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Moscow: It’s Raining Men
July 1999. It was midnight in Moscow, eight years after the collapse of European Communism and the Soviet Union. That Party was gone. But in a lavish new nightclub, our rather proper if not outright staid American Cinema Foundation was hosting what turned out to be a successful but memorably nearly out-of-control party of our own. There was something foreboding about those long-ago summer midnights at the Moscow Film Festival. It was a strange, early transition era of “frontier land” capitalism, when anything still seemed possible, even, God forbid, peace and good relations between Russia and America.
But something went badly wrong in the transition. After close to a decade of the heralded blessings of free enterprise, while the festival’s globetrotting sophisticates were dancing the night away, the glum-but-decent nearby streets, of rundown stores and communal apartments, now glittered with bright lights, strip clubs, brothels, and extravagant new restaurants, run by a newly empowered criminal class. The Yeltsin years. It was like the dystopian alternative future gone so wrong of Back to the Future Part II, but it was real. Russia’s new billionaires partied with their foreign friends while Russians felt humiliated. Was this America’s fault? Why are so many Russians bitterly convinced to this day that it was, at least in great part?
For me, the trail of the answers began way back. I’d started listening to shortwave radio when I was a kid, and soon became familiar with many foreign stations, including the distant, static-y sounds of Moskva Gavrit (Moscow Speaks), and its English-speaking sibling, Radio Moscow. I finally had a look at Moscow, and its national showpiece of a film festival, on my first trip overseas in 1985. It was all a complicated mix: Communist bureaucracy; a stubborn pre-Left national culture of remarkable durability; and the restless new young aspiration of the MTV and Walkman age that tacitly hinted at a less Marxist future, which they glimpsed in Mikhail Gorbachev, who’d taken over in March.
Millions of young people readied themselves for that future. I was surprised by how many of them I’d see in the subways of Moscow, intently making notations in Russiki yazik self-help books that taught computer programming. They didn’t own a home computer but expected to someday, and whenever they finally got it, they wanted to be ready. It was hard not to be impressed with their determination.
In the Eighties, you could go into any Moscow cafeteria–Stolovaya–and get a pretty good basic lunch. Chicken soup, bread, a steamed vegetable, and a glass of tea for about 35 cents. The subway was immaculate and cost seven cents. This is part of what makes writing about the Iron Curtain days tricky for pre-Trump conservatives: the Soviets might lie about anything, but they weren’t lying about everything. The late period USSR was a land of tradeoffs: Freedom for equality. Opportunity for predictability. A crowded trolleybus today, maybe a family car in ten years.
By 1985, the Stalin era was far back in the rearview mirror, but there was still a level of government surveillance of the Moscow Film Festival that few of the foreign guests expected or understood. If anything, they were foolishly flattered by all the attention.
Then, after the tumultuous changes of the Gorbachev years, it suddenly ended. By New Year’s Day, 1992, the Soviet Union was no more. Boris Yeltsin was Russia’s president.
Some of the benefits of the end of Soviet rule were clear. There was less fear of a 2 am knock at the door. Some of the negative parts would have been hard to avoid in any case. Wall Street’s “shock treatment” prescription of the Nineties, adopted by Clinton’s team, was probably if reluctantly needed in some form, but the high dose of austerity administered at once almost killed the patient.
Losing the Cold War? The bewildered Russians, stung by ridicule, thought they deserved the lasting thanks of the world for negotiating an end to that Cold War, before doing everyone the favor of dissolving the USSR altogether.
Many Hollywood conservatives protested Clinton’s air war against Serbia in 1999. Serbia is Russia’s little brother: Yugoslav=southern Slav. That war really stuck in Russia’s craw. Even the multimillionaire guys walked a picket line with the rest of us when Madeleine Albright spoke at the Beverly Hills Hotel. The news coverage of the demonstration never aired. I’m not proud to say that we had no impact—zip, zero, nada. To the broadcast media, Hollywood being antiwar was only adorable some of the time.
Russia was screwed in the Nineties, yes. But they weren’t simply victims; it was complicated. The transition away from Communism was never going to be easy. We were never going to nudge Boris Yeltsin into being James Madison, but we could and should have handled Russia a lot better than we did. It’s a moot point now.
By the end of the Nineties, stricter attention paid to appearances ensured that Moscow’s major monuments and boulevards gleamed with nationalist, not Communist, pride. A backlash was building.
Back to the party, the one in the Luxor nightclub. The disco ball was spinning. The festival’s international crowd mingled with the local mob, and I use the term “mob” advisedly. They gyrated to Prince’s 1981 ode to that once futuristic year of nineteen-ninety-nine. I sweated under the lights, too, although all I was doing was making on-camera conversation about the festival. This was the most lavish club in a city that was now full of them. Oligarchs had their own reserved booths. The liquor flowed at $500 a bottle. The walls elaborately imitated Egyptian motifs but with lots of female nudity.
When you came down to it, I was there, in part, to show that America cared about their history, that Hollywood applauded their struggle to overcome the Communist years. Did we really? I wondered, as French movie stars mingled with Moscow’s new rulers of the midnight streets. Personally, I missed the low-key Russianness of the old stolovaya. But who was I kidding? To them I was a cardboard cutout, the American with a nice suit and a microphone. I was mixed up in all that entails whether I liked it, admitted it, or not.
*There was a pause in the music and a lighting change. Fog machines started filling the dance floor for a production number. As scantily dressed female dancers took formation, the music teased the opening of a gay dance classic, “It’s Raining Men”. The lewd MTV video played on a screen in the background. While the dance troupe of women moved forward through the fog in arrow formation, like they were in A Chorus Line, a line of interested men formed, moving hungrily towards them. “The temperature is rising! (Rising! Rising!) Barometer’s getting lo-o-w-w-w!” The two lines clashed in a dance floor collision of curses, smiles, slaps and rushed exchanges of telephone numbers.
Someone’s boyfriend had jealous objections, and a chair flew across the elegant nightclub. In moments, a brawl broke out. They didn’t stop the show, which BTW I was ostensibly hosting. The club just cranked up the music and called out an insta-ready platoon of beefy, heavily armed bouncers, who ran through the shrieking metal detectors and waded into the fight. There was a roiling, boiling fistfight but no one fired a gun. The loudspeakers drowned out the shouts: “It’s raining men! Yeah! Say Hallelujah!”
By the time the last wise guy was tossed out into the street, it was 3:30 in the morning. I headed back to the hotel in a taxi. Seal’s “Kissed by a Rose” was on the radio. In Russia’s northern latitudes, the summer sun was already above the horizon.
Something else was rising above that horizon: an unquenchable wave of Russian resentment. Movies like Prisoner of the Mountains, Brother, and Voroshilov Regiment were like our downbeat cynical 70s films about Vietnam, amoral youth, and vigilante justice. No, they didn’t want the USSR back. But they wanted the country they thought they knew back. Many Americans today would, if not agree with those Russian sentiments of a quarter century ago, at least at some level understand them much better now than we did then.
You know what else was rising above that new horizon? The reign of Vladimir Putin. Given that history, given the circumstances, are you surprised? I wasn’t.
Published in General
A really long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…
EPSON MFP image
EPSON MFP image
Imagine if Russia had taken little brother off into a corner and whispered to him urgently that raping and butchering one’s neighbors is just not done.
Imagine it ever occurring to a Russian that raping and butchering one’s neighbors is just not done.
It’s an impulse that’s by no means confined to Russians, of course. The case of Serbia isn’t so easy.
Since, oh, the twelfth century, Russians have lamented that they don’t get help from the West in fighting off barbarian invaders. That’s in those times between when they were being invaded by other Christians. Bosnian Serbs had a legitimate complaint in the Eighties that Yugoslav federal policy favored Muslim resettlement in their nominally sovereign state/province. This was true, but it reflected another fact: it was easy to be blind to these distinctions because 40 years of iron-fisted Communist erasing of religious and cultural identities in Yugoslavia did have a brutal but undeniable effect. It also meant those separate identities springing back to redoubled life as the end of Communism neared. When in 1988 Slobodan Milosevic told Bosnian Serbs, “No one has the right to beat you”, he wasn’t wrong in 1988. That doesn’t justify his turning into Huey Long and then for the final years into a small-time Mussolini. It’s history’s eternal irony, the victim that turns bully.
An excellent piece, @garymcvey, and I recommend it strongly for promotion to the Main Feed. I especially appreciate your references to the Clinton Administration’s vanity project (the various NATO air campaign targeting Serbia).
Reflecting on those years from 1989 to 1999, I can now recognize that it was during that decade that the bitter kudzu of decay now afflicting the contemporary US military was first planted and then lovingly cultivated.
The optimism of men knows no bounds when confronted by scantily dressed women.
Good one, Gary.
Given we now know that the Clintons were, at least later, in bed with the Russians, was this only a bad policy decision? Or work more or less as designed? Seeing as the end result was Putin, it seems they ended up with what they wanted. The other option is Putin’s largess was showered on accidental allies.
Thank you for the thoughtful essay. Did we even have leaders of the stature required to have helped in constructive ways, who understood the Russian temperament and history? Was it even possible to help the Russians constructively given their temperament and history? If a people won’t accept any responsibility but constantly look to others to solve their problems, then I’m not sure what can be done.
Great post!
Part of the problem of Russians “recovering” Russia is that it may never have existed. When the czars ruled, 90+% were worse off than medieval serfs in Western Europe. Lenin had plenty of resentments to work with. The wealth and national prestige under Catherine or Peter took place in the absence of a recognizable middle class. The concentration of wealth in the nobility was probably unprecedented.
Modern Russians wanted the material goodies of the more advanced world but lacked the identity, values, and self-image of a free prosperous people that goes along with a market-based society. The West is all about optimism. Russians have a hard time with that.
Andrei Amalrik in Will the Soviet Union Survive until 1984 made the point almost fifty years ago that glad-handing Western politicians did not fathom the depth of Russian mistrust and lack of faith in betterment. When an American drives home in a new car, he wrote, his neighbor looks out the window and says to himself, the system better let me get one of those. The Russian neighbor wants the state to come and take it away because its owner is getting too big for his breeches.
Alas, that seems to have changed, at least for a sizeable number of Americans. Adam Carolla has expressed it a bit differently. He says that years ago a father and son would be walking down the street and the town’s rich guy would drive by in his Rolls. The father would tell the son that if he works hard, that can be him one day. Now, the father is more likely to tell the son that the fat cat unfairly got the Rolls and something needs to be done to knock him down.
I’m trying to imagine what it takes to level such a grotesque indictment of the moral character of each and every citizen of a nation/member of a culture (in this case, about 140 million of them). I’m failing.
Good golly. Even TDS is not this bad.
Each and every citizen? Nah. Too many of them flee and are valuable citizens elsewhere for that to be true. Their leaders? Again no, but they arrive at leaders prepared to do anything to amass and maintain power with disturbing regularity. Terrorism is certainly in the toolbox. In fact, it seems to always be the first to hand.
Sometimes you throw a party, and it turns into a fistfight…
It’s more than 50 years since the trial of Lt. Calley, but people still recognize the words “My Lai”. Fifty years after the special military operation is over, people in southern and eastern Europe will remember Bucha. By then, what will Luhansk and Donetsk think about being shelled from both sides? It depends on who is perceived to have won the pile of rubble.
Great post Gary!
It must have been fascinating to travel there during those interesting times.
Thanks, Clavius, right back at ya. I never got to see India; I walked a beat in Communist and Communist-adjacent countries, so that generally meant eastern and central Europe, as well as Hong Kong and Taiwan.
Good comment. No, I don’t think we had leaders of that stature in either party at that time, and alas, later.
There are analogies with race relations in this country. Just suppose there was a group of people small enough to be a minority but large enough to cohere, to resist change. Suppose they have genuine, undoubted grievances about how history has treated them, which has hardened into a diamond-hard shell of resentment, distrust, and an undying memory of persecution. Going from self-blame to believing that nothing is ever really their fault.
It’s a human trait, but not a helpful one.
I don’t think it was our responsibility to craft a solution for them. They weren’t a colony, they weren’t 1945 Germany or Japan, and they have their own culture and traditions. Beyond the usual give and take of international agreements, incentives and the like, the usual tool set, we weren’t going to have much affect. I think Iraq and Afghanistan vividly showed the limits of American wisdom in nation-shaping, but still there are some pushing endless wars.
I have a different analogy to offer:
You threw a pool party, then someone plopped a rancid turd into the pool and got well deserved flak for it.
Me too.
Even before my move to America I was a dedicated listener to the BBC World Service which used to be available only on SW (now it’s broadcast domestically on FM and possibly LW when Radio 4 shuts down at night). I’ve owned at various times a Sony ICF-2002, a Sony ICF-2010 with a powered antenna, and a Yaesu FRG 7. Before the advent of the internet, the BBC World Service was invaluable in keeping in touch with UK news, but I did a lot of listening to Radio Moscow, Radio Peking, and Radio Tirana also (around 2015 I met a bunch of Albanians in a Starbucks and they were amazed I could hum the Radio Tirana interval signal).
I’ve got a small, battery-powered, no-name SW receiver in a bedroom drawer in case of emergencies, but I’ve not turned it on in years. Perhaps on Nov. 6 when civil society disintegrates and the power goes out, I’ll have to resurrect it.
An addition to the soundtrack, which has an interesting backstory of its own:
I’ll use smaller words and shorter sentences.
Berlin. Three months later: November 1999, the night before the 10th anniversary of the opening of the border between the BRD and the DDR…also known as “the fall of the Wall”.
This is one of the best posts on Ricochet that I’ve ever read . Great stuff!!!🙂
Totally agree.
Bravo and thank you, Mr. Mcvey.
Your colorful descriptions and your wise observations about your place in that setting made for an intriguing read.
I <ditto> the piece being one of the best posts offered on this forum.
By the late 1990’s, oil man, and mafiosa-styled American business man, Richard Cheney, was rumored to be part of the group that brought about newly minted Moscow billionaires. Meanwhile normal every day people abandoned their children to state run orphanages, as there was no food in their homes available to feed those kids.
Often those abandoned kids still starved, as caregivers who were hired to take care of them dipped into the meager allotments of food available.
I never was able to substantiate those rumors about Cheney.
In 1993, I had a health care client who had spent much of the prior year over in Russia distributing aid to people who had once been normal, rather middle class citizens of the Soviet Union. Once back here in the states, even as he recovered from a quad bypass, he continued organizing a donation drive requesting monies from SF Bay area people. He never relaxed as he felt that every single moment someone else – possibly someone whom he had met – might be dying back over in Russia. (This man was an affluent American business man, not some comrade mourning the death of the communism-based Soviet Union.)
Currently one of the few non-scrubbed accounts of how much American economic titans had to do with the economic realities that the average Russian citizen was being hammered by is this one:
https://worldaffairs.blog/2017/03/01/why-the-us-russia-relationship-went-sour-after-the-1990s/
My comment: in this article, the blame is placed squarely on the big greedy shoulders of The World Bank and the IMF.
From the article itself:
“Under the guidance of U.S., thousands of Russian factories were simply shut down. Even Russia’s oil/gas production fell by half, compared to the USSR period. Russia’s PPP GDP fell by 40% during Yeltsin years and the economic crisis was worse than America’s Great Depression of the 1930s”.
The article is worth reading for anyone interested in the analysis and background of what went on.
There may well be some similarities between what is happening here and now in our country, and what went on there in that time period. Time will tell, I guess.
When I started writing this post, I tried to keep in mind, “Don’t concede too much to the social conservatives. Just what is obviously correct about how things went. If they gloat, they gloat.” As A. Whitney Brown used to say, let’s look at the Big Picture.
Did the West introduce vice to Russia? Of course not; that borders on a straw man argument. Human nature is everywhere. Even in strict Soviet days, there was furtive behavior that was hidden or ignored. Compared to major European cities, prostitution was minimal in the USSR. Though I have to note, with a cynic’s amused eye, that police restrictions mysteriously loosened during massive events with lots of international visitors. It was known at the Moscow film festival that official delegates from what might be call the developing world eagerly looked forward to sampling the delights of the east, in rooms that no doubt had more cameras and microphones than Studio 8H at 30 Rockefeller Center. I am inclined to look at this as more of an intelligence operation than as a puzzling sudden lapse in official morality.
After 1991, prostitution flourished. Teenage girls were quoted as aspiring for the job. This was not sustainable for any society.
Before we get too pious about the traditionalists of the Soviet Union, note that abortion rates in the USSR were very high, much higher than America’s even at their peak. In this century they’ve come down radically. It’s hard to categorize modern Russian sexual morality as being prim or conservative. The hookup culture is not all that different than ours or Britain’s.
You know the traditional line restaurants or bars use when they’re comping someone who’ll bring lots of lucrative business into the place: “Put your wallet away, esteemed sir. Your money’s no good here”, they’ll say with a smile. That’s what they told me in Moscow. But the sad thing, sometimes the creepy thing, was the opposite was true. “My” money–the American dollar–was the only thing that was good there. Nineties Russians referred to the ruble in the most scatological terms. The moment a cab driver knew you were American, he wanted to be paid in dollars. It was the official currency of the Moscow underworld. A new Mercedes? A kilo of cocaine? Your own private harem, rented for the weekend? Anything. Provided you had dollars.
This did not do our image much good.
The article was written by Chris Kanthan, an anti-Western Putin-lover who claims elsewhere on World Affairs to have had articles published on the famously pro-Kremlin and antisemitic website Russia Insider. He is clearly not someone whose opinions on the subject of Russia and its history should be trusted.