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

by Mark Ames, Matt Taibbi, Eduard Limonov (Foreword)

The eXile is the controversial biweekly tabloid founded by Americans Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi that Rolling Stone has called "cruel, caustic, and funny" and "a must-read." In the tradition of gonzo journalists like Hunter S. Thompson, Ames and Taibbi cover everything from decadent club scenes to the nation's collapsing political and economic systems - no person or institution is spared from their razor sharp satiric viewpoint. They take you beneath the surface of the Russia that most Western journalists cover, bringing to life the metropolis that Ames describes as "manic, nihilistic, grotesque, horrible; and yet, in its own way, far superior to any city on Earth." Featuring artwork and articles from their groundbreaking newspaper, The eXile is the inside story of how the tabloid came to be and how Ames and Taibbi broke their biggest stories - all the while playing hysterically vicious practical jokes, racking up innumerable death threats, and ingesting a motherlode of speed. It's a darkly funny, up-close profile of the sordid underbelly of the New World Order that you will never forget.

Genres: Russia, Politics, Nonfiction, History, Drugs, Travel, Journalism

256 pages, Paperback

First published March 27, 2000

Reviews

[mark monday · Rating 3 out of 5]

I appreciate the independent journalist Matt Taibbi; he's a reliably intelligent, critical, anti-authoritarian writer who usually leans far-left. Due to his exposé "The Twitter Files" and his perceived bias against Democrats and the current administration, he received a lot of heat from other journalists, social media, and various politicians (including a shameful threat from hack careerist Stacey Plaskett). Some of the attacks against him focused on cherry-picked quotes from this oversized book, a sort of self-exposé detailing misadventures editing the infamous eXile, an antiestablishment and often trashy publication for trashy expats living in trashy 90s Russia...

☭

Chapter 1: Mark Ames

what I didn't realize before reading was that the actual creator of eXile is Mark Ames, who in this first chapter recounts how the magazine came into being. it is in all ways a very subjective and personal recounting. it also took me over a month to get through. very hard to read! Ames is equal parts self-loathing and full of contempt for the entire world around him. he fell in love with 90s Moscow because it is violent, trashy, corrupt, cold, ugly, and bleak. literally those are his reasons. to Ames, the city is a physical manifestation of his own world view, and so it felt like coming to his true home when he moved there. it was beyond disagreeable being inside this fellow's head. his own self-debasement and his debased view of the humans around him made this as enjoyable as looking at the excrement someone left behind in an alley. Notes from Underground, meet your child Mark Ames.

I'm Gen X, the best generation since the Silent Generation. of course, it's inane making generalizations about an entire generation; such lists of traits often have little meaning within the context of individual lives. that said, I'm going to go ahead and make those generalizations. unlike the bombastic and complacent Boomers, the maudlin and self-righteous Millennials, and the sadly ill-equipped-for-life Zoomers, disaffected Gen X (supposedly) centers such underrated virtues as detachment and independence. in the lore of generational generalizations, nothing is less cool to a Gen X-er than getting all emotional about the vagaries of fate; Gen X has no time for crybabies and people who go on about their various traumas. but there is a flip side to that old coin: the potential for callousness. that tendency is front and center in this first chapter. it was just so ugly, from Ames' sneering at the suffering of various dipshits, to his detached acceptance of corruption & addiction & violence, to the way he physically describes both himself and all the people around him in the most degrading ways possible. back in the 90s, this would have been a person I'd sneer back at. here in 2023, it was like torture reading his perspective.

Chapters 2 - 4: Matt Taibbi

what a great antidote to having to deal with Ames' cruel and adolescent commentary! Taibbi's cold shower helped clean some of the grime off of this book.

Chapter 2 is all about Matt Taibbi. his life before, during, after, and during (again) Russia. Including some time spent in Mongolia, his bout with a life-threatening illness, and his own perspective on the creating and building of the eXile. I really appreciated his take on Russia during this time period: his is a cynical and incredibly critical way of looking at this society, but also a realistic one that doesn't reduce everything to a sneering joke. he does come across as a sarcastic, smarter-than-you asshole - a contrast to Ames' self-indulgent, nihilistic monster - but one who is still, in his own way, earnestly trying to understand and connect with a culture going through a complex identity shift.

Chapter 3 is a deep dive into both the world of the eXile and the world that the eXile was trying to mock and expose. mainly, various hypocritical neoliberal individuals and institutions that were making bank in Russia, usually at the expense of Russians. if you've heard of the term "dirtbag left" then you know the style and the political stance that Taibbi and the eXile channel - despite coming about two decades before dirtbag left writers became popular. Taibbi is hard left and it shows. practitioners of neoliberalism get extreme beatings within the eXile's pages, with the specific aim of running certain persons and publications out of town. the violence and corruption of 90s Russian society also gets eXposed, to a lesser degree, including via a queasy column that gloated over the high number of murders happening everywhere in Russia ("Death Porn" is the column's literal title). semi-Marxist muckracking side by side juvenile atrocity-mongering, as well as Taibbi & Ames' absolute willingness to be vicious antagonists, made the eXile a uniquely pungent rag. and, as with the dirtbag leftists that popped up 20 years later, there was no shyness when it comes to being un-pc: alongside Western neolibs and Russian politician-thugs, Jews & women & blacks received equally disrespectful treatment in the pages of the eXile, and to an extent, within this chapter.

Chapter 4 is weirdly inside baseball, all about deeply amoral American expat Michael Bass, an ex-con and wannabe power broker, infamous for a range of repulsive yet somehow boring shenanigans. Bass gets multiple beatings within the eXile (including a front page photo of Bass post-actual beating). this fascinating yet rather pointless chapter made me somehow ever so slightly sympathetic to a sex-trafficker and suck-up to the Russian powers that be. which is kind of a reverse accomplishment? it's that bad of a beating. hard not to feel sorry for the guy, a bit. mean Matt Taibbi!

Chapters 5-7: Mark Ames again

writers who aren't sellouts write about what they are actually interested in. in these three chapters, Ames writes about drugs, sex, and revenge. Ames is not a sellout! despite my loathing of his incredibly obnoxious and juvenile nihilism, the guy can really write. his natural talent (usually) shines, despite the cynicism. these chapters are basically fictive memoirs written in an intense gonzo style that is no doubt influenced by his idols Hunter S. Thompson and Eduard Limonov. and by "fictive" I mean more in the sense of a practiced raconteur's use of exaggeration for effect... these dirty, sickening, soul-deadening stories still have the ring of unvarnished truth to them. kudos?

Chapter 5 is an often fascinating mess. Ames writes that he was on a lot of drugs while writing this very chapter, which is about his love of drugs. namely, various forms of crank and heroin, which he prefers to mainline. the reader learns all about his habits, how to obtain drugs in 90s Moscow, and how he finally got in with the appropriate druggie crowd instead of having to socialize with the bougie normie expats ("Beige-ists") that he understandably despises. the problem with this chapter is that it was so clearly written... on drugs. he literally repeats anecdotes that he's told earlier in the book and sometimes repeats them again in the same chapter. there's a lot that was compelling but there was also a lot of annoying dross. the chapter felt like listening to someone high out of their mind. which he was.

Chapter 6 is the most infamous of the book. "White God Complex" is all about his sexual misadventures. his thoughts on women are, as they say, unreformed. to say the least! malcontent Mark scorns both macho fratbros and slimy eurotrash, but his deeply dehumanizing take on nubile devushkas comes from the same misogynist perspective. it is all about scoring the most chicks, preferably teens, the younger and more virginal the better, without condoms even better, anal the best. this - for any sheltered readers - is typical guy talk. from my college years listening to drunk Greeks horny for freshmen and openly theorizing about what they'd do to them, through my late 20s working in the corporate world and hearing casual comments from walking boners like "that bitch needs to be gangraped" - usually delivered in a blank, quasi-ironic monotone - I'm more than passingly familiar with how moronic, vicious, and sleazy many dudes can sound. yet the chapter surprised even me.

I think the surprise I felt reading this chapter came from actually reading it. rather than hearing it. I'm not sure I've read a personal narrative (despite its no doubt frequent tall tales) that is so wall to wall no holds barred in its graphic storytelling. we read all about the sex life of this swarthy, ape-ish, not-unattractive former-jock turned dirtbag druggie, all the details. in particular the ability of expats like him to use his Western Man status to repeatedly score sex in second-world Russia and Belarus. he's not cocksure, he's just American. thus the "White God Complex": sexually open Slavic women apparently threw themselves at him and others of his ilk, in the hopes of being whisked away from post-Soviet impoverishment. he, in turn, screwed them repeatedly then kicked them to the curb, and sometimes bullied them into having abortions. and then he occasionally wrote about them - demeaningly, of course - within the pages of the eXile. his favorite appeared to be Lena, a drug-dealing whore and ex-convict, who would excite him with tales of her raping other inmates during her frequent times in prison. so sad they couldn't make their touching relationship work out in the end!

Chapter 7 is how Ames dealt with hate mail and various anti-eXile campaigns from liberal Americans out to get our intrepid young (ish) hero. not a bad chapter, but it strangely made me want to read actual political articles by the author, rather than filthy tales of revenge, drug binging, and sex with underage Russians. those articles are apparently what gave eXile some sort of credibility inside and outside of Russia. why weren't there more examples of that writing? one piece that was included - "The Rise and Fall of Moscow's Expat Royalty" was fascinating.

Chapter 8: Matt Taibbi again

I wish I had read this chapter first! this is the Taibbi that I know and love (minus the occasional bits of crude misogyny, which honestly came as a big surprise whenever they appeared). "Hacks" is all about the ridiculous journalists of Western media. specifically, foreign correspondents in Moscow whose reporting sought only to underline the goals of neoliberalism and to portray Russians as simple-minded bumpkins (or Fresh New Voices who espouse Western economic values)... and who often couldn't even speak the language. these reporters rarely had a problem borrowing entire stories from each other - and themselves. Matt Taibbi rails against this cadre of grifters and how their entire world view was (and is) antithetical to true journalism.

"My colleagues weren't just stupid and petty. They were shilling for the rich and sucking up to tyrants, teaming up to squelch dissent, keeping the world, and particularly rich America, isolated from desperate emergencies.

Working for the eXile made me realize that right and wrong really do still exist, that the struggle between good and evil hadn't been phased out of existence. The fundamental things really did apply, as time goes by. All the rights that I'd enjoyed growing up - free speech, the rule of law - they were all tenuous and fragile, constantly in danger of being taken away. And everybody, even people working in professions as seemingly stupid and inane as newspaper writing, was playing a part in determining whether we kept them or lost them."

I wish the book had more chapters like this last one! still, overall this was a pretty interesting albeit frequently grueling experience. part squirm-inducing memoir, part diatribe against complacent and/or corrupt journalism.

[Todd N · Rating 4 out of 5]

i was turned on to the exile by someone who forwarded me links to the whore-r stories. i canceled my meetings that day and read through everyone of them. by the end of the day i was convinced that mark ames was a genius -- part gonzo-era rolling stone part early-spy magazine. i have worked on small press and it is hard thankless work. and what i helped to create is nothing as great as the exile is. this story of the creation and running of the magazine by ex-pats with huge fucking chips on their shoulders (for no reason as far as i can tell) is riveting. it's the story of what you could have done with your life if only you had courage imagination talent and didn't give a fuck.

[Jonfaith · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bought three copies of this at a brick and mortar bookstore back in those heady Clinton days. My head filled with an article in Wired about a digital cultural renaissance in the former soviet union. Our reading group enjoyed this, munching on the history and the pornographic bits. Our one friend who married a Russian girl from the Ukraine, well it likely wasn't as much fun for him. It isn't surprising that this is how despotism occurs, we can read Plutarch and Polybius--but it is the debasement of civic organ which leads to gangsterism.

[Kane · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ever wondered what would happen if you just forgot about all your worries and headed to a strange foreign land? What if that strange foreign land was Russia in the 1990's, a country in the midst of a brutal transition from communism to gangster neo-liberalism? This book often reads like a work of travel-lit, but it benefits from the fact that its two authors are not the usual kind of globetrotting fun-seeker. Most people wouldn't like the idea of going to a country where your enemies can have you murdered for a thousand bucks. Since this is a work in the vein of gonzo journalism (i.e. the writer abandons “neutrality”, and gratuitously injects himself into the story), it's important to know what you're getting into with Ames and Taibbi as your guides to the New Russia.

First off, Mark Ames is an unrepentant asshole, and throughout the book you will find numerous reasons to think he's a disgusting piece of dogshit. And he doesn't care: he knows who he is and he's as comfortable with it as any person can be. He has a gift for making enemies and using his upstart magazine to absolutely destroy them. Nine out of ten times they probably even deserve it. However, for Mark Ames's four chapters (Taibbi gets the other four), he tends to let his magazine take second stage, instead focusing on his sexual conquests, copious drug use, and profound hatred of America (and, by extension, its Russian outpost, the expat community). A lot of this is very ugly. Russia, for Ames, is a land where most people have given up on believing in anything. It is a land of serial killers, whores, and drunks. That Ames feels more at home amongst this crowd than among his native Americans is a little disconcerting, though entirely understandable according to his telling of the story. Ames is at one point described as a “brooding artist”, which I think is fitting.

One profound moment comes to mind. Early on in this saga, Ames, a child of American suburbia at its worst, is woken up by the sound of gunfire, and ends up spending the day wandering Moscow, which has been transformed into a battlefield. In the aftermath of this, he writes about how he suddenly feels alive for the first time. He takes pride in standing taller in the face of gunfire than the Muscovites. He finds his life feeling more real and legitimate after seeing dead bodies lying on the street.

Like Ames, you will probably find this story very entertaining, a welcome break from the mundanities of everyday life. Ames is very self-aware and plays on the fact that the reader is being cruelly entertained by the suffering of millions of Russians. There's a voyeuristic aspect to Ames's writing that should make your engagement with it more interesting than just sitting back and judging him for at times being a misogynist or imperialist or poverty tourist or selfish child or whatever else you might come up with.

Before I get to Matt Taibbi, I should mention that Edward Limonov (an eccentric Russian novelist) has a great bit part in this book. He writes hilarious articles in broken English, and while he never gets a chapter to himself (he does handle the introduction), I'm glad that Ames and Taibbi decided to feature a number of his pieces.

Taibbi's character arc makes for a nice change of pace from Ames. He arrives in Moscow as a young man who in many ways has won the genetic lottery: he's athletic, he's good looking, he's witty, he's well educated, and he comes from a good family. Despite all that, he's restless and spiritually empty. Both Ames and Taibbi come to Russia to escape their boring American lives, but when you read Taibbi's background the scary thing is it doesn't even sound that boring. Still, Taibbi comes to Moscow to roll the dice and I'm glad he did. For Taibbi, this is a journalistic coming of age story that reminded me of Hunter S. Thompson's The Rum Diaries. Taibbi quickly picks up on an ugly truth of the journalistic world: most writers are worthless hacks who do a disservice to their readers.

My favorite chapter in the entire book was the last one, titled “Hacks”, wherein Taibbi skewers virtually every English-speaking reporter in Russia. Because I enjoyed it so much, I though I would try to summarize just how much is going on here, In addition to showing some hilarious exchanges with hacks, this chapter gives us a very illuminating look into how mainstream foreign journalism “works”. And, as Taibbi's post eXile career has illuminated, it's not just our foreign coverage that has come down with an awful case of journalistic anemia.

If we think of journalism in an idealized sense, we think of a bunch of ambitious reporters fighting each other to get the big scoops and give the public important information. What's missing in English-language Russia journalism is every piece of this puzzle. The reporters are all in the same clique and are a bunch of cynical careerists who don't want to rock the boat and want to get by with a bare minimum of effort. They're all working for journalistic titans with different markets and aren't in any way in competition with each other. They're glad to copy each others work and obfuscate the truth in the name of “not confusing the reader” by challenging their preconceptions (which are themselves unfortunate remnants of cold-war propaganda) or asking them to learn about the often confusing ways by which a new kind of corruption has taken hold of Russia.

It shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that journalistic integrity is easily compromised. Unfortunately, this isn't just the story of a few careerist hacks. There's a lot at stake here. America played a large role in Russia's reconstruction as a modern economy, and most Americans were basically lied to about what our presence there was accomplishing. What the journalistic community obscures is a country that is being robbed blind by well-connected gangsters and wealthy foreigners. This is a country where auctions of public assets are rigged to have only one well-connected bidder. This is a country where the few investigate journalists who aren't paid attack dogs for the elite are killed or beaten. And, to bring it back home, this is a country where foreign aid enriches the well-connected and does nothing for the needy poor who have been abandoned by their government. Instead of reporting any of these stories though, the reporters opted to phone in a bunch of puff pieces about the inevitable capitalistic march of progress. The mythology they perpetuated, which came crumbling down in the wake of a massive financial crisis, was that Russia was being run by a group of reformer technocrats who were working day and night to bring just laws, free elections and free-trade to a people who were hungry to be just like America. Ever heard that one before?

I want to emphasize that this is just a summary: Taibbi is acutely aware of all the details, and as he says, the devil is in the details. Taibbi names names and he breaks stories. He fights the power, and, despite working for a magazine that runs his pieces next to a perverted Chinese accountant on a quest to get laid, he actually has a few victories. He beats them at their own game. You may well walk away with the sense that Taibbi is a self-aggrandizing asshole, but I found his perspective to be very refreshing.

Unlike the last three books I've read, this one isn't perfect. The editing was flawed at times and the layout of the book at times made it difficult to read. This books features numerous articles and comics from the eXile, which at times have such a small font or are printed so dully that they are practically unreadable. Also, I would often read through a chapter, get to a break in the action, then read one of the articles and find that Ames or Taibbi had basically used the same language twice, which makes me wonder if they read the book as a whole before it went to print. I suspect that as they were writing the book they fell into familiar writing patterns, as opposed to consciously repeating themselves. Beyond just the relationship between the articles and the text, I found Ames's writing to get repetitive at times.

Overall though, I found this tale of scrappy journalists vs. the world to be a very good read.

[Adam McPhee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Been following the eXile and related projects since maybe 2002/2003/2004, waaay back when I was just a kid in (junior?) high school.

Don't want to get too into it here except to say that yes, this is the book that's quoted from selectively to make Ames and Taibbi look as if they were self-reporting sex criminals. Anyone who's familiar with their work (and not arguing in bad faith) will find this hard to believe, and understand that the sections of the book where they're writing about themselves and their paper are in the tradition of auto-fiction. It's part of the tradition to exaggerate your worst impulses and invent horrible details about yourself. Think about how, years later, Houellebecq wrote a novel in which he appears as a character, slovenly and disgusting ("I have completely relapsed into charcuterie"), only to end up a murder victim.

More recently, Canadian rapper-turned-CBC host Rich Terfry (aka Buck 65) had the same thing happen to him over his book Wicked and Weird. Some credulous people actually thought the book was non-fiction, and that he spent two months in a Russian prison cell. But of course, when the book actually hit the shelves, people read it and realized he was telling tall tales. Likewise, no one actually thinks Houellebecq was murdered (although I wouldn't be surprised if he actually moved his bed out into his living room when he realized he was a shut-in and would never again receive guests in his home in Ireland). But the eXile writers never gave their readership those easy Colbert winks, and I can almost understand how people would fall for it, especially when they're being fed only the worst snippets. (I myself was a little put off by the eXile when I first started reading it). But come on–if you apply even the most limited of critical thinking skills, it's pretty apparent that this is fiction. And don't get started on that ISBN small print – that's for bookstores and libraries.

It really is annoying. The Clintonites and the Cernoviches of the world aren't going to argue about this in good faith, fine. But when DSA people and Leftists start accepting these arguments and calling for the authors to be blacklisted, that sickens me.

I don't know, I didn't mean to write this much about it. Give the eXile writers a chance, is all I'm saying.

[Yuriy Blokhin · Rating 5 out of 5]

If Hunter S. Thompson was in his 20s when Perestroika happened and left for Moscow in the early 90s to do his trademark gonzo journalism and enjoy all the vices that Moscow has to offer, then... he would have written this book. However, it was Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi who ended up doing and by doing so they've earned one eternally loyal fan. This is literary punk rock at its best: insightful & crass, honest & fearless, humorous & loud. I'm not sure how these two weren't either shot or died in a drunken / high accident, but they stayed alive to tell the bizarre and enigmatic story of life, partying, and politics in the New Russia of the 1990's.

[Jonathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I guess my first caveat with this review is that the denunciations of these guys for their sexism have some truth. In passages where that quality isn't present, they give vivid accounts of their adventures and hijinks in Russia. Parts of this book had a page-turner quality, while other parts made me want to cringe. Overall, thought, it's a compelling read.

[Saurabh · Rating 4 out of 5]

The clearest thing about this book is that Taibbi is so much better at journalism and writing than Ames. I really didnt like the Ames parts. But this book is one of its kind. When after reading a book you wish there were more like it, you cant really give it any less than 4 stars.

[John Christy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jeff's sad middlebrow review is reason enough to give this 5 stars. Look upon the exile's enemies and rejoice!

[Aaron Arnold · Rating 5 out of 5]

What would you write if you had complete editorial freedom in a foreign country plus a nearly unlimited amount of drugs and women willing to sleep with you? Each of these guys landed a book on my 2010 best-of list (Ames' Going Postal and Taibbi's The Great Derangement) because they're both great journalists who are also great writers, and this is their wildly entertaining retrospective of the muckraking magazine they ran for a decade in the middle of Russia's momentous transition away from Soviet communism towards almost unbelievably corrupt gangsterism. The fall of communism was life-changing for everyone who went though it; the collapse of order meant that Moscow went from stern showcase capital to near-anarchy extremely quickly, with plenty of fun to be had for the savvy American able to get in on the action. Ames' portions of the book tend to be more autobiographical, focusing on his own psychological motives for abandoning America to live in exile among the drug addicts and whores he found there, while Taibbi tends to focus on the unique aspects of reporting as an English language paper in a Russian-speaking country where the authorities were either completely indifferent or savagely hostile. It's hard not to be envious of their luck at being in such a unique time and place, and after reading this book, "wild and crazy guys" like Tucker Max will look like bland straight-edge douchebags to you. This is a book that should probably revolt you a little bit, but in a good way.

[Public Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

I can't believe I let this book sit on my shelf unread for almost 5 years. I guess I flipped through the pages and it looked like it was mostly articles from the Exile - which I wasn't too jazzed about reading. But I finally gave it a serious look and I'm glad I did.

What an amazing, hilarious, raucous ride. I must say that I absolutely love Matt Taibbi. He is the reason I bought this book and also the reason I currently subscribe to Rolling Stone. I want to support his career in any way I can. Mark Ames I was not familiar with, but I appreciate his balls out prose and brutal self criticism.

This account of the birth and glory years of the eXile, an English language newspaper in Moscow in the late 1990s is funny and totally bonkers. I loved it.

[Josh Bunting · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mark Ames's chapters are a little self-aggrandizing and there are lots of details he includes I could've done without. When he's not too hard to make the reader like or respect or fear him, he and Taibbi give an interesting perspective on what was happening on the ground in Moscow during and after the fall of the Soviet Union.

[Amar Pai · Rating 5 out of 5]

see also: exile.ru

[Josephus FromPlacitas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sick and hilarious. Long live the eXile!

[Constantin Gavrilescu · Rating 5 out of 5]

The crazy 90's in Russia were not much different from the crazy 90's in Romania, just a bit more intense. It's a good and fun read

[Allison · Rating 4 out of 5]

Repugnant, depraved, nasty and genius. All the filthy parables of expat exploits ring true to someone who’s seen that type of business play out firsthand. And the really stomach-turning stuff in this book is in the not-sexy parts about corruption, greed and America’s hand in the creation of Russia’s oligarch class. Its body count (in the actual sense) is by far more offensive than either Ames’ or Taibbi’s body count (in the notches-on-bedpost sense).

[Ronnie Gardocki · Rating 5 out of 5]

During my dirtbag college years I used to call it "The Bible". My affection for this has not waned in the intervening. Ames and Taibbi, but especially Ames, was the kind of writer I wanted to be and still remains one of my biggest influences. Despite this book being a millstone on their reputations I'm glad it exists and my dogeared copy remains one of my prized possessions, literature-wise.

[Tadek · Rating 2 out of 5]

wish my dad was sonny bono