the eXile - editorial

Issue #21/102, Oct 26 - Nov 9, 2000

Can’t We all Just Get Along?

Next week, an era will end in Moscow. It will be marked by the relocation of The Moscow Times from its legendarily luxurious newsroom on Ulitsa Pravdy to a smaller, shittier, more inconvenient office next to the Independent Media building on Vyborgskaya Ulitsa near Rechnoy Vokzal.

Since the early ’90s something of a public symbol of that confident “heady” early period of the eXpat invasion, the Times’s gleaming modern workspace—replete with happy middle-class Russians working side-by-side over their whirring iMacs with smart, positive-thinking young Western journalists—will soon be just a memory. Into the Times’s place will move some dreary tenant of a building complex which already houses such publications as Selskaya Zhizn, Komsomoslkaya Pravda, and Vek—and we are willing to be that the sight of heady young Western newshounds racing up and down the aisles carrying printouts of the Bloomberg wire will hereafter be very rare events indeed.

The eXile can sympathize with what The Moscow Times is going though. Last year, we were forced out (for reasons we’d rather not get into) of an eminently comfortable pre-Revolutionary building in the Krasniye Vorota area, a place with high ceilings, phone lines aplenty, and a view. On the other hand, the new office we moved into, and where have remained to this day, is a rank, miserable, stinking, rotting, closet-sized basement property in something like armpit of an Aeroport region neighborhood. The few windows we have are half-sunken into the ground, and the neighborhood cats use the little concrete vestibules in front of them to leave piss and turds there. We work like animals in there, piled on top of one another, necks bent form constant negotiation of the low ceilings, the smell of cat turds permanently in our lungs.

The Moscow Times won’t have it that bad, but sources tell us that their new home is no lap of luxury either. Worse still, the paper’s staff now finds itself permanently under the nose of their boss, Publisher Derk Sauer, who keeps his comfy suite complete with cute secretary in the building across the street. From his window, it is said, Sauer will be able to stand on whatever telephone books he has handy and feast through his trademark spectacles his pair of satisfied Dutch eyes on the savings he’ll be making hereon in on the Times’s once-astronomical rent payments.

For obvious reasons the eXile is deriving some satisfaction from this state of affairs. But by itself, this news wouldn’t warrant an editorial response from us. Only when taken with the news that the Times’s humiliating move might have come as a result of an intrigue by their moronic competitor, The Russia Journal, does the story rise to an occasion worth commemorating. And boy, is it worth it!

Two different sources with direct knowledge of the deal—one at the oil company LUKOil (which owns a stake in the building as well as in Komsomolskaya Pravda) and one at Komsomolskaya Pravda—told the eXile last week that the real reason The Times was leaving Ulitsa Pravdy was that their landlord, LUKOil, was forcing them out.

The version we heard from both sources is that LUKOil was approached by an aide to Kremlin media advisor Gleb Pavlovsky, and asked to get rid of The Times. The two sources then confirmed longstanding rumors that The Russia Journal had originally been created as a Kremlin-friendly Pavlovsky project.

“Pavlovsky asked LUKOil to do this favor for The Journal,” one of the sources told us. “The idea was to displace The Times from their home, and emburden them with administrative problems.” He added that The Journal was also counting on The Times to suffer the blow to its commercial reputation which would inevitably occur with the loss of the newsroom facility, for years one of the paper’s major selling points.

The incident is just the latest in series of squabbles involving the two publications. For some time now, The Russia Journal has been quietly complaining The Times has been scheming to weaken the Journal’s distribution network, threatening some sites with the removal of The Times if they continue to carry The Russia Journal. Their accusations are at least somewhat believable, since the Times’s parent company, Independent Media, was once well-known for using such hardball tactics with distribution points who carried the short-lived Russian Elle—at the time viewed as a threat to its own Cosmopolitan publication.

Furthermore, the folks at The Russia Journal strongly suspect that it was Independent Media who first brought the Journal’s larcenous web-classified site, loot.ru, to the attention of the Britain-based loot.com, one of the world’s most successful such sites.

Loot.ru, as clear and obvious a product ripoff as there has ever been, was (the last time we checked) the subject of a lawsuit against the Journal management. It is said that the Journal people resent the feckless Times’s quiet snitching, which led to this costly distraction for their business. Of course, Independent Media, which actually paid for the rights to use its famous brand-names (i.e. Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, Playboy, and so on), could be expected to take every measure possible to level the playing field—although no one we know at the company is willing to say as much publicly.

Probably the most ironic thing about the whole story is that the Journal’s competitive ire was, for a long time, focused in entirely the wrong place—at us. eXile readers may recall that just under a year ago, we ran a feature entitled “Next week in The Russia Journal!” in which we claimed we’d hired a mole in the RJ newsroom to leak the contents of the paper’s next issue to us, so that we could apply the necessary even-handed criticism in advance.

As we later heard, the management of the RJ was less than amused over the issue. According to one source we have at their paper, they even went so far as to take the extraordinary step of calling in the police and having an employee they suspected of being the mole interrogated. We did nothing to help this innocent party, of course, finding the whole incident sufficiently amusing to make interference unnecessary.

But in retrospect we’re glad they made the mistake of taking us at our word in the piece. We claimed we’d hired a mole at the RJ; this was not strictly true. We hired a mole in a local English-language newspaper, all right, but it wasn’t at the RJ. We won’t say much more on that score except to note that The Journal is published at Ulitsa Pravdy, i.e., at the same building that houses The Moscow Times and also prints their newspaper.

It’s a big building, that place, and there are more than ample opportunities there for a Times staffer to drift downstairs after a beer break, and inadvertently run into a mess of film templates belonging to a rival publication…

So what’s the lesson in all of this? It’s hard for us to say. We certainly feel for The Moscow Times, and express our condolences at the move. And we do wish that everyone would try a little harder to just get along. Fair and honest competition is good for everybody—for The Journal and The Times, and even for us. That almost anything qualifies as fair and honest competition in this country is a fact we guess we all must face.

It’s sad, but it’s the truth. And there’s probably nothing that any of us will ever be able to do about it.

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