organized kind, and lots of it. The U.S. State Department estimates that there are 50,000 murders a year in Russia. More than half go unsolved. Sergei Pavlenko told me that four businessmen a day are killed in Moscow. The key word is businessmen. Russia does not yet have an effective system of civil law. The only way to enforce a contract is, as it were, with a contract—and plenty of enforcers. What would be litigiousness in New York is a hail of bullets in Moscow. Instead of a society infested with lawyers, they have a society infested with hit men. Which is worse, of course, is a matter of opinion. Moscow’s English language weekly, Living Here, publishes a club and bar guide which had this to say about a typical vorovskoi mir, or “thieves’ world” hangout: Marika Entrance: $20 for men, free for women Why: Come here to gawk at Moscow’s coked-up femme-fatale elite, none of whom will notice your existence; end your fun-filled evening by getting your date stolen and your life threatened by slobbering-drunk Mafiosi and their unshaven thugs. Why Not: You still have dignity; you want to live. The reliance on muscle means that criminals have a cut of everything mercantile or financial happening in Russia. This, combined with endless political wire-pulling and universal bureaucratic jobbery and graft, leads to an atmosphere that is . . . still a lot more fun than a KGB torture cell. On my first evening in post-communist Moscow, after the lavish dinner, I ambled through the busy midnight streets to the Hungry Duck. An enormous circular bar occupied what looked like a trading pit from the Chicago Commodity Exchange. But there was no futures trading—or much future—in the old USSR. God knows the room’s Soviet-era purpose, but the current purpose was clear. A thousand twentysomethings— Americans, Russians, Germans, British, French, Australians, Japanese; the foot-soldier employees of the corporations that have invaded Moscow, the Anne Kleined and Brooks Brothered sentinels who man the mouse pads and keyboards of capitalism’s front lines—were having a Thursday night screen saver. Happy youth was pressed breast to pec in one raving mass while fifty people danced on the bar top and giggling waitresses passed out free vodka shots from some booze company
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