Expats with an accent

Of all the English-language newspapers published in cities where English isn't much spoken, Moscow's free weekly, the eXile, has most ent...

Of all the English-language newspapers published in cities where English isn8217;t much spoken, Moscow8217;s free weekly, the eXile, has most enthusiastically embraced Ernest Hemingway8217;s notion of expatriate life, as described in The Sun Also Rises. 8220;Fake European standards have ruined you,8221; a visitor tells an American in Paris. 8220;You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed by sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see? You hang around cafes.8221;

The eXile, distributed at Moscow restaurants and bars frequented by westerners, takes this less as a criticism than as a standard to be attained. Its most widely-read feature is a listings guide to the capital8217;s nightspots, star-rated according to three factors: the Fahkie Factor, the likelihood of the presumed male reader having sex with a Russian girl met at the venue; the Flathead Factor, the chance of being maimed by a presumed male Russian fellow-funster; and the Foam Factor, the cheapness of the beer.

Butthe paper aims to be more than a cult fanzine for the college-fresh, male, US-Brit twenty somethings who measure out their Moscow lives with coke spoons and beer glasses between the Starlite Diner and the Hungry Duck bar. The paper8217;s editors, Americans Matt Taibbi and Mark Ames, use the eXile as a platform for a moral crusade against what they see as hypocritical, self-centred Western essentially American attitudes towards Russia. Their targets are institutions like the World Bank and the IMF; the Western-backed Yeltsin government; the Moscow-based Western press corps, which they accuse of shallowness, laziness and incompetence; and, most of all, their longer-established but more conventional rival, the Moscow Times.

The eXile8217;s tirades are provocatively spiced with fragments of the anti-western rhetoric used by Russian communist-patriots. Their most recent editorial urged Russia to solve its financial crisis by defaulting on all its loans because the West, afraid of its nukes, would have tobail it out anyway. But since the eXile speaks in English, its reform-skeptical message penetrates Russia-watchers more effectively than the Russian voice of protest.

According to Taibbi, the eXile gets more hits on its Internet web site exile.ru from Virginia, home of the CIA, than anywhere else. The paper also reaches think tanks and academics in western Europe and the US through an E-mail newsletter known as Johnson8217;s List. This twice-daily scrapbook of clippings from newspaper websites, together with contributions from the US and even occassionally Russian academics has become a virtual salon of Russology, where students, journalists, professors, politicians and amateur Russophiles sound off.

Johnson8217;s List, which often features eXile articles including their infamous press reviews, pseudonymously written by 8220;Abram Kalashnikov8221; has been a forum for battles between pro- and anti-eXile factions throughout the paper8217;s short existence. But the loathing for theeXile felt by more conventional Russia-watchers really came to the fore when a group of anonymous Johnson8217;s readers complained about a piece by 8220;Johnny Chen8221;, in which the author wrote about an apparently real rape of a drunk Russian teenage girl as if it were a routine, acceptable act. The protestors also pointed to the listings entry for the Hungry Duck, which read: 8220;Female Friday8217;s boasts of almost a thousand drunken, crazed chicks and far too few dudes, while the success of the Ladies8217; Nite formula has led the Duck to add a new Sodom Sundays. You thought that the den of sin had seen and done it all8230;but now they8217;re offering to get all chicks blindly drunk on FREE liquor from 7-9 p.m. Tuesdays, Fri8217;s and Sun8217;s, while keeping the men at bay. Then at 9 p.m., the doors open, and the men pour in, and the rape camp festivities begin. Thank god for antibiotics!8221;

This opened up one of the most passionate debates ever carried by the List should an American publication celebrating the sexual misdeedsand substance abuse of westerners in Moscow, and at the same time carrying some of the sharpest, most uncomfortable reportage on Russia, be suppressed? The overwhelming response was no; not just because of the pertinent political stuff, but because the writing about sex, drugs and violence sometimes vile, sometimes infantile, sometimes funny was also telling a truth about the way well-brought up US college boys behave in Russia.

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8220;This whole argument about rape and Johnny Chen is a red herring,8221; wrote Ames in an angry defence. 8220;Those who want to censor us from the Johnson list object to our politics. They can8217;t stand the fact that products of American liberal arts educations would dare to criticise Yeltsin, USAID, the IMF and everything else that the mainstream stands for and that, worst of all, we8217;re getting taken seriously. That8217;s the issue.8221;