My Year in eXile

But they weren't. Four years to the day after my triumphant flight out of Ruzyne International, I found myself boarding an Aeroflot nonstop to Moscow to work for another broke English-language paper in post-communist Europe.

I wasn't new to the eXile. I had known Mark Ames, the founding editor, since 1999, when I sent him a slobbering review I'd written of his first book, The eXile: Sex, Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia. For years after that, our paths would criss-cross in strange ways. In 2000, I ran into him late one night on Republika Square in Belgrade, where we had both converged to witness the overthrow of Milosevic. Neither one of us wrote much that week. What we did do was double-date two sexy but chaste Serbian girls, one of whom gave me one of my most prized possessions: a copy of Andric's Bridge on the Drina, with a love-poem dedication written in Serbian. It was my first lesson in Cyrillic.

The next lesson would come seven years later, when I accepted Mark's offer to help him edit a newly "rebranded" eXile. The 24-page biweekly tabloid was still printed on the same newsprint paper it had always been printed on. Its editorial style hadn't changed from the late-90s, when it earned a global cult following for its irrepressible editorial mix of pranks, politics, and pussy. It was still running columns from its longtime mascot, the novelist turned icon of fringe politics-of-the-deed, Edward Limonov. But the paper was newly redesigned, its logo updated, the cover images consciously toned down. The idea behind the rebranding was that Russia's flush advertisers would buy into a paper more superficially reflecting Russia's new cultural climate—less yellow, more sophisticated—without the paper having to make any compromises in content.

Its editorial style hadn't changed from the late-90s, when it earned a global cult following for its irrepressible editorial mix of pranks, politics, and pussy.

In the years before moving to Moscow, I had contributed the occasional piece to the eXile, but wasn't a regular contributor until the winter of 2005, when I started sending "Gandhi Porn" dispatches from South Asia. (The colun was essentially the paper's famous "Death Porn" template pressed over the gruesome violence of modern India.) As a columnist, I gained my first window into the eXile story development process, which was essentially to send out a last-minute email to contributors using a tone somewhere between reminding and pleading. A typical email from then-editor Jake Rudnitsky: "U in this week??"

I was jetlagged on my first eXile production night. The feature that issue was entitled "The Ass-cademy Awards," a long Naked Gun-style script spoofing on American entertainment culture and the war on terror. The cover featured Ellen DeGeneres and Muqtada al-Sadr holding golden ass-shaped awards. Our designer, a very talented and supernaturally patient chainsmoker named Victoria Morozovskaya, busted out the Photoshop job in 20 minutes. But the feature writing lasted until dawn. When it was done there was little time or energy to let the 4,000-word piece breathe and fix the 150 typos. "So this is why the eXile editing touch always seemed so light from the other side," I thought. It's because the eXile was a writer's paper in the truest sense of the word: Editors were so busy writing their own copy there was almost no time for actual editing. True, the best of the paper's contributors, including Ames, Gary Brecher (aka "The War Nerd") and John Dolan, didn't need much editing. But others, editors included, could have used more.

I thought I could change standard eXile operating procedure. Indeed, I had been brought over as part of an explicit effort to professionalize the organization. So I took on the role of Dickensian schoolmaster meets killjoy consultant. "If we were going to turn this thing around," I'd explain in frustrated post-production emails, "then we need to take control of the process. No meeting the Friday before production to assign the lead. No more starting to write the lead eight hours before we hand files to the printer. Are we fucking retards? Amateurs!"

The feature that issue was entitled "The Ass-cademy Awards," a long Naked Gun-style script spoofing on American entertainment culture and the war on terror. The cover featured Ellen DeGeneres and Muqtada al-Sadr holding golden ass-shaped awards.

Ames and Yasha Levine (the web editor, a Leningrad-born repat skate punk from San Francisco) would always listen politely and admit that I was right. They'd solemnly promise to make an effort. Then nothing would change. This went on for six months before I finally gave up. By the time I left Moscow I was submitting my own copy around the time our printer was eating his breakfast porridge on production day. And the truth is, it's not such a bad system. As every writer knows, often the best stuff is written during the Hour of the Wolf, when the brain is tired and lets down its defenses, and the clock is cracking the whip with force. The trade-off is typos. Lots and lots of typos. "But typos are what makes the eXile great," reasoned Yasha. "It wouldn't be the eXile without the typos." I eventually conceded half the point.

There were big plans for the eXile in 2007. My hiring had been made possible by a modest infusion of investor capital, which was also funding a slick new website. There was talk of launching a monthly Russian-language glossy that would be the cash cow to fund the money-losing English-language operation. But behind all of the morning-meeting talk of empire, there were lurking late-night inklings that this stab at profitable reinvention was doomed like the rest. "I've seen too much over the years to get too optimistic, or to panic too much," Ames would say, depending on the news of the day. This was true. When the new website landed its first big advertiser, nobody got too excited. When lawyers from the pop band Maroon Five threatened to sue the paper over an orgasm joke, nobody flinched. When our publisher's business partner welded our office door shut during a murky business dispute, we simply found another office the next week and carried on.

The new spot was a windowless bunker on a side street off Chisty Prudie park. It turned out to be an appropriate space for the Final Days of the eXile, which ceased printing this June after 11 years as Moscow's Only Alternative.

"I've seen too much over the years to get too optimistic, or to panic too much."

I left shortly before the final curtain, as the shadows were closing in. In March, the paper suffered a cash flow crisis, timed to my landlady's sudden decision to raise my rent $500. Other omens included a surprise refusal on the part of our printer to run-off an issue featuring a harmless photo essay entitled "Fucking for Medvedev." After surviving eight years of Putin, there were signs that the paper may not make it through the first months of Medvedev. (We had greeted Russia's new president with a mock New York Post headline two weeks before the election: "IT'S MEDVEDEV: Prime Minister wins with 78%.")

Two months after I left town, the paper received a rare "editorial audit" by officials from the Federal Service for Mass Media, Telecommunications, and the Protection of Cultural Heritage. The visit was the first step in revoking the paper's license, and it scared away the remaining investors, as it was no doubt intended to do. As of this writing, the eXile is planning a re-launch as a web journal based outside of Russia. Whether that counts as a tenth life or a new first is not yet clear.

I was sad to leave Moscow when I did, but I'll never know the extent of the emotions I might have felt watching the city disappear under cloud cover. At my goodbye party at a Georgian restaurant in the shadow of Lubyanka, the eXile team presented me with a bouquet of fine pills. The next morning, while my Miami-bound plane warmed its engines on the tarmac, I went out like a light.

Alexander Zaitchik is a freelancer living in New York City.