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The eXile, founded in 1997, is a controversial biweekly English language newspaper based in Moscow. The eXile features a mix of content including satire, press reviews, opinion and polemics, personal stories, and investigative reporting. The eXile also provides perspectives and satire locally tailored to members of the Moscow expatriate community, and publishes a guide to Moscow restaurants and nightlife. The colorful eight year history of the eXile has included many pranks and stunts, a celebrity libel case, and many detractors. The newspaper is currently in its 225th issue.
The eXile is currently co-edited by Ames and John Dolan, and published by Konstantin Boukarev. Since 1998 most issues have been available online in full at the eXile's website.
Creation of the eXile
In 1997 Mark Ames left the English-language Moscow newspaper Living Here to found the eXile. Ames considered the Moscow Times and the Moscow Tribune his main competition at the time. The concept was first proposed by Manfred Witteman, who also convinced Marina Pshevecharskaya to provide $10000 of start-up capital. Ames was initially joined by former Living Here sales manager Kara Deyerin, and Matt Taibbi (then a Moscow Times contributor) was recruited after the third issue as co-editor, but returned to America in 2002.
Ames later wrote that the word 'exile' was chosen as a title for its contextual triple meaning. First, Ames considered himself an exile from California. Second, he intended to lampoon the way Western expatriates complained of the minor annonyances of Moscow life. Finally, Ames was aware of the painful connotation of exile (изгнание or сослание) in Russian culture, and that he was in a some sense "selling the national tragedy as a joke."
Content
Articles published in the eXile articles have focused both on Moscow and Russia related topics, as well as issues of more general interest. Reviews of Moscow nightlife, concerts, and restaurants, commentary on politics and culture in Russia and America, film and book reviews, and mocking replies to its readers' letters appear in most issues.
The Whois lookup for the eXile's web domain, exile.ru, reads: "An alternative nightlife paper providing in-depth reporting combined with an extensive guide to Moscow's night."
Political Coverage and Commentary
American Politics
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Edward Limonov and the NBP
The eXile has a close association with Eduard Limonov, founder of Russia's National Bolshevik Party. Limonov has published many columns in the eXile, including some about his political activities.
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The Oligarchs
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Putin and the Kremlin
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Russian Financial Crisis
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Ideology
An Audience for Fringe Voices
Co-editor John Dolan expressed the eXile's ideology in his 2004 Budapest lecture "Conceived in Sin: The Online Audience and the Case of the eXile." According to Dolan, subaltern perspectives have been discounted by mainstream discourses as "sinful," irrelevant, disgusting, mysoginistic, or otherwise too objectionable to be heard. In the aforementioned lecture, Dolan gave the example of the eXile's war nerd Gary Brecher as an example of this phenomenon:
- "Brecher's sensibility...has found hundreds of thousands of fans online. Every day devoted followers write to the War Nerd, giving homage to the only online voice they trust. Yet Brecher's sensibility could never be admitted either to mainstream journalism or to academic writing."
Dolan, a former academic and self-labeled subaltern, cited the attraction of a wide audience as a reason for leaving academia, and what he called its "starchy sensibility," to embrace a life of sin in Moscow. Beyond his own personal choice, however, Dolan proclaimed a central role for his concept of sin in the eXile's ideology:
- "By contrast, the eXile was conceived in sin - "and proud of it," as Bart Simpson would say - by refugees from the moral world of the American academic. Its editor, Mark Ames, fled Berkeley to set up his own paper in Moscow, then the sin capital of the world. In 1997, when the eXile began publishing, Moscow was without law - especially libel law."
Dolan was not the first eXile editor, however, to mention the importance of libel in the paper's ideology.
Libel
The eXile has admitted to printing many statements, satirical and otherwise, that would be considered libelous under most legal jurisdictions. In the ideology of the eXile's editors, these statements are justified both by the odiousness of their targets (,) and by the inefficieny of ordinary journalism at raising public awareness. This abandonment of journalistic norms for a specific end is a common point with the gonzo journalism style of certain other eXile content.
Former editor Matt Taibbi has claimed that weak Russian libel laws provided immunity to the eXile (, see also the book “The eXile: Sex, Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia” by Mark Ames, Taibbi, and Edward Limonov) and Mark Ames has also claimed in his article “Democracy Sucks” that “(W)e'd be sued out of existence within a few weeks of appearing in any Western democracy, but here in Russia, in the so-called kleptocracy, the power elite has been too busy stealing and killing to give a fuck about us, allowing us to fly around the capital beneath their radar, like a cruise missile. A real democracy would never let us get off the ground.”
Nonetheless, in May 2002, the eXile was found guilty of committing libel by a Russian court and Mark Ames published a court ordered apology in the eXile "Pavel Bure Kicked our Asses". The damages awarded were 500,000R (then about $16,400 US ).
Hockey star Pavel Bure had filed the suit on behalf of a former girlfriend, saying "a real man should protect his girl’s dignity."
Contributors
eXile contributors have included:
Pranks, Scandals, and International Incidents
Buns McGillicuddy
To mock face control policies at elite clubs in Moscow, the eXile fashioned their intern into a fictitious international nightclubbing celebrity, Buns McGillicuddy. Creating a fake entourage and an absurd music single "Touch my Buns," eXile intern Jeremy Lanou was allowed into the VIP rooms of Moscow's most elite and restrictive clubs.
Kiriyenko Letter Forgery
In July 2004, the eXile claimed responsibility for the "Kiriyenko letter", a forged document purportedly from five US Republican Congressmen which expressed concern over Russia's "democratic transition," and accused former Russian Prime Minister Sergei Kiriyenko of stealing IMF funds. After the eXile took credit for the letter, Ames was condemned by US Representative Henry Bonilla (R-TX), who demanded that he be punished for forgery. Many media outlets also believed that the eXile had sent the letter. In the next issue Mark Ames retracted his confession, saying it had merely been inserted as filler on production day. Ames wrote that he feared for his safety as a result of these events, drawing a parallel between his own case and that of recently murdered Forbes editor Paul Klebnikov. This episode also earned the eXile a "website of the week award," from the Philadelphia weekly City Paper. ()
Detractors, Critics, and Enemies
Prominent critics of the eXile have included:
Michael Bass
the eXile's published an excerpt from the recently published book "You'll Never Make Love in This Town Again." The published excerpt contained a model's account of her experiences with Bass in Paris, in which she alleged that Bass had promised a runway modelling contract, locked in her hotel room, and demanded she prostitute herself for visiting Arabs.
Peter Ekman
Peter Ekman, then a columnist for the Moscow Times, has claimed that the eXile has libeled him. In a letter to Johnson's Russia List he stated that "the eXile is fascist and racist," that "every eXile issue contains unverifiable stories that smear someone's reputation," that the eXile "is associated with the fascist party of Eduard Limonov," and that previously Mark Ames had threatened him with physical violence.
Michael McFaul
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Kim Murphy
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The eXile Book
In 2000, Grove Press published The eXile: Sex, Drugs and Libel in the New Russia, composed of essays by Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi, and a foreward by Edward Limonov. The book described itself (on the back cover) as "the inside story of how the tabloid came to be." The book was printed in the USA by Grove Press and distributed by Publishers Group West.
See also
References
- The eXile Website
- Browseable List of eXile Columns
- Mark Ames, Matt Taibbi, and Edward Limonov . The eXile: Sex, Drugs and Libel in the New Russia. Grove Press, 2000. ISBN 0802136524.