I can tell you God’s plan for this place very concisely: God created this place as a critique of me. – John Dolan I hate this time of the year. Being stuck in the Moscow heat is like unpaid overtime…

Whenever they travel overseas, most Americans are aware that the locals hate them, but few know why. Usually Americans ascribe bad blood to jealousy. Iranian flag-burning mobs? Uneducated, unfortunate and misguided people, afraid of progress. Okinawans? Sore losers, still mad…

This is the cover of Issue # 8 of The eXile, published May 1997.

Virtually every unmarried person-and certainly every unmarried man-who reads Moscow newspapers knows what he’s looking at when he sees an ad for “Massage.” Though The Moscow Times long ago disposed of the word in favor of the even more meaningless…

Almost two years ago, on the eve of the 50th anniversary of Russia’s victory over the Nazis, I experienced the quintessential evening of Moscow Decadence. It began at around midnight in the parking lot of the Young Pioneer’s stadium. My…

While the United States is beginning to dominate the loony suicidal cult market, Russia is rapidly replacing America as the serial murder capital of the world. First Andrei Chikatilo set the modern record for serial murder victims by killing 53…

We at the eXile were on the phone last week when a funny thing happened. We were hard at work at the time, researching an in-depth story on what spring in Moscow was really all about. Unlike other newspapers and…

The fashionable writer Viktor Pelevin provides this neat little paradox in his latest novel, Chapayev and Pustota: “Foreigners, of whom there is an incredible number in Moscow, have for many years dressed in such a way that they could not…

This is the cover of The eXile Issue #7, published in May 1997.

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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

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,…

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…

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…

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…

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

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…

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…

On Monday, we mainly sent out letters. Among those was a letter to the well-known public opinion firm VTsIOM-the first ripple in what we’d hoped would turn into a media groundswell indicting new deputy premier Boris Nemtsov in a “Blimps-for-Cities”…