Black Earth: A journey through Russia after the fall. Andrew Meier

the world’s leading TB incubators – and I wanted to talk to Stanley.

      I arrived too late. Stanley was already behind his turntables. So I was put to work, pouring beer behind the bar. All eyes were fixed on the male strippers who paraded on top of the long bar that ringed the center of the club. “We usually get upwards to eight hundred in here on Friday nights,” Stanley screamed as Puff Daddy blasted out from huge speakers. (Nine hundred and twenty girls, he said, were the house record.) Stanley had stacked the speakers on top of one another, building a barricade to protect him from the sweating masses. “It can get a little–” I could not make out the end of his sentence. But I saw what he meant.

      The Duck’s managers, relying on the laws of physics and desire, had mastered the art of maximizing the sexual tension a single room can permit. The girls, many of whom had to survive long train journeys to get here, got in free. They drank – only hard liquor – for free. Men were allowed entrance only after 9:00 P.M. They gathered in a long queue outside the bar, like bulls locked in a chute awaiting a rodeo’s opening bell. The effect naturally was dramatic. The sweating mass of Russian teenaged girls danced harder and harder as the music grew faster and faster, while the older, mostly Western men lusted all the more publicly. As the fever swelled, one, then two, then many more girls took to the bar to dance. Before long they had ripped off their blouses and bras. It was not rare, Stanley would say, for the action to go farther, much farther than that.

      In the years that followed the crisis, Moscow’s nightlife grew serious. As Yeltsin departed and Putin entered, a new stodginess threatened to reign. Many of the landmark stops along the ex-pat map of Moscow closed. The Duck was one of the last, but it, too, shut down. The woman who ran the former House of Culture that housed the club was eighty-two-year-old Olga Lepeshinskaya, a former Bolshoi prima ballerina. Still known as Stalin’s favorite, Lepeshinskaya was not pleased her beloved building was hosting a bacchanalia. She launched a campaign to evict the foreigners. The Canadian owners had survived countless death threats and an attempted kidnapping, but eventually the police raids, even though the owners had paid out some two hundred thousand dollars in bribes, killed the business.

      One of the final blows came when a clutch of Duma deputies, of the Communist and nationalist bent, checked in on ladies’ night. They arrived just as Dylan, the Duck’s six-foot male stripper from Nigeria, wearing little but gold spangles, was “dancing” on the bar, with several young Russian females, to the blasting strains of the Soviet national anthem. Weeks later one of the Duma deputies in a speech on the parliament’s floor, grew red in the face. “If this were Washington,” he screamed, “they would hang that Negro!”

       EIGHT

      IN ALL THE YEARS I lived in Moscow, I never had a car. Each day I would step out onto the curb and raise an arm–“voting” the Russians call it – and almost always in an instant at least one car, sometimes an entire lane, would screech to a stop. For a journalist, few modes of transport could be more rewarding. For Muscovites, and Russians in cities across the country, turning your car into a gypsy cab is what even the most educated and skilled did – and do – to get by. Over the years I enjoyed my share of ambulances, hearses, KGB Volgas, and Kremlin Audis. In the privacy of their cars, I sat beside the dispossessed and displaced: a nuclear engineer who had helped to design the SS-20s once pointed at the United States; a Yakut wrestler who pulled off the road, opened his palm, and tried to hawk a two-carat Siberian diamond; an ex-KGB colonel who had spent his career reading dissidents’ mail and now complained that the state had abandoned him; an Armenian gas smuggler who drove an armored BMW he could no longer afford to fill with gas. Each day brought a new round of coincidental interlocutors. Rarely did they stay silent for long. Like the coachmen in the stories of Gogol or Tolstoy, they steered the talk effortlessly from the weather – the dreadful snow or the dreadful heat – to politics – the ineluctable triumph of the “den of thieves” in the Kremlin – before settling into a long disquisition on the country’s dreadful past and dreadful predicament at present. Each, above all, was certain to recite, as if by rote, his – and occasionally her – own canto of loss.

      One hot and humid summer morning in the final days of Yeltsin, I was sitting with such a stranger, an out-of-work air traffic controller whose dove gray face streamed with sweat. We were stuck in his 1986 Lada on a two-lane street that divides one of Moscow’s largest cemeteries. For some unknown reason, he had turned onto this street even though it was bumper to bumper with cars. For nineteen minutes we had not moved. I watched the minutes tick off on the dashboard clock. The clear plastic cover of the clock was cracked, but the hands continued to move. I had long ago missed the interview I’d set out for when I met the man sitting next to me. He seemed a bright enough fellow, this man who once guided Aeroflot jets through the Soviet skies, but he did not realize that I was a foreigner and he had no understanding of why I could be exasperated.

      He had a point. In Moscow, after all, time spent frozen in place was not without its lessons – even in a traffic jam. Soon the more enterprising drivers usurped the sidewalk. Still, they did not crawl far. Two black BMWs, their windows smoked, moved toward us, negotiating for space with the little blue migalka lights on their roofs: government cars. At the same time, a Mercedes 600, the largest model the Germans ever made, eased right to make good use of the sidewalk. In the Yeltsin years of excess the Mercedes 600 had become the chariot of choice among the Moscow elite. In one year in the 1990s, more shestsoty, as the luxury cars were known in Russian, were sold in the Russian capital than in all Germany. Others of course now tried to follow the Mercedes offroad, but almost immediately one follower, an old Zhiguli two-door, hit an asphalt crater and stalled. The sound of metal on stone hinted at axle damage.

      The tension grew, but everyone stayed silent. A few men swore to themselves. No one honked. After nearly an hour we still had not seen the end of the block. I was staring at the same dozen drivers and their passengers and at the rows of tombstones that ran deep amid the lean trees. At the hour mark the honking started. It was naturally without purpose or direction. A Volga to our right gave out. The poor soul in it was forced to evacuate. There was nowhere to move the car and no one willing to help its driver. Instead, a burly fellow in a Land Cruiser read him the riot act. There is nothing as pleasing, it would seem, to a Russian driver as a stream of blue swearing. The yelling did no good. The Volga was rooted in place.

      We inched forward. As the second hour approached, the driver said he did not mind the wait. When he worked the tower at the airport, he’d often have to stay awake for double shifts. Sometimes there were long stretches through the night when not one plane would land. I noticed that the gas gauge of the Lada was on empty, even to the left of empty. A young girl, perhaps fifteen or sixteen, rollerbladed through the maze of metal. She was blond and wore earphones. Three cars ahead of us, in the lane to our left, sat an army truck, with an open flatbed ringed by wooden slats. It held four or five large metal barrels. At first it was not clear what the barrels contained-until I saw the pool of liquid forming beneath the truck. Then I saw the trickle dripping from one of the barrels, the one lying on its side.

      “Yes,” the former air traffic controller said. It was gas. “And in a second, when some fool drops his cigarette out the window, that truck will go up like an open oil well on fire.” We went on sitting in place. I began to smell the gas. We were in the middle of five lanes of cars. We could not move anywhere. I looked left and right. On all sides drivers and passengers and passersby were smoking. I counted nine lit cigarettes.

      The scene became Felliniesque in its absurdity. Another car broke down. A young woman emerged from it. She had light brown hair and was wearing a white tank top and oversize sunglasses. Two volunteers abandoned their cars to come to her rescue. At the top of the second hour a crane, unattended and parked, appeared up ahead in the right lane. Nearby stood a truck with a green canvas roof On the back of the truck a small yellow sign stenciled in black announced LYUDI (“PEOPLE”). The truck was filled with conscripts. Inside the heat of the canvas, the soldiers were sweating. They did not, as is the usual practice, extend a hand to cadge cigarettes.

      We inched again. Up ahead a new obstacle, a parked trolleybus. Its power lines unstuck,