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…

There was an earlier version of this very column that was much better. But it got spiked. Matt didn’t like it, and nowadays, what Matt says, goes. See, I sold him the eXile for a song-or rather, a dirge. And…

Now that I’m back in print, I’m starting to hear it all over again: Ames, are you some kind of anti-Russian? The short answer is, if I didn’t like it here, I’d leave. The long answer goes something like this:…

I’ll write stories that will make them come from the ends of the earth to kill me… then at last it will be over, and that’ll be fine with me. – Celine I have a contract out on me. Not…

A British expat goes down to the local kiosk to buy himself a pack of cigarettes, and notices a street bum begging for money. He hands the bum 3000 rubles, gets his cigarettes, then leaves. The next morning, passing the…

The Victim Where are your greatest dangers?-in pity. – Nietzsche I did everything I could to avoid her. She’d been leaving message after desperate-rape-victim-voice message on my answering machine. What could I say? You were your own worst enemy, Marina….