Moscow in the mid-I 990s was vulgar, venal and violent. It was manic, obscene, uproarious and Mammon-obsessed. But above all, I found almost everything about it hilariously, savagely funny. Everything, from the way thuggish New Russians would leave the ‘IN Protected’ stickers on their sunglasses to their habit of stealing oil companies from each other, the way they placed TNT under cars and staged shoot-outs in public places, was comic. By the time you had soaked up enough of the country’s penetrating cynicism, even the tragedy was, on some level, darkly amusing. Soldiers blew themselves up hammering open the warheads of surface-to-air missiles, trying to steal gold circuit boards. Ambulance drivers spent their working day moonlighting as taxis. Policemen ran prostitution rackets and delivered the girls to their clients in squad cars.
Russia’s president cavorted on a band stage in Berlin drunkenly conducting an orchestra. Russia’s cosmonauts fixed their spacecraft with a monkey wrench and duct tape in between filming ads for Israeli milk and pretzels and drinking cans of vodka labelled ‘Psychological Support Materials’. Girls who went home with you after fifteen minutes’ drunken conversation in a nightclub would be mortally offended when you didn’t bring flowers to a second date. Gogol captured Russia’s sordid craziness best – the nightmarish mood of dislocation, the mad, scheming little people, the petty vanities, the swinish drunkenness, the slobbering sycophancy, the thieving, incompetent, churlish peasantry.
Like my father must have done, I found Russia not just another country, but a different reality. The outward trappings of the city were familiar enough – the white faces, the Western-style shop fronts, the neoclassical architecture. But this European crust only sharpened the sense of otherness. Instead of reassuring, the distortion of the familiar was even more disturbing. Moscow felt as surreal as a colonial outpost on which some distant master had tried to transplant grimly imperial architecture and European fashions. Underneath all the affectations the city’s heart was wild and Asiatic.
One of my first assignments was to cover Moscow’s First Annual Tattoo Convention. The convention was conservatively billed as a kulturny festival in the bemused Moscow press. It was, in fact, a clan gathering of the capital’s alternative society, an exuberant, pagan orgy of nonconformity. A thick wall of body odour welled out of the dark entrance of the Hermitage club, propelled by high-decibel punk rock. Inside, the two main rooms were wreathed in the rancid smoke of cheap Soviet cigarettes and filled with the heaving forms of dimly lit, half-naked bodies, mostly male. Moscow’s punks, skinheads, bikers and a few culturally confused hippies were milling in one giant, pungent, heaving mass, intensifying into a frenzied rhythmic pogoing in front of the stage, where four punks, their Mohican haircuts plastered to their heads with sweat, were pounding out bad Sex Pistols covers.
Another evening found me in Dolls, a flashy and fashionable strip bar where teenage acrobats danced naked on the tables. Paul Tatum, a prominent American businessman, was there, sitting alone at one of the luncheonette-style stools at the edge of the stage, nursing a drink. Tatum was something of a local celebrity for his prolonged business dispute with a group of Chechens over ownership of the business centre of the Radisson-Slavyanskaya Hotel. I greeted him as we came in, but he seemed distracted, his usual bullishness strained. We chatted for a while about the ‘freedom bonds’ he had issued to raise funds for his legal battle with the Chechens and sold to his friends.
We were joined by Joseph Glotser, the club’s owner, who complained, half-joking, in a thick Brooklyn Russian accent about how hard it was to ‘make honest living in zis town’. Tatum seemed keen to get back to his bird-watching, so I wished him luck and rejoined my mends.
A month later Tatum was dead. Someone put eleven AK47 rounds in his neck and upper back as he entered the pedestrian underpass outside the Radisson. Tatum hadn’t been wearing his customary bulletproof vest that evening, but even if he had it wouldn’t have done him any good because the assassin had fired from above, straight down through his clavicle and upper vertebrae. Tatum’s two bodyguards were unharmed. It was a classic Moscow hit. The shooter dropped the Kalashnikov and walked calmly away, and a couple of hours later the police issued the standard statement, that they believed that ‘the killing was connected with the professional activities of the victim’.
Soon the only person left alive who remembered our brief conversation that night at Dolls was me. Joseph Glotser bought it too, a couple of months after Tatum, a single sniper round to the side of the head from across the street as he emerged from Dolls. The marksman was so sure of his shot he didn’t even bother with a follow-up.
Soon after, for a feature on Moscow’s death industry, I interviewed a mortician who specialized in patching up the corpses of Mafia victims for presentation in open coffins. The man wore a Hawaiian shirt under his stained lab coat, and spoke of contract hits as a ballet connoisseur might talk of his favourite performances. The Glotser hit, he said, with deep appreciation, was one of the ‘finest, cleanest assassinations’ he’d ever seen. The cheery mortician was a true hero of the times, wearing his cynicism lightly, making a joke of the awfulness around him so that it wouldn’t get inside. My Moscow Times colleagues and I, it occurred to me, were morticians too, with lab coats over our Hawaiian shirts, all feigning a detached connoisseurship of Moscow’s gothic wickedness.
Spring began one night in late April, a few weeks after my arrival. The evening before a wintry chill had lurked in the night air, although the last, tenacious remnants of filthy snow had finally melted the previous week. The lawns were bare and scrubby and the earth smelt bitter and dead. But when I woke the next morning the sky was a vibrant blue, the tentative buds which had begun to emerge days before had all suddenly burst out and the boulevard exhaled an unmistakable tang of life. By that evening spring was firmly established across the city.
Like emerging butterflies, the girls in the streets shed their winter coats and emerged in high heels and miniskirts. On Sundays I would walk down the gravel paths of Tsvetnoi Boulevard to the Garden Ring. At Sad-Sam, I’d turn towards Mayakovsky Square, and head to the American Bar and Grill. There, a gaggle of Moscow Times staffers were usually hunched, gossiping, under a pall of cigarette smoke and half-hidden behind crumpled newspapers, trailing in the remains of eggs Benedict. Here it was at last, I told myself, the life of a foreign correspondent: the glamour, the girls, the hard-drinking, bootson-the-brass-rail colleagues, the camaraderie of young men far from home in a strange and wonderful city. In truth, I was acutely aware, even at the time, that I was living the headiest and most adventurous days of my life. Though in the company of my new colleagues, of course, I was careful to conceal my joy under a cultivated veneer of world-weary flippancy.
9. Drinks with the KGB