Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

The mafia contingent makes up 10 to 20 percent of the crowd. Everyone knows who the mafia people are. They will get a share of the profits from this party; every club or bar or party in Russia pays the mafia between 20 and 60 percent of its revenue. “In your country, you have taxes,” someone explains. “And we have this system.”

The rave scene in Russia began with the First Gagarin party on December 14, 1991, organized by Yevgeny Birman and Aleksei Haas. Held at the Cosmos Pavilion at VDNKh, the ultimate Stalinist temple to the socialist state, it attracted more than four thousand people. “The First Gagarin was amazing because everyone was so hungry for it,” explains Birman, who has since organized other major parties. “We’re trying to mix the semiotic in this postmodern world and bring these different tusovki together. It’s about autoeroticism and an absolute beauty code, which we never had in the Soviet period.”

Birman is boyish, exuberant, and fun; Haas has a cosmopolitan professionalism and a hard self-assurance. I chat with him in his Moscow apartment near Red Square while his American wife prepares dinner. “The First Gagarin’s budget was twelve thousand dollars,” he explains. “We had to pay for security, music, DJs, rent, firemen. We gave the mafia twenty percent”—a low figure, achieved by sharp negotiations—“and we didn’t make a profit. But I proved to myself that these people did exist in Moscow. I went out in my car in the weeks before the party, and when I saw the right kind of people, I gave them invitations. I invited a thousand friends for free. We ran TV ads on the day of the party; they were in English, to select the audience.” The First Gagarin was unlike anything ever before seen in Moscow: lasers bounced off the rich architecture and Western disc jockeys played the latest music.

Haas plans to open a club in the autumn. “You come in from the provinces to Moscow,” he explains. “You’re ambitious; you’re young. What do you see? Success is in the hands of these big mafiosi driving expensive cars, with pretty girls around them. It’s dark energy, evil. I want to start a club for light energy, a place for clean people with good bodies and smart minds. You can’t win people over to light energy by being a hippie: I want a club for ambitious people with success written all over them. I’m not going to have alcohol there: it makes people retreat into the fog, and our lives are foggy enough. I’m going to have the best sound system and the best music and amazing DJs. And the price will be really low. That’s democracy: it’s for everyone, for the new Russia.”

I want to see the clubs of Moscow. I mention five names to Vladik Mamyshev-Monroe, a Marilyn impersonator and hero of Russian pirate television. “Mafia, prostitutes, a few businessmen,” he says. I ask about Diskoteka Lise, the biggest in Moscow. “Oh, no,” he says. “Even in America you must have these places, full of heavy, middle-aged Georgian women with bleached hair, blue eye shadow, and Lurex tank tops, shimmying out of time to old Debbie Harry songs.”

After trying a few dreadful places—at one, three bananas and three drinks cost $95—I am in despair.

But in mid-April, I go to the painter Sveta Vickers’s new, low-budget club in the Hermitage Theater, where I find members of the artistic-bohemian tusovka, with people from television, some actors, painters, conceptualists, and intellectuals. A big room in front has tables and chairs where people can drink and talk; the dance floor is in the theater itself. I run into more than a hundred people I know within my first half hour at Sveta’s; there are no strangers here. “I would be happy to come every night,” says Tanya Didenko, a musicologist and host of the voguish late-night television music-talk show Silence Number Nine. Arisha Grantseva, an artist, is holding court at a table in the corner. Painters come by to say hello, and MC Pavlov, a rapper, drums out time on the back of his chair. I meet a Bulgarian-Swiss performance artist and a Greek architect. I even spot Aleksei Haas on the far side of the room. The club has never advertised; everyone knows of it by word of mouth.

Sveta, at the center of it all, laughs. “You know,” she says, “I have two big advantages over these other people who are running clubs. In the first place, none of them is Jewish! And in the second place, none of them is a mother!”

The pleasure of Sveta’s club lies in something Russian that I have never encountered in a club in the West. It lies in visionary, exuberant love, which you feel all over the place, as tangible as the decoration or the music. “We know how to enjoy,” a young painter says to me. “We grew up with the image of our parents suffering together. The legacy of that communal pain of the bohemian world is strong in us, and it makes our joy palpable.”