Issue #14/95, July 20 - August 3, 2000   

By Mark Ames

When Sell-Outs Cry

I try not to read reviews of our book; all I care about is whether it sells, and how much of the proceeds might wind up in my pocket. Last Saturday, a drunken friend ignored my blackout rule and angrily quoted something Owen Matthews wrote in his review for the Moscow Times.

"Owen lied and said you only printed the photo of 'Miss Kirov' in your book because she's the only attractive girl you've ever fucked. You can't let him get away with that! It's a lie, we were there in Kirov!" he barked.

But I wasn't surprised. Matthews has his reasons to resent me. Physical reasons first and foremost. His grotesquely distended stomach looks as if it had been pumped so full of gas that a single match struck at belt-level would flatten a five-block radius, while his teeth lean randomly like Celtic temple ruins. As ugly as I've become after the last few years of self-abuse-and I have grown parabolically uglier-nothing restores my confidence more quickly than appearing in the same room with him.

Matthews's slight about the women I date is ironic not just because I stole Miss Kirov from Owen and fucked her myself; the real irony has to do with Matthews's present-day girlfriend. I met her twice and couldn't believe he'd drag her out in public. Her face looked like someone had dripped wax or yellowish base paint onto her skull, then left it out in the sun too long. When she accompanied Matthews to our Third Anniversary party in February, wearing a scarf around her head, I was convinced she was dying of bone cancer. She earned the nickname "Leukemia Lady" at the eXile offices, and got a mention in our post-party review, which Matthews later complained had "gone too far."

Matthews also directly insulted his own sister by not including her in the "cute girls associated with Mark" category. She and her aristocrat's-daughter friend once tried to force me into a menage a trois in Owen's bedroom. They slobbered on each other's breasts in one of the most vile displays of dipshit lesbiana that I'd ever experienced. Right before my eyes was this Divine version of Owen Matthews, Jabba-in-drag, large-nippled breasts jiggling menacingly into my face. My dick bolted into my stomach; I couldn't coax it out for days. "Heeeere, dickie-dickie. Niiiice dickie. It's me, dickie. No Miss Matthews, just me, dickie-dickie!" I had to literally throw Matthews's sister off of me and rush back out to the dining room, apologizing and explaining that I'm not into the Henry and June bisexual thing.

Matthews's real weakness isn't just physical; it's the way he fell into the same sell-out trap as everyone in our generation.

I first met him when we started up the predecessor to the eXile, a paper called "Living Here", back in October of 1995. He'd been with the Moscow Times, but needed an outlet for his enfant terrible affectation. It was Matthews who, under the pen-name John Evelyn, first conceived of Living Here as a brazen nightlife guide to Moscow. I added the editorial content, but I was deferential, since he was much more of a journalist. As it took off under his early leadership, Matthews had to make a choice. Had he come out of the closet and announced that Living Here was his, he'd have risked "not being taken seriously," the fear of every middlebrow journalist. It might have set his journalism career back a bit, and condemned him to a certain level of poverty that we at the eXile have experienced. But the payoff in taking control of Living Here could have been much bigger: he could have claimed the entire untold story of Yeltsin-era Moscow, in the untold style, all for himself. He could have etched himself into the permanent record.

Instead, he quit after just three months in order to devote himself to the measured crawl up the mainstream journalism career-ladder, earning a promotion 18 months later as stringer for Newsweek. This was good for me, as I stepped into his place. But it was a colossal chicken-shit move that permanently disfigured Matthews's ability to write creative, damaging prose. His precise, overconfident language, honed at Oxford, had once made me a little insecure. But writing is just like any muscle: it responds to training, and forms a kind of permanent shape over time. You could see Matthews's demise when he tried to repaint himself as the Times's decadent-guy in his atrocious "Batwing Soup" column. His descriptions and metaphors were all borrowed; he'd even lost the ability to experience originally. Everything was adulterated from England's library of jaded decadent prose, and pressed through the cheesecloth of the Moscow Times's style book. After a few years at Newsweek, his prose is indistinguishable from the Beigist prose of his peers.

Matthews's attack on us was personal on many levels, not just because he comes off as a sad villain in our book, but because professionally, we are a reminder of the fact that he chose to be a civil servant when he could have been a hero. His totally disingenuous attack on Taibbi for not "risking" his life as Owen allegedly did in Chechnya ignores a simple fact about mainstream Chechnya reporting: Newsweek reporters like Matthews had their entire trips mapped out with official approval and total security; they didn't take a shit without FSB assistance and approval, two bodyguards in attendance. Not a shell was fired that wasn't pre-approved on the famous FSB-guided war safaris. That's why even the frailest, most bourgeois hack was able to endure a tour or two to Nazran. Hunter Thompson once compared such reporting to going on a boar hunt by firing spray paint from the back of a speeding pickup truck. The eXile has never played that game of accomodation-for-scoops; hence, our access has always been limited, as have our funds.

From my experience, facing death is far less scary than facing an entire future of uncertainty and failure. When it came to this daunting choice, Matthews chose the safest, surest path as a Newsweek functionary, a civil servant of the ninth rank, all benefits, security and upward mobility guaranteed.

If Matthews's retreat to the careerist territory of our parents was chickenshit, then Moscow Times editor Matt Bivens's total ideological about-face since Putin's Duma victory last December is nothing short of treachery. His side-column review of our book, which I hear was a panicked blowjob disguised as a pious lecture on journalism ethics, is symptomatic of Bivens's attempt to have it both ways, to trash his rivals while setting himself above the fray, a two-faced Clintonesque approach that is part of a pattern in his professional life.

First of all, let's make one thing clear: Matt Bivens commissioned, read, and approved of Matthews's article, and therefore, despite the decoy review, he is most responsible for Matthews's attack. Bivens called my girlfriends "ugly", and he hoped it would hurt. Should I in turn go after Bivens's wife and children? Is that what he wants? Hold me back, hold me back!

Readers of the Moscow Times may remember how Bivens, throughout last year, used the editorial page as a virtuous center-left soap box. Annoying as it often was in tone, it was effective. It was the culmination of a righteous path he embarked on after quitting his lucrative USAID job in Kazakhstan some years ago, a job which he subsequently condemned in an impressive anti-USAID article published in the Atlantic Monthly three years ago. Of course, that mea culpa didn't extend as far as actually returning the USAID money he'd earned to the US or Kazakh taxpayers who subsidized his job-that would mean paying for his principles. (In fact, unlike Bivens's amoral co-workers, he was able to exploit USAID twice, first for the cash and per diems, and then later, by shrewdly timing his treason towards USAID, he used the mea culpa article to advance his journalism career and to forestall any damage to his reputation from his association with the scandal-ridden USAID.)

A couple of weeks ago I went into the Foreign Library across from the Kinoteatr Illuzion and read through every Moscow Times from last September, when the Chechen War first re-ignited, up through the end of March of this year. I wanted to relive and retrace the transformation of a former leftie.

I started with the pre-sell-out Bivens and counted, for the period from late September through late December, no fewer than 19 vicious, strident articles attacking the war on Chechnya as wrong, evil, staged, doomed, manipulated, and every other bad thing under the sun. Then something happened. We know from Bivens' own article in the current issue of Brill's Content, "Back To the U.S.S.R.", that right around the Duma elections in December, the authorities leaned on Independent Media to tone down their anti-Chechen war coverage. As Bivens himself admits, his publisher, Derk Sauer, convened an editorial meeting and urged him to "tighten up" the Chechnya coverage. Here's how it was "tightened up." During the next three month period after Putin's victory, Bivens published a total of five apologetic quasi-anti-Chechen War editorials. That's right: 19 strident ones before; 5 apologetic ones after. He published just one in January, one in February (and a few safe editorials deploring the Babitsky detention, which even the pro-war Russian press denounced), and three in March. But don't be fooled by that brief uptick. One was laughably titled, "Terrorists Are People Too" with its Orphan Annie vision of Basaev and Putin talking through their feelings and coming to an understanding, another denounced a gag order on journalists covering the Chechen side (again, totally safe in post-Putin Russia), while the third was the grammar school civics-inspired "When Being Jeered Is A Triumph", which, with sentences such as "we are not endorsing Chechen independence," was little more than an apologia for his previously strident anti-Chechen war line, a plea to Russians not to hang him from the lamppost of unemployment.

This sudden about-face isn't just confined to his attitude on the war. On the eve of the Duma election last December, Bivens attacked the election process's blatant unfairness no fewer than four fist-shaking times with editorials such as "And They Call This Elections?" and "When State Television Rules Voters". On the eve of the presidential elections March, which made the Duma elections look like Jeffersonian democracy by comparison, the new Bivens not only didn't savage the elections, he published a psychotic full-page Russian-language editorial praising Russians for the historic choice on voting day! He also pleaded yet again that he be understood as a Russian patriot

Recent crackdowns on the oligarchs have brought nothing but scorn from Bivens; in fact a raid on an oligarch seems to be the only thing that really gets him out of his seat.

The gentrification of Bivens' editorial page is as much physical as it is ideological.

On January 20th, the editorial page underwent a major transformation, nay, a revolution. Bivens started signing his own toned-down editorials at the bottom of the article, a first in Moscow Times history. It was as if Sauer had called Bivens's center-left bluff: "Okay, you vant to take on ze autorities, here, take ze heat yourself." It was an effective way to reign him in; suddenly, Bivens wasn't so cocksure of his center-left ideals. The editorials got more and more tame, culminating in the March 27th Russian-language editorial on the eve of the Russian elections which read like a prophylactic Stalin-era confession crossed with a "we mean you no harm" signal from benign higher life forms. Most of you probably couldn't read it because you don't read Russian, which saved Bivens the shame; his audience was Russian authorities, whom he wanted to appease. Someday, we'll translate it and publish it ourselves.

Bivens's capitulation was complete by the end of March: the editorial page had all but ceased to exist. The soap box forum had been torn down and replaced by the equivalent of a journalistic strip mall: tame editorials reprinted from mainstream American newspapers, a move unthinkable just six months ago, and unheard of in a newspaper with a staff as large as his. Once in a while, Bivens editorials reappear, weakly simulating his left-of-center pose of yore, but they ring hollow, the twitchings of a poisoned conscience.

These days, Bivens seems most comfortable talking money. He boasts of his newspaper's profitability- he did so in the Russian-language editorial, in Brill's, and in a crazed defense of his IKEA scandal on the Johnson's Russia List- which is something even the most shameless career editor is supposed to only brag about privately with his publisher or stock broker. In a March 14th editorial, "New Ad Tax Deductions Great for All", Bivens went so far as to praise the government for offering a tax break for media ads; later, when the government proposed a flat tax for all citizens, the confused Bivens attacked it as favoring the rich.

What happened is clear. Bivens was left with a choice that many of us face a few times in our professional lives: suffer from your principles, or abandon them. The risk of an uncertain future career outweighed the risk of damaging his center-left credentials. It was probably a wise choice in this, the Clinton era. What former hippie isn't licking the boots of any oligarch who comes his way? German Greens' Party head Joschka Fischer had campaigned on pacifism and anti-nuclear power, then, when faced with a critical choice between remaining foreign minister or working at Der Wiener Schnitzel, ended up sending the Luftwaffe to bomb Belgrade and extending the German nuclear power industry's life by another thirty years. Clinton burned draft cards and smoked weed, then got into power and waged war and jailed every dope smoker he could find. Bivens, it seems, has gotten with the program.

Why did two self-respecting "serious" journalists bother attacking the quality of the girls I date? Because they hate me. They hate all of us at the eXile, because for all of our faults, we took the one doomed path into an unknown and insecure future that they didn't have the balls to take. Owen Matthews and Matt Bivens are the two most public sell-outs in the local press community, a pair of raw, bleeding literary egos who resent our existence. One is a hopeless social climber; the other a fraud with a shrewd sense of timing. More than that, Bivens is probably counting on the fact that I, and the eXile, will lose in the end. He's probably right: allying yourself with the powers that be almost invariably ensures victory. With Putin, and IKEA on his side, it's hard to imagine that Bivens didn't jump ship at the right time and land on the winning side. Yet again.

I hate winners.

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