#28 | February 12 - 19, 1998  

by Mark Ames

When I was in Minsk last August, I met a British-Indian specialist from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. We were talking about the fall of the Soviet Union. How did it happen? we asked. Why did the Soviet leaders allow their empire to evaporate right under their feet? It's not as though they didn't have a choice. There were hundreds of paths they could have taken, nearly all of which would have been disastrous, but few of which would have entailed the sudden extinction of the 20th century's most successful empire.

The EBRD specialist told me that the most credible explanation he'd heard came from some CIA spooks he'd met in Kazakhstan. It was all part of a Big Plan, they'd told him. The Americans had worked it out going way back to the late 1940s. Their weapon? GNP. The West would bury the Soviet Union by outproducing them. This wasn't just a theory, but a carefully crafted strategy, elaborately planned and executed right down to the last Snickers bar. The specialist knew it was ironic-especially since the EBRD and the West have been pushing the supposedly "free market" ideology over the failed "planned economy." Produce X goods and services over Y period, and at point Z on the graph, at that exact date in time, the Soviet Union would collapse.

If that's true, then Gorbachev had about as much to do with creating perestroika as a busboy does with creating the soup that stains the tablecloths he has to wipe down. As the walls were crumbling around him, he kept telling his people that "Vsyo idut po-planu," or everything's going according to plan. Yeah, right. But not his plan.

All of us came to the new Russia with plans of our own-Big Plans at that. Even we at the eXile have to admit that we all had vague plans of "making a life" and "experiencing" or just "getting the fuck away from that bland, neo-Soviet, Northface police state called America." But we never dreamed that our sole purpose in life would be to travel to the ruins of the world's last great empire with the sole purpose of putting out a rag that annoyed as many people as possible... and making a modest living. Maybe it's better that we never planned the eXile in advance. We'd have never believed us.

We're not sure what it is about post-communist Russia, but every Tom, Dick and Harry seems to come here with Big Plans. Jeffrey Sachs and Anders Aslund, a pair of tenured professors who are legally guaranteed employment for life and handsome pensions, arrived in Moscow with a shock therapy blueprint pushing the benefits of mass unemployment-and the Russians bought it; USAID came in with plans to promote democracy and free markets, and although they didn't quite get either, at least a lot of underqualified Generation X-Pats made some good coin. There were other more pronounced failures in the Big Plans category. Jonathan Hay arrived with noble plans to build a civilized, law-based form of capitalism in Russia-he even had the chance to burn his good name into the history books-but somewhere along the line his intention-wires got crossed, and he wound up stranded in ugly insider deals that lost him his job and his good name. Nowadays, he's known as a kind of Michael Bass with felt elbow patches, sucking funds from defrauded investors and stashing them in his girlfriend's mutual fund. Paul Tatum planned to become a hotel magnate, but wound up face down in a Kievskaya Vokzal perekhod with eleven caps in his back.

Which only proves the point- having plans isn't enough. You've got to learn how to execute. Like those spooks from Kazakhstan. You've got to show some results to prove that there was ever a plan. Plans just don't have rights unless they have results and 20-20 hindsight to back them up.

No operation could have been more poorly planned than the eXile. Conceived in the placenta of bitterness by ex-employees of another disastrous newspaper, Living Here, the eXile at first only existed as a kind of half-psychotic egotrip with a few petty grudges to settle, and a few salaries to boot. But no Big Plans as such. The name itself caused many locals to wince at memories of Stolypin neckties and Stalin's GULAGS. But we never let little obstacles like horrid taste or alienating your intended reader get in the way. Because we didn't have a plan. We just liked the name-suggested, actually, by an American who knew well what it was to be an eXile. See, he couldn't find work in California, or Arkansas, or even Alaska... so he wound up going into forced exile in Dunedin, New Zealand, which he referred to as "that rock at the bottom of the earth" and "Alcatraz perfected."

There were a few Potemkin attempts early on to broaden the eXile's range in those early days: more pages were added, a female columnist was given airtime, and even notorious muckraking journalist Alexander Minkin agreed to work with us. Nevertheless, reading the eXile was hardly a pleasant experience. Many readers found themselves ducking for cover. Because there was no plan: just random small arms fire from the back of a fast-moving Chevy pickup, literary Somali warlords whose only goal was to find more gas and bullets, and keep moving.

That's the unofficial truth. The truth we want you to believe. It just sounds better.

Officially, yeah, we had plans, just like the rest of you who came here. We had a business plan, with business-y numbers, and revenue graph charts showing arrows making pseudo-realistic early stumbles before heading in an 85 degree upward direction... One year later, we can't remember the nitty gritty details of the eXile's business plan-perhaps it would be better if no one remembered-but the plan's there, sealed in a secret location deep in the harsh, desolate, Carol J. Williams-esque Russian steppes. We may be ahead of the game for all we know. No one remembers promising that we'd go weekly within a year, putting us on par with the zillions of free alternative weeklies that stack up in Guitar Centers in every major and minor metropolitan center across North America-you know, those flannel shirt and pointy-beard rags whose pseudo-leftie articles only seem to get in the way of announcements for upcoming Sebadoh concerts. Those rags are good business. But they're also generated by Big Plans and market segmenting. The eXile, on the other hand, was one of four English-language newspapers serving a limited market when it came out a year ago. It was clear to even a Jeffery Sachs that this town wasn't big enough for the four of us. And frankly, except for the hellbent backing we got from our Russian publisher and his star bearded designer, the odds were pretty well stacked against us. Our most distinguishing mark was that we were more annoying, petty and hostile than the competition. Hell, we even had the gall to splash our cover with a massive, dated "X," which made the paper appear as though it had been born with an ugly birthmark-someone else's ugly birthmark, in fact. Some turtleneck type named Coupland. We knew we were lifting a thrice-adulterated brand image, and we even boasted about it in our Letter To Our Readers: "Using the X may be cliched, but hell, we couldn't call the paper 'tHe cliChi.'" Hey wait a minute, stop everything-we might have been on to something with that clichi thing. Oh well, too late now. We're all stuck with that X.

Okay, so we're being a little hard on ourselves. Hey, it's part of our shtick. We don't do the "we're number one" thing very well. We just don't believe it. But we can issue an encyclopedia-length explanation for why we are the worst-planned and -executed commercial venture in town. We say that with pride, you see. Because it means that at least we're excelling at something.

Actually, let's be fair. The newspaper did take a turn for the better when Taibbi joined. In the first place, by joining us, he helped achieve our goal of destroying our hated rival. But more than that, Taibbi brought a Plan to the table. Plans, in fact, was his middle name. Here was a creature who had more unrealized plans under his belt than Wile E. Coyote. In the span of one year, from February 1996 to February 1997, he'd gone from crime author to private detective to mainstream journalist to husband/father/public school teacher to professional Mongolian basketball player to lung machine attachment. And now he was on his way to Moscow.

I remember thinking, just before Taibbi came to Moscow to take over Living Here, Why couldn't he have just died? Or at least been the victim of "complications"-stuck in the hospital for another six weeks or so. Instead, Taibbi recovered just in time to make new plans. He intended to return to Moscow, resuscitate the moribund Living Here, and simultaneously enroll in a PhD program at Moscow State University. That was on Thursday, March 6th, 1997. By Sunday, March 9th, 1997, Taibbi was the co-editor of the eXile, and the PhD plans were history.

Taibbi told me: let's aim for higher targets. He was right. Picking on my former publisher and his bug-eyed American henchman was redundant: like intentionally peeling out on roadkill, and laughing as you speed away from the mush-and-fur remains.

We also had a concept: to portray Moscow to an English-speaking audience as most people here actually felt it-manic, nihilistic, grotesque, horrible, and yet, in its own way, far superior to any city on earth. Most businessmen here have flourished by taking advantage of market inefficiencies and gaps. Our shtick wasn't that much different. We saw that there was a hole in the information services, a massive opportunity to exploit, the chance to print things that no other English-language hack in Moscow dared to touch: the truth, the bitter, ugly truth. While the Moscow Times pushed its brand of heavily-cut cocaine on its readers, painting all those violent colors into one safe streak of beige, we realized that a Moscow unfiltered by Western prejudices would become the drug of choice: sort of like a cocktail of glass, MDA and Spanish flies. After all, what is Moscow to those who live here but Sodom, Gomorrah, Nero's Rome, and Jimmy Page's Windsor Castle all rolled into one. Take Death Porn, for example. On any given day, murders so gruesome and shockingly stupid that they would plunge a Western nation into months of self-examination are, in Russia, as common as... well, the common cold. In fact, grisly serial murders are so common that they barely make the front pages of the Russian press. There's a section in Moskovsky Komsomolets just for serial murderers of the week. It's buried somewhere on page 5. Savage slashings and wild shooting sprees are relegated to page 7 in Sevodnya. Three family-hour television shows are dedicated to Russian faces of death: you can watch naked rape-murder victims splayed in the blood-stained snow, severed heads, and charred corpses while junior studies his Pushkin. And the truth is, it's all kind of funny. You can't help laughing when you read about a maniac in Kirov who imprisons a trio of female slaves and forces them to sew oven mittens for commercial use; or about the group of kids in Sakhalin who were caught playing soccer with a human head; or the prisoners in Siberia who ate their cell mate in the hope that they'd be declared insane and transferred to a psychiatric ward. And got executed instead. It's not pleasant reading. No one ever said Moscow was supposed to be pleasant. But it is damn funny, mainly because it's happening to them, and not to us.

It was Proust who declared that the only two themes worth exploring are love and death. We've never read Proust before, and we never plan to, but we do agree about the love and death part. Only, love in Moscow is not exactly the drawing-room game of delicate hints and social climbing. It's more like... well, like rape. Which is also sorta funny. The kind of respect-driven love most eXpats have been conditioned to expect may not exist in Moscow, but there sure as hell is a lot of careless, condomless sex. If the Western press was timid about reporting the daily carnage for fear of nauseating their readers, then they were downright bible-thumping, climacteric, hair-in-a-bun chaperones when it came to reporting what every expat has come to realize in Moscow: this place is a 24-hour geyser of body fluids, bleeding orifices and swollen eyes. This is love, Moscow-style. And the real story is-for just about everyone except expat women-it's fun as hell! Whores more beautiful than your average Playboy Channel star are available to even the pudgiest, hairiest-knuckled businessman; parents teach their teenage daughters to date older, preferably foreign men in order to gain "experience"; a popular bar packs in hundreds of proto-alcoholic girls, pumps them full of free liquor until they can barely stand, then unleashes a mob of prison convicts to rape and pillage. Reports still come in from the Duck about teenagers getting sodomized as they're vomiting up cheap tequila in the men's bathroom. This is love, Russia-style, and it isn't pleasant reading. Which is why everyone else stuck to safe, moralistic 18th century articles about Moll Flanders-like street prostitutes and the growing threat of X, Y and Z diseases. We say: diseases, schmiseases. Love and sex are all about fun, not responsibility. At least, that's the censored truth. To accurately portray love in Moscow as merely "sexist" would be like describing Anatoly Chubais's $90,000 book scandal bribe as a "peccadillo." Which is exactly how our the beigists at the Moscow Times described it. From a business angle, that's fine with us. Let them stick to a pre-arranged script. If the truth is violently sexist, and we're the only ones who shamelessly write it up... then... by the laws of economics, that means we've got a corner on the truth. A veritable monopoly. And there's big bucks in the monopolizing business. But better than the money-part is the fun-part. Even a pale, desperate-to-be-taken-seriously esthete like Proust would have appreciated love and death in Moscow. If he were alive today, he'd pump out novel-length articles on the high fahkie-factor at Bell's. He'd write a ten-volume tome on how youth was no longer wasted on the young out here in Moscow. He'd fit right in, because there's just no other way around it. But then again, Proust was a known amphetamine abuser whose body conked out at the age of 51. Six years before the average Russian male dies. But Proust never had fun, not like the prematurely dead Russian. Nothing much ever happened in Proust's life, and frankly, nothing much happened in ours either before we came here.

Those of us who live in the thick of Moscow's melodrama no longer need ESPN, rock climbing or month-long vacations in Third World resorts in order to relieve the pain of a monotonous existence. We've all finally found a plot. Action films and pornos no longer thrill us the way they used to. They just don't have the same kick as real life in Moscow does. And that's what the eXile concept was all about: by reporting the things other people won't print, we keep you updated on your own plot-line.

But the truth is that those of us who started the eXile had only one goal: to kill off our predecessor, Living Here, which we'd all abandoned. It didn't take long. Living Here died a grisly public death, and suddenly, we found ourselves satisfied and purposeless.

Then something happened. A weird pattern emerged, one of growth, revenue collection, and elevation to new levels of both venomousness. Savage and apparently unsolicited attacks on people like Michael Bass resulted not only in public responses but actual death threats, which resulted in more public scandal, more revenue collection, and still more savage attacks, reaching the level of a "Bassworld" column celebrating the opening of the Buchenwald death camp. Even Bass liked that. Something we'd never counted on before was happening- a real relationship with the community. It was like a love affair- only a Russian love affair, more like rape.

By the fall, would-be victims of everything from Moscow Babylon to our Press Review began making obsequious overtures to us in private, digging us in the ribs and whispering that they could no longer keep a secret the fact that they liked the mindless violence of the paper. They were trying to stay out of the paper, but they also meant what they said- the squealing, self-flagellating part, anyway.

Somehow, it was all just in good fun. Not that the hatred in our paper wasn't real- it was. If we had our way, we probably wouldn't be writing about people, but beating them with baseball bats- big aluminum ones, the kind that make that chilling "plink!" noise when they hit the skull. We can think of a couple of people right now that half our staff would give a month's pay to take a little cold-weather BP on.

When the paper first started, that urge seemed like the chief obstacle any future profitability we might have. We were really worried. Just consider the concept behind our business: an abusive left-and-right-wing expatriate newspaper that revels in serial murder and random sex committed by those who don't read the newspaper, while attacking the hypocrisy and sleaze committed by... its readers. It sounds like a first year business school joke.

The newspaper's existence just didn't make much sense, except for one thing. In Russia, the idea of bat-wielding thugs putting out a pseudoliterary scandal-sheet is not considered an unsaleable or even an unwholesome idea. This is a place that has a TV show where people try to steal real cars and get chased by real cops, and where criminals run for office to avoid prosecution- and win. Decapitated naked human trunks are considered family viewing here. To a Westerner just arriving, it's all shocking at first, then it's funny, and finally you don't even notice. It's just normal.

All of which means just one thing. We're still here after a year because enough of you out there are assimilating successfully. You sympathize with our desire to cave your head in with a rubber-handled Easton 36. And you know it's all in good fun- even if we really are all genuinely out to destroy one another. After all- you'd do it to us!