Issue #02/57, January 28 - February 10, 1999  

by Mark Ames

The crisis is finally having a visible surface effect. I only noticed it after my six-week detention in New York. The most obvious feature is that it's quieter and dimmer. There are fewer cars on the road. I'm in a pretty good position to tell: I live at one of the busiest intersections in Eastern Europe, where Leninsky Prospekt meets the Garden Ring Road. It used to sound like Husker Du was recording Land Speed Record on my balcony from about 5am to about 1am, even later on weekends.

Now, the noise is bearable. I only get headaches once a day, or every other day. And the streets and buildings, they're somehow dimmer. At night, I mean. I remember when I first came to Moscow five years ago being struck by how dim it was after dark. The street lamps, the apartment windows, the storefronts, the car lights: everything was dim. After years and years of wincing and sweating in the miserable San Jose, California glare, a smog-choked furnace that never let up, after all that ugly brightness, it was a huge relief to come to a city that was dim, cold.

Moscow's going that way again. It's receding fast, picking up reverse-speed. It's one of the few surface signs that a crisis even exists here, subtle as it is.

When the devaluation first hit last August, I was in Riga scoring a new visa. The way the news hit there about the devaluation had me terrified. I expected the eXile to have been shut down, the city to be burning in flames. And there I was, in Riga, one of those imitation-Western cities popular with Germans. I snagglepussed out of there, and arrived at Ryzhsky Vokzal... only to find that not a single Russian I knew gave a flying fuck about the devaluation.

A week later, I was in Kiev on a free-lance assignment, when the banks first collapsed and shut their doors. The apartment I was staying at had cable television. CNN showed this one bank that had a line of people crowded around it, jostling to get to the door. The reports made it seem like a social explosion was just around the corner, that this one bank with this one angry crowd (actually the crowd was far tamer than your average jostling metro escalator mob) was being repeated on every corner in Moscow. Again, I dropped everything and flew back as quickly as possible, hoping to find my apartment building glowing in glorious cinders, entire blocks demolished by vicious mobs, random gunfire... But no. A few jokes in the local press, a telephone whining, and that was that. No hollowed out buildings, no corpses in burnt shells of cars.

Most Russians I know were oddly proud when the crisis first hit. It seemed to confirm their version of reality: that a few evil people manipulate events and control their destiny; that nothing is ever predictable in Russia; that they're the most perennially-fucked people on earth.

I remember the first time it started hitting people in our office. Our receptionists, Olya and Natasha, were fired for good after not having received their pay for a couple of months. Olya, dewy-eyed, looked at me on her way out for the last time and asked me to marry her and take away. I got her phone number, called her several times, and tried taking advantage of her misfortune. It didn't work. She shined.

After our crisis party, I hitched a ride home in some kind of Japanese sports utility vehicle. The guy who drove was some low-grade Lisovsky look-alike with the same clean long hair. He sped around the Garden Ring at over 100 miles per hour, screaming the whole time about how fucked he was for being Russian, how fucked Russia was, how you could never get anything going in this country, even if you just tried to mind your own business and lead an insulated, middle-class life. I made him pull over and drop me off, and watched him speed away, swerving and cursing.

The crisis is manifesting itself in other ways. Junkies are screwed. Last year, it was reported that Russia imported 500% more smack than in 1997. I'm sure the steep upward curve on drug imports has been steady since at least 1994, when heroin first started to court Russia's youth with its promise of warmth and nirvana. Now, how is anyone going to score a g of china? With prices ranging from $50 to $100 a gram, it's impossible. The supply has dried up, dealers are splitting town. And junkies are going nuts. Just last week, two young junkies sliced up their neighbors and threatened self-defenestration. On Dorozhny Patrul, I've seen at least two other junkie-murder cases. The same holds true with coke. At $150 a gram, it's suddenly gone very, very out of style.

When I was on the metro late last Friday night with Krazy Kevin, I sat across from a pair of teenaged thugs with Caesar hairdos and that mischievous, gaunt expression common to drug-users. We had some eye contact, which I mistook for the Morse-code communication between chemical abusers... I think they were doing an eenie-meenie-minie-moe thing on which passenger to stomp. Lucky for me and Kevin, they pounced on some hapless middle-aged citizen, just as we started slowing to a stop. It was right out of A Clockwork Orange: two teens clearly fed up with having to go clean were forced to artificially simulate a drug rush by stomping the shit out of some innocent, happy, well-fed family man in a brown fur cap. When they got him on the ground, the blond-haired kid launched into a series of penalty kicks on the old man's temple while his friend laughed. The doors opened, they took one last kick, then slipped out and laughed, simulating karate kicks in the air. So much for the benefits of going clean.

There are conventional answers to the lack of heroin and coke and speed and E: locally-produced goods like vint, poppy straw, phenamine. But for some reason even phen is nearly impossible to come by, even though there were smoothly operating speed labs in the Baltics and St. Petersburg right up to last autumn. Local goods for some reasons haven't filled the massive gap left by the disappearance of the (some would say) superior foreign products. Right now, it's just a bad time for everything... but liquor.

Alcohol. "That filthy peasant drug," as a friend of mine calls it. We at the eXile have been trying our damnedest to go clean. At first it was a health issue. None of us can remember last year. All that's left is one embarrassing blur. If Taibbi, Krazy Kevin and I really put our minds to it, we might be able to recall a collective ten or twelve minutes of 1998, but we'd really have to strain. So this year, or at least, this month, we're going clean.

But not sober. Anyone who passed by the eXile table at the Moosehead's 4th year anniversary party would have seen that. The folks there made the mistake of offering us kholyava. After our tenth or twentieth free beer, things got nasty. Taibbi, whose spine slumped over like a Neanderthal's, bared his hairy ass to every patron, including a drunken British lesbian. Krazy Kevin, after gulping down what must have been his thirtieth vodka shot, spewed french fry mush in the middle of the bar. He was like a human sprinkler, spraying shit out of his mouth in every direction, most of which splattered on Taibbi's purple silk shirt sleeve. I took on the role of dragon slayer, trying to hit on every overweight girl there--and believe me, the Moosehead didn't lack for them--and wound up striking out as famously as Vijay Maheshwari.

For some idiotic reason, getting blindly drunk as often as we have is considered not only acceptable, but even admirable and wacky by the mainstream. If I were to pop some jones up my nose and pass out in my apartment, I could go to jail for 5 years; if I hoovered a quarter of phen and wrote three chapters of a novel, my ass could be locked up in Butyrka, while my lungs fought a losing battle against killer strains of tuberculosis.

But alcohol... it's so cute 'n harmless, ain't it? Between twenty and thirty thousand Russians die every year from alcohol poisoning; well over half the 40,000 murders committed in this country are alcohol-related; add in the drunk driving deaths, the wife beatings, the child beatings, the rapes, all done under the influence of that filthy-yet-legal drug, and I feel damn good about this decision I've made.