#23 | December 4-17, 1997  

This ugly person could close down your favorite club!

The Moscow City Duma last week passed an incredible resolution. A majority of city deputies agreed in principle to sign the following bill into law: under a new administrative statute, nightclubs and discos can be fined and even closed if invading police decide their patrons appear to be under the influence of drugs.

"It's not a joke. It's true," said Yelena Tarasova, spokeswoman for the Duma. "The law governs only the appearance of having taken drugs, not incontrovertible proof."

According to the new law, clubs which contain stoned-looking clients can be fined 500 times the minimum wage the first time, 1000 times the second time, and be closed altogether the third time.

Fined for bad-looking clients? Thanks to the Moscow Duma, face control has just entered a new, dangerous phase: this isn't about trying to be cool anymore; it's about keeping your business from being shut down. Maybe in Russia it really has come to that-where you can be punished just for looking at a cop the wrong way.

Should the bill pass into law-and it has only one more hurdle, a second reading after corrections are introduced-it will mean just one more way that the introduction of new "administrative procedures" has been used to make everyday life more repressive, less free, and less fun in recent years. While the economy has been liberalizing, everyday life is in danger of returning to the gray, dull days of yesteryear. And the administrative code has been at the heart of a lot of it. If you're an American and you remember the literacy tests for black voters, you know that there's nothing that secures a bummer faster than an "administrative procedure." Only a few of them are funny enough to bring the whole depressing phenomenon into focus. The new drug law, an inspired piece of knee-jerk anti-fun legislation, is one of them.

Club owners could have seen this coming. In the last year, a whole slew of clubs have suffered severe problems due to administrative crackdowns. The gay club Shans was raided earlier in the year and closed temporarily; rave clubs like Galaktika and Akvatoria have all also had temporary shutdowns, while Less, Moby Dick, Aerodance, Water Club and other "underground" clubs have closed for good. Jack Rabbit Slim's and Miramar have both seen their nighttime business close due to rules about commercial activity in residential buildings-a rule that ruined the infamous Ptyutch club, and ensured that Krisis Zhanra keeps a cap on the nighttime fun factor. In a country where every single high profile murder that has been committed in the past seven years has gone unpunished, someone for some reason has decided that nightclubs, and the dopey, stoned, practically brainless teenagers which patronize them, are a threat the Russian public needs to be protected from first of all.

Now we're going to get a law where beered up, buzzcutted cops from provincial holes like Voronezh and from the Podmoskoviye are going to have to walk into places like Luch, look at the sloe-eyed teenyboppers in London rave gear grinding away to monotonous techno music, and make the expert determination, on sight, as to their sobriety.

Owners of youth-based clubs who've been hit up for building code violation fines, architectural zoning infractions, and municipal rent hikes know exactly what the deal is with a law like this. This is the beginning of the end for the club scene, the first round of cultural legislation-the moment where "hip, happening Moscow" gets rolled back, leaving nothing but casinos, strip clubs, and a bunch of barely-above-freezing podyezdy as recreational choices for the masses.

"This is serious. This means the police can come in and shut down any club at any time, for no reason at all, " said Andrei Alexandrov, director of Kak Biy, a club in eastern Moscow. "It's just one more in a string of stupid and savage laws."

Another club manager, who asked not to be identified, said that the new law is not intended to enforce cultural prejudices, but to help police aid partners in protection schemes. "This law gives police the excuse to shut down the competitor of any club which pays a big enough bribe," he said. "It has nothing to do with imposing new cultural standards of order. If they wanted that, they'd shut down the drug dealers at Lubyanka. This is all about money."

Many of our readers who are not fifteen year-old girls with dumbstruck looks on their faces might very well ask themselves: who cares? What does it matter if hangouts for ravers and hippies get legislated out of existence? As long as my oil deal still goes through, why should I care?

The answer is that the new drug law is very representative of an ugly new habit the Russian government has adopted lately of circumventing the law through an emphasis on "administrative" discipline. If you were one of those people who believed our propaganda when we said we wanted freedom for Russians before perestroika, this-and a few other "administrative" foibles we'll be getting to in a minute-should be the kind of thing that would disturb you. Or, alternately, if you're a businessman who believes that the value of his Russian shares will ultimately depend on the international perception of Russia as a democracy, you may want to pay a little more attention to administrative law. That's because as a result of it, the Moscow authorities already have the practical experience to control movement, behavior, public speech, and even consumer choices-all the things democracy was supposed to leave up to the individual. When the world finds out your consumer base isn't free, you may be in trouble.

While most Muscovites, including the folks at the eXile, were shamelessly cashing in on the festivities surrounding Moscow's 850th anniversary, the Helsinki Watch for Human rights released a report on Moscow that contained what would have been eye-popping statistics, if anyone had been paying attention. Among the most shocking things in its report was the fact that in the first five months of 1997, Moscow police entered apartments to make registration document checks 1.3 million times. That means that this year about one out of every five people in Moscow has been subject to random administrative checks-most of which have resulted in bribes, fines or deportations (Helsinki Watch found that 63.4% of the checks uncovered violations).

Like the new drug law, the mass registration checks are based on the use of police to enforce administrative procedure, blurring the lines between criminal and administrative violations. In fact, under Moscow municipal law, police do not have the right to enter apartments to make registration checks. Article 10 of the Law on the Militia grants police the right to unhindered entry into citizens' homes in order to pursue a suspect in a crime, in cases of accidents, and to "protect the safety of citizens and public security in times of natural disaster, catastrophe, and . . . massive disturbances." In short, for any reason you might need a policeman for-not for administrative purposes. There is a Ministry of Internal Affairs decree which allows police to enter businesses and hotels on plausible grounds that a crime or administrative violation has occurred, but that doesn't allow police to enter private homes.

Alexei Yegorov, a lawyer who has campaigned for fair drug laws, believes that the new drug law and other police behavior are creating an environment where people have come to expect and tolerate even the most ridiculously obvious types of invasion of privacy from the government. "That new drug law is a mockery of the whole concept of law," he said. "You can't have people fined just for looking a certain way. This would be an obviously illegal procedure."

So far, there hasn't been too much public outcry about the random apartment checks or the drug law. Why? Because the majority of the people having their apartments raided are dark-skinned migrants, and the majority of Muscovites aren't all that sympathetic to X-ed out teenagers.

Russians, of course, have a storied history of tolerating just about anything as long as the majority is left alone. After all, only about a million people were repressed in 1937, a tiny minority. So it makes perfect sense that no one would get too upset about a few passport checks or a stoner law or two. Everyone knows that police in this city harass pedestrians. But how often have you heard that it's getting worse? Here are a few statistics: in 1996, 3,098 people were deported out of Russia from the territory of Moscow-1.7 times more than in 1995. Most of those deportations came as the result of random passport checks, which have soared again in 1997. In fact, in the first five months of this year, street passport checks nearly doubled in comparison to the same period of 1996, reaching 1.4 million in addition to the aforementioned apartment checks.

Given Russia's history, you'd think that when Russian police start invading privacy a million times a year, people would start having bad memories. In fact, when the Russian police do anything at all a million times in a year, thoughtful people should probably worry. But you don't hear much of anything in the newspapers-even in the Western, "democratic" press.

With the notable exception of Stanford professor and unabashed Yeltsinophile Michael McFaul, who last week made the extraordinary assertion that Russia was not an undemocratic state because the near-dismissal of Anatoly Chubais demonstrated that public officials are still somewhat accountable for their behavior, even the most conservative Western commentators have backed off the assertion that Russia is a democracy. In fact, in separate editorials in recent weeks, the conservative Economist and the Financial Times both published lengthy apologies for the post-Soviet Russian regime, speaking in detail about the progress the country has made since the end of communism. Yet although both spoke about new respect for the "sanctity of private property" and the promise of the "new market economy," neither mentioned the word "democracy" at all, except as a future goal.

A weird sort of boosterism has taken over in our view of Russia. When the club scene booms, everybody from Good Morning America to Newsweek rushes to publicize it. But when democracy erodes to the point where clubs can be shut down just because the people who hang out in them look funny, you don't hear a peep about it in the news.

It's beginning to look a lot like we were kidding when we funneled all that junk over Radio Free Europe in the early 80s. We talked about the free press, and when the press went in the tank for Yeltsin in 1996, nobody protested too much. Now the press is almost completely bought off, and the U.S. government still issues editorials, through Radio Free Europe, saying that Russia is on the "right path." We talked about human rights in the 1980s, but by this year we have millions of illegal home entries every year and a criminal conviction rate of 99%. The system of representative democracy has degenerated to the point where there is only one election-the Presidential election-that matters, and even the 1996 version of that was dubiously held at best.

Now, with this drug law, we've got this great example of the mentality of the people running things in this country. More than just corrupt and greedy, they want to make the world safe for stupid people everywhere.

"These people don't really understand youth culture. And they don't like it," said the manager of one prominent Moscow rave club, who asked not to be identified. "So they're using the law to make the city look more they way they want."

You hate to be a bleeding heart about stuff like this, but there's one thing about all of this that you can't argue with. All really repressive regimes start out by targeting a few groups here and there. And it's almost always true that most people don't worry until it's their turn.

We're betting Russians thirty years from now won't be too impressed with all of those Western reporters who were going on about low inflation in the late 1990s. They'll probably be too busy avoiding cops to write their thankyou letters.