Slog News & Arts

Line Out

Music & Nightlife

« Is It Too Late... | On Art Criticism Criticism »

Wednesday, June 11, 2008

The Death of The eXile

posted by on June 11 at 11:58 AM

The eXile—the much hated/beloved Moscow biweekly that launched the career of Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi and continued to publish the works of Russian dissident author Eduard Limonov well after it had become dangerous to do so—has reached its fatal end with the censorship authorities in the new Medvedev government.

From the English language daily The Moscow Times:

Mark Ames, editor and founder of The eXile, was scheduled to meet Thursday with inspectors from the Federal Service for Mass Media, Telecommunications and the Protection of Cultural Heritage, he said by telephone Wednesday…

Ames said he did not know which articles were of interest to the inspectors, but he suggested that one possibility were columns by Eduard Limonov, founder of the banned National Bolshevik Party and a vehement Kremlin foe.

He conceded that many other eXile editions could have riled the authorities.

The eXile, which publishes Gonzo-style journalism on topics such as drugs, prostitution and Moscow nightlife side-by-side with political analysis, has often pushed the limits of decency — not to mention libel law.

The speculation was later confirmed by Mark Ames himself in Radar—wherein he notes the special joys of running a collapsed business venture co-owned by a member of the notoriously unkind world of Russian organized crime.

It’s not to say that The eXile was always an insightful or even a particularly well written paper; when Taibbi departed for life back in America, Ames often covered for a shortage of ideas with the laundry list of things he’d inject into himself to better enjoy listening to Husker Du, or his successful transactions with Moscow’s prostitutes. But quality dips aside, The eXile was an important document chronicling the descent of Russia from Yeltsin’s wild, lawless kleptocracy to Putin’s new police state. They called ‘bullshit!’ loudly and earnestly on America’s aimless privatization plan for the post-Soviet Russian state, and when the going got rough, they settled a dispute with New York Times Moscow bureau chief Michael Wines by hitting him in the face with a horse semen pie.

They were occasionally demeaning and stupid, but they were never dull—and that has to count for something in the grand scheme of media. The paper is holding a fundraiser to help get their website infrastructure hosted somewhere off of Russian soil, and probably to keep Ames from being murdered by his business partners.

RSS icon Comments

1

Their "columnist" the War Nerd wrote some of the best and truly hilarious historical/political/military workI have ever read.

Posted by StrangerDanger | June 11, 2008 12:23 PM
2

Thanks so much for covering this. I've been a big fan of the eXile for a while and am glad to see their likely demise get some western press. I do partially dispute the wording that it is the fault of Kremlin censorship, though, because from what I'd heard it wasn't actual censorship that did the eXile in but rather that their financial backers pulled out when the Kremlin began its investigation. They're holding a fundraiser right now to try to help salvage things and get a new server up elsewhere, here's the link if anybody wants to join me in throwing a a few bucks at one of the last bastions of opposition journalism in Russia: http://www.exile.ru/articles/detail.php?ARTICLE_ID=19253&IBLOCK_ID=35

Posted by TMW | June 12, 2008 5:25 PM
3

The eXile came into existence after I left Moscow back in 1992, and I came across it online Googling the names of former co-workers from my time in the armpit that is Moscow. I found that Matt Taibbi and his colleagues had basically waged a strange war against one of my old co-workers who was by then a kinda-journalist at another English-language publication in town. I read, fascinated, by the viciousness with which they tore her down in the pages of The eXile. It wasn't that I had any horse in that race, but it was brutal to read. A couple of years ago, I wrote to Taibbi to ask just what it was that my former co-worker had done to merit such vitriol, and he couldn't really remember. Go figure.

Posted by Merujo | June 14, 2008 9:34 AM

Comments Closed

Comments are closed on this post.