kind of mini-death, I suppose...!

     They’re all back in town again—all hyped up for the Big Dance. Throngs of knob-polishing co-ed cheerleaders in two-tone skirts, ready-made trophies, standing doe-legged and glassy-eyed at the end of the players’ bench. Each one watches the score and wonders: who will call her number tonight? A starter, or a reserve?

As you all may or may not know, there is a new HUNGRYDUCK on the horizon. Well, maybe not that fucking far away, but it is on Altufievskoe Shosse. I mean, it took me two fucking hundred Ruble notes to get there. Who the hell would put a club so far out? As if there aren’t plenty of sluts in the center of town...

      Some of us have, in recent months, gone so far as to fly to Beijing for the weekend just to get hold of some quality Chinese food. Meanwhile, a bit closer to home, the newly opened KHRAM DRAKONA [Temple of the Dragon] on Leninsky Prospekt seeks to inject some heavily ornamented decorative (if not necessarily culinary) spice into the local scene...

THIS WEEKEND

     ... eXile's 4TH ANNIVERSARY PARTY AT IKEA!, Duran Duran, No Smoking Orchestra...

Get your copy now at Shakespeare’s Books or order it from amazon.com before it goes bankrupt. “The eXile: Sex, Drugs and Libel in the New Russia”: the book they call “more fun than fucking a vacuum cleaner” and “the perfect Hannukah gift”!

    Like many an upper-middle-class American woman, newly crowned Moscow Times Interim Editor Lynn Berry loves horses. So much so, in fact, that she has written no fewer than six equine-related articles for the paper during the past three years. But one of these in particular hints at a special kind of horse-woman relationship that goes far beyond ordinary spinsterish obsession and into the realm of Catherine the Great-inspired legend...