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

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, great action- a sure winner, right? Only problem is, it’s already been done! Since November, 1996, four assistants to Duma deputies have been murdered in Moscow. The most recent to go down was Yevgeny Shklayev, assistant to “Narodovlastiye” deputy Sergei Shashurin. The other three were all, coincidentally, assistants to LDPR deputies: one with two prior rape convictions, another whom police called a member of the Solntsevo gang, and a third whom MUR detectives called a known mafioso from the Smolenskaya gruppirovka. (more…)

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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 the anti-Russian that he is. Rather, according to a recent Russian government press release, the second most powerful man in the C.I.S. makes a paltry $703 per month.

“Seven hundred and three dollars?! Shame!” (more…)

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 head decoration. With a one hand she is squeezing some sort of scepter. Maria Davy Christos. (more…)

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 all over the city thought the same thing: man, people at home must really be bored. For eXpats, the news was life-affirming. For many of us, our best excuse for being here is that it gives us, however erroneously, a sense of being a participant in a society where people lead real lives and have real problems. More than one of us has suspected that if we were to go back home, there would be only one road to take to escape the sanitary life the West has to offer-get on the net, and die.

Now, suddenly, we had 39 solid reasons to be sure we were right to move here. (more…)

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