“Every woman was hot,” says Alexander Zaitchik, an Exile editor. “The policewomen were hot. The tram drivers were hot.”
“Russians are always anarchic, but at that time they wanted to try everything—new drugs, new positions,” the Wall Street Journal Moscow correspondent Alan Cullison says. “The esteem of Americans was enormous. The men wanted to drink with you, the women wanted to sleep with you.”
But if libertinism was regnant, propping it up were graft, poverty, and murder. Many Russians were living in worse squalor than they had under the Soviet Union. Horrific public violence was routine, and Westerners were not immune, a fact driven home early in the party when an Oklahoma-born bon vivant hotelier, Paul Tatum, was perforated with Kalashnikov rounds in a metro station one evening in 1996. Nor did reporters enjoy special protection. Carol Williams investigated the Tatum murder for the Los Angeles Times and after concluding it had likely been a contract killing, she got a call from someone in the government who told her it was “unhealthy to pursue certain avenues of inquiry,” Williams says. The trickle-down venality began with Yeltsin’s cadre of billionaires and bumptious economists and descended to the streets and storefronts of Moscow, controlled as they were by overlapping criminal syndicates and factions of the city police and the F.S.B. (the K.G.B.’s successor), which provided the requisite krisha, or roof—protection by way of extortion, in other words.
“When I opened a business in Moscow, the question wasn’t if we’d be successful, but whether we’d be able to keep it,” says one American financier and entrepreneur who works for a large Wall Street firm in Moscow. “Would I be in danger, get kidnapped? Would I get extorted by a criminal racket, or by the K.G.B.?” He adds, “All of us were scavengers on the carcass of the Soviet Union.” ...
Read the rest of the "web exclusive" backgrounder at Vanity Fair.
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