Amusing ourselves to death

If you’ve ever worn tight shoes, you’ll know that the relief you feel when you take them off is so akin to euphoria it leaves you dizzy. Imagine a whole capital city, hobbled for 72 years of communism, united in that sense of deliverance. Then try to imagine waking up after a night out in that city… Inky nightclub stamps in Cyrillic script brand… my hands… and my head reminds me why, even in binge Britain, we choose not to chase each glass of wine with a thimbleful of vodka.

“This city is a sick place,” shrugs Elena, the biggest party girl I know. She means sick in the LA sense of the word… so outlandishly hip… that it prompts only that most contrary of adjectives. Others may prefer to use the same word in its original meaning. My first night was gentle enough: dinner at Turandot (a new £30 million restaurant built [like] an Italian palazzo), followed by two bars and three nightclubs… we arrived at a rave in an old factory where pornographic pop-art lined the walls and strobes bounced off eyeballs avid and dry from drugs. Two £25 drinks later and we were off again in search of transport. Nobody takes taxis in Moscow. Instead, they hail down any car that will take them: a Skoda, a Lada… courtesy of a dignitary’s chauffeur…

Culturally the capital is a frenzy of amorphous creativity, with one art form bleeding into another: bars are selling books, nightclubs sell clothes… I’ve spent all-nighters in New York and LA and been disappointed to discover only a forced… attempt at hedonism. Muscovites are suicidally serious about fun. But if this is New York, then it’s the New York of Brett Easton Ellis and Jay MacInerney, or the Chicago of the Twenties, where corruption and decadence… can be a heartbeat away from despair. “As long as the oil prices stay the way they are,” sighs Troitsky, “the lifestyle will continue. Politically we are in limbo, but for you guys, for visitors? It may be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to visit a capital that burns money.”

Excerpted from Celia Walden’s ‘Is Moscow the new Big Apple?’ in the London Telegraph