Moscow 99: 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 nearby streets, glum-but-decent, 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. Predictability for opportunity. 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.

I swore up and down that we’d never go through all that again. And yet in the end, we did, willingly, for several years.

Not many conservative cultural groups of that era could say “Jack Nicholson did the press conference but backed out of the midnight party at the last minute. Roger Corman showed up”.

https://ricochet.com/637147/morozhenoe-the-real-cold-war/

https://ricochet.com/1201263/the-don-and-the-donbass/

When The Godfather opened, fifty years ago this month, one thing that really made it hit home to so many Americans, especially “white ethnics” like me, and probably many of you, was its sense of rough urban justice; when crime is out of control and the police can’t or won’t protect you, there’s a strongman who’ll stand up for you and avenge the humiliations and injustices you’ve suffered, even if there’s always a price to be paid.

That was New York City in the Seventies; painfully aware of how far it had fallen, aware and bitter about how much of it had been the city’s own fault, defensive and angry about having it rubbed in our faces by outsiders.

And that’s also the story of Russia in the Nineties. To many of the working class Russians who experienced them, Putin is Don Corleone; sure, they’ll say, his methods are undeniably rough, but it’s a tough neighborhood and there are a lot of scores to settle.

https://ricochet.com/1220418/russias-pride-and-sadness-computing-in-the-ussr/