You wouldn’t have guessed he’d shoot himself, but it made sense after the fact. He always meant what he said and did, and he always had the guns around. It was right that he used one to blow his brains out.

I can’t remember the last time a celebrity death made me sad like this.

  As an antidote to the current World Cup soccer idiocy, we suggest taking 1 full dose of The eXile’s classic soccer takedown, published during the 1998 World Cup. Here’s a little something to consider for all you folks who’ve…

Faced!  Wheelchair-bound eXiled Editor Yasha Levine finds out that in Russia, provincial clubbing ain’t for cripples Editor’s note: We reprint this eXile Classic, first published in The eXile on September 25, 2007, to commemorate Russia’s recent triumph in the Vancouver Winter…

This article was first published in The eXile in November, 2002. Look down at your hand. Flex the tendons, watch them ripple under the skin. What a nice design! So silent and quick. That’s what they never get in these…

This article was originally published in The eXile on November 29, 2001. Now that we stomped the dust monkeys, our only casualty being that helicopter wheel that the Taliban danced around while firing their AKs in the air, I have…

This article was first published in the March 21, 2002 issue of The eXile. Hot on the heels of the the Homeland’s latest impluse-buy publishing hit, 1776 Things to Love About America, the eXile decided to put in its own 911 cents….

In celebration of the second printing of The eXile book, we’ve decided to start the painfully dull process of merging the vast and greatly disorganized eXile Canon into a complete and definitive collection, which will now officially be referred to…

A map of Zhukov’s attack on Japan’s Imperial Army bears a strange resemblance to the inner jaws of those giant sandworms in Dune How the Japs got served with the 3,000-mile long Stalin Roll combo Everybody knows about the Fall…

This is the cover of The eXile Issue #288, published in May 2008.

Photographic evidence of Tibet’s military, circa 1950 FRESNO, CA — Writing a column on the military history of Tibet seemed like a good idea in the good old days, a week ago, before I started actually trying to research it….

This article was first published in The eXile, April 2008 Last summer, The eXile took a safari journey in search of the legendary Gopniki, Russia’s underworld answer to the OGs of South Central, Long Beach, and the Bronx. Those notorious…

Klein on Columbian TV a few months before his arrest in Moscow Two weeks ago, while all eyes were focused on the case of international arms dealer Viktor Bout, I spent about five hours at the Moscow City Court watching…

This article was first published by The eXile in March 2008 Two weeks ago I sat in a GAI patrol car drinking whiskey with an on-duty traffic cop. The pudgy officer had flagged down my friend’s Nissan for a routine “document…

The guy on the left in the Santa suit is responsible for up to fifty murdered sex slaves, including his own daughter. A version of this article first appeared in the February 2008 issue of Penthouse magazine. NIZHNY TAGIL — Last…

(a.k.a. Yakov Borisovich Levandovsky) I came back from vacation this week and found myself urgently in need of a warm winter shapka. I lost my last one after I gave it to some guy in exchange for a bottle of…

ST. PETERSBURG — The morning air was icy and the mood tense as people gathered for Other Russia’s pre-protest press conference outside the Yabloko office and it was obvious that something was going to go down, and soon…

This article was first published on November 21, 2007 in The eXile. It was just after 1 a.m. on Monday morning when I pulled my rental car up to my apartment building. I’d just spent the last 48 hours working as…

They get in your mind… They make you do things! – General Owen referring to the Brain Bug in Starship Troopers. This isn’t a movie, kids. The Brain Bug is real. It doesn’t look anything like those big fat brain worms…

Which chick scares you more from a public health perspective? Spring is here and so are migrant birds. That means another bout of bird-flu media-frenzy. H5N1 was supposed to be a pandemic, remember? The Bubonic Plague without borders. Millions would…

All these years, I’ve been wondering to myself, “What’s wrong with Russians? What’s with their strange Byzantine ways? And what the fuck is the deal with that murse thing?” “Murse?” you ask. The stubby little word may sound unfamiliar, but…

A year ago I wrote a poem, concerning nineties. I will translate it from my excellent Russian to my broken English as best, as I can. The Nineties I drunked “Rakia” I have fucked Maria I had my happiness accented…

Christopher Hitchens is out to save America. He’s brought the cross of St. George–Orwell, that is–along on the crusade. He’s everywhere in the American media lately, lending his accent and vast self-importance to the cause of Freedom. You might wonder…

“Mao: the Unknown Story” by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday Random House 2005 See it on Amazon.com… When I watched the second Addams Family movie, I knew there’d be a “blockbuster biography” of Mao coming soon. The key scene comes…

This book is a four-hundred page testimonial to the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the American Russia-watching mafia. In its pages, Michael McFaul condemns himself again and again with staggering non-sequiturs, self-serving lies, crude misrepresentations of his own past and the recent history of Russia, and repeated failures to meet even the most basic standards of academic rigor.