The Exile: Sex, Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia (Paperback)

~ (Author), Matt Taibbi (Author), Edward Limonov (Foreword) "the eXile was the perfect name for our newspaper..." (more)
Key Phrases: Moscow Times, Mark Ames, Anatoly Chubais (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In 1997, two American college-educated slackers began publishing the eXile, a no-holds-barred newspaper, in Moscow. The paper includes irreverent discussions of Russia's sex and drug scene and off-color humor pieces, such as an article poking fun at a U.S. African-American basketball player who was toiling for a Moscow team after he was kicked out of the NBA following a forced sodomy charge in the U.S. Their attitude toward Russia's expatriate community, including themselves, is clear: "Any affluent or even middle-class American who renounces the good life of sushi and 50-channel cable delivery" is "motivated by a highly destructive personality defect." The pranks the newspaper plays are entertaining: convincing an aide to Mikhail Gorbachev that New York Jets football coach Bill Parcells wanted the former Soviet leader to give a series of inspirational pep talks to his team, for example. The eXile also takes on the herd mentality of reporters, managing to convince one of its rival papers that basketball hall-of-famer Wilt Chamberlain was considering a comeback in Russia. (In between its humor and its testosterone, the eXile has reported some important stories, most notably that much aid money from the U.S. went directly into the hands of some top Russian politicians.) Only those with a National Lampoon mentality will enjoy the descriptions of the editors' sexual conquests and their comparisons of Russian and American women. Like much of the paper itself, the book, which recounts the newspaper's history, is tasteless. There's little doubt, however, that both incisively probe contemporary Russian reality--and the expatriate mindset. (Mar.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Full of drugs, sex, and booze, this book initially strikes one as an ode to bad taste. The authors, editors of the English-language Moscow tabloid newspaper The eXile, know this: "we stood for all the wrong things--but at least we weren't bores." True enough. Still, Chapter 3 has good reporting on USAID, the World Bank/IMF, and the Investor Protection Fund and how they waste money and benefit the Russian rich. Similarly, Chapter 8 contains news items (e.g., former Yeltsin adviser Anatoly Chubais's "loans-for-shares" auctions) incorrectly analyzed in the Moscow press, along with the correct analysis by the editors of The eXile. The authors also describe The eXile's first year, 1997, which one editor saw as his "first experience...with taking life seriously." Like most coming-of-age stories, this is bittersweet. Recommended for academic libraries collecting in Russian studies or journalism.
---Bert Beynen, Des Moines Area Community Coll. Lib., IA
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Grove Press; 1st edition (March 27, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802136524
• ISBN-13: 978-0802136527
• Product Dimensions: 10.7 x 8.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (28 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #458,915 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

36 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Life in a Northern Town Book Club selection![....], January 26, 2002

By	K. M. Sherrod "Kate Sherrod" (Cheyenne, WY) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

As the subtitle might indicate, this is not a book for the faint of heart, nor is it a straight-up history, though the portrait it paints of post-Soviet Russia from the early '90s to 1998 is pretty vivid in all its pornographic, bloody, vomitous, sexist glory, making it a pretty damned good history anyway.

The book is divided into eight chapters, four written by Ames and four by Taibbi. Many readers have complained that Ames' sections of the book are Waholianly dull, too petty, personal, splenous, what have you, while praising Taibbi's sections for their directness, adherence to and expressed admiration for basic journalistic principles and (false, false, false) relative modesty. But I will go on the record as admiring both.

Ames... poor Ames. A lot of his stuff will make readers cringe, but for every one of his self-pitying narratives about scabies or his girlfriend or his dependence on speed whenever left to get an issue of the eXile out by himself, there are still gems of hilarious realism like the following:

"What people forget in every article ever written about drugs is one simple, basic fact. PEOPLE TAKE DRUGS BECAUSE THEY'RE FUN. That's it. There's no mystery to the drug thing. Peiople drink water to quench their thirst, they have sex because it feels good; and they do drugs because they're fun...

Even Hunter S. and William Burroughs couldn't stait it that plainly;: they elevated drugs to the mythical level, keeping mum on the single most obvious, dangerous fact. So I'll repeat: PEOPLE DO DRUGS BECAUSE THEY'RE FUN. It's no different from alcohol or roller coasters except that drugs are A LOT BETTER."

Co-author Taibbi observes later in this book, after a brief reflection on his childhood growing up in the newsrooms of Boston and New York, that "If, as a consumer, you want good newspapers, you're not going to get them if the reporters are people who only reluctantly tell you the truth. Ideally, you have a bunch of people who are outcasts, even sociopaths, who get off on telling people the whole truth because that's the point: The other parts of society - government, business, etc. - have to be able to function while trusting the public to know the worst."

In these two quotes we can find the eXile, and this book, in a nutshell. Ames and Taibbi are two people who get off on telling the truth, and make no bones about the fact that they do get off on it. Hence their infamous "Death Porn" section, their version of a police blotter, in which the goriest crimes they could find in Russia that week are recounted with mocking slapstick horror, in true tabloid fashion, complete with cartoons illustrating basic, recurring story elements, i.e. a little Thanksgiving turkey to indicate the victim was "carved up like a turkey", a piece of Swiss cheese to indicate "riddled with bullets," a hamburger bun with a human haand sticking out of it to indicate cannibalism (quite prevalent out in the provinces where people, still waiting lo these many years for the goverment to pay their back wages, have little to do but hack each other to pieces and eat each other) and, my favorite, a squad cap next to a vodka bottle to indicate an "investigation ongoing."

But Death Porn and little drug and scabies excursi notwithstanding, why should you read this book? Because it also tells the story of a newspaper that has been a huge pain [...] to an expatriate community in Moscow that has done little to actually help convert Russia to a free-market economy or to prepare its citizenry to live in such an economy. Those whom Ames and Taibbi have skewered over the years in their paper have been both highly-placed Russian oligarchs who have taken state corruption to unbelievable new levels (I would refer readers especially to Taibbi's in-depth look at Anatoly Chubais and his loans-for-shares program which should have been a global scandal but was deemed "too complicated" to cover in the western press), and American and British consultants who lived the high life spending foreign aid money on luxuries for themselves, investing it with each other's mutual funds, and creating scandals like the Investor Protection Fund, meant to bail out poor Russians whose first forays into private investing led to their being defrauded (to date the IPF has not paid out one rouble to any bilked investors - but it made one mutual fund manager a lot of money for many years!).

But this book is not to be read as an exercise in schadenfreude: most of the worst villains in the eXile's hall of shame are Americans, and it is a theme throughout the book that once Americans are in any way freed from the usual constraints on their behavior, they are the most corrupt, scaly lizard-beasts one can find anywhere. Even an ordinary suburbanite, once she lands in Russia, winds up threatening gangland hits on the authors [...].

And it could happen here, if we ever cease to keep an eye on each other, on our elected officials,and on our press. For, as Taibbi notes with dismay, the age of those outcast sociopaths is gone; today's "reporters," at least in the western press in Moscow, have become "a bunch of corrupt, cheerleading patsies," largely because there is no longer any competition between papers, magazines, networks, what have you, and thus there's no one paying attention to the accuracy, fairness, or relevance of what is coming out of those Moscow bureaus - and thus no reason for western journalists in Moscow to work very hard at all.

The authors leave open the question of whether this might not be true in other parts of the world or back home, but it does make me wonder about what I'm reading about what's going on in Kabul, in Israel, and in Cheyenne.

I know too many reporters to be able, truthfully, to say that nothing like that can happen or has happened here. I've done it myself, run stories without double-checking facts, accepted sources' words as gospel because of my personal fondness or respect for those sources, left out story elements I didn't think my readers would understand... I just never got called on it.

I fervently wish that there could be more papers like the eXile in the world, while knowing that there can't be: it is only Ames and Taibbi's unique position - out of the reach of American libel laws and unread by the officials whose corruption they expose in Russia because they print in English - that makes the eXile possible.

But in a perfect world, there would be an eXile in every city, Death Porn, pornographic club reviews and all. [...].

38 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars a rough gem in muddy flow, July 14, 2000

By	Kirill Pankratov (Acton, MA United States) - See all my reviews

Perhaps one of the reasons (in a sort of cause- and-effect logical warp) that this book should have been written is some excerpts of its reviews on its own back cover: "Brazen, irreverent ... the eXile struggles with the harsh truth of the new century Russia" (CNN), "...welcome to the life on capitalism's new frontier..." (Newsweek). One can't get much blah-blahnder than that - seemingly playing along the book's irreverence and channeling it into safe acceptable notions.

Following any standards is not what authors had in mind. Among their goals - if any - they proclaim "... is protecting Russia from going the way of Prague. From becoming a domesticated, obedient member of the Global Village".

One of the more astute observations in "The Exile" is about Moscow numerous "expats" community, for which the authors readily have inexhaustible amount of scorn and derision. By the early '90-s there wasn't a shortage of Westerners, particularly Americans, plodding Moscow streets. Romantic idealists, careerists wishing to nail a fashionable piece of "emerging markets" on their resumes, fly-by-night sleazebags and crooks, hopeless losers of various sorts trying to make it "on the new frontier" and then running back, tail between the legs, and writing ridiculous "revelations" like "Moscow Madness". One of the most conspicuous crowds were the hordes of Western young MBA consultants and advisers, the likes of what is known as "Andersen androids" and similar telling nicknames. It was a peculiar bunch. They mostly stuffed "...publicly funded businesses and organizations that were guaranteed profits, independent of any competition or accountability of performance, while supposedly furthering the capitalist values of competition and fair play... Looking at their bright, happy faces, you'd never guess that these were the people who'd have the balls to tell millions of Russians that their jobs and benefits needed to be sacrificed for the sake of 'competitiveness'."

The book goes a long way to explain why reports of western correspondents from Russia often feel like stale bottled water taken from the same puddle, chlorinated and carbonated and slapped with a familiar label. In short - because mostly these expat reporters are indeed a closeted inward-looking insipid crowd, less interested in understanding and accepting a new country than in fitting and truncating new reality to familiar forms - and making a career out of it. Ironically, the "official" pedantic expatriate outlet "Moscow Times", hilariously scewered all over this book, came out with not one, but two reviews, both patiently explaining why "The Exile", while so blah-blah irreverent and provocative, is not such a big deal and perhaps should not be taken too seriously.

"The Exile" unashamedly (and exploitively) revels in Moscow bursting sexuality, so missing in US, either from real city streets or from plastic-looking flesh and toothy smiles of innumerable "sexy" TV shows. Of course, the book is far from flawless. Some of author's pranks are sophomoric (but others are excellent), there are factual errors and some of its political insights are laughable. But to nitpick on the book for this is to completely miss its point. More likely the real bummer - they still don't get the word "dinamit`", as when one's party (repeatedly) skips a date - until one gets the point. The word

originates from "dynamics", with at least a hint of a game - chase and rejection, rather than "dynamite" as in "blow up something". What a bunch of dopes.

Despite enjoying this book as no else I've read recently, I won't give it full 5-star clip. That would smack of a kissassination job of the likes the authors so gloriously trashed in their book. But I'll keep reading "eXile" to feed on its visceral, shameless energy and mockery of things safe and proper.

24 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Schmoozing with the Enemy, May 11, 2000

By	Michael Bass (Beverly Hills, California) - See all my reviews

As a former Moscow resident, I was in many a run-in with authors Ames and Taibbi, and not always on friendliest of terms. Indeed, no small amount of the titular libel in "the eXile: Sex, Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia," their tell-all book about the decadent glory days of mid-90s Moscow, is directed toward yours truly and the boys' longstanding feud with myself -- so it seems they're still earning points at my expense! Even if most of what they say about me is exagerated, if not falsehood, I hold no grudges. For in spite of all their showy spleen and venting of frivolous personal vendettas, Ames and Taibbi can't help but write about the Moscow they love with a warmth and glow that is unmatched anywhere. From the get-rich-quick schemes, to the shady deals, to the fast living and fancy cars and, yes, the prostitutes, this book describes it all to a T -- with wit, compassion, and honesty. Of course, if you were there in Moscow in the mid-to-late 1990s you probably don't need to read the book -- you lived the dream. But for all others, this book is as close as you'll probably come to having been there in the flesh. My Moscow gone by... I miss it so.