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Dancing, dreams in Moscow

Young adults party away, mixing patriotism with borrowed nostalgia and a yearning for cosmopolitan excess.

By VANESSA GEZARI
Published August 23, 2005

	[Times phto: Vanessa Gezari]
	Anya Bulgakova, 22, left, and Marina Smirnova, 21, want to go to Australia and Paris and live in Fiji for a year. Bulgakova likes the idea of a seaside vacation home.

MOSCOW - Marina Smirnova turns her head slightly, listening. Through the talk and clatter of the club, she can hear the song's opening chords, then a few lines in accented English: "Come with me to Pasadena if you want to have some fun."

"Come on!" Marina shouts across the table. She wants to dance. In a few seconds, she is out on the floor, under the mirrored disco ball, shaking her hips and running her hands through her shining red-gold hair.

It is retro night at the Tunnel Cafe, an underground dance club in Moscow. Black-and-white photos of Bruce Springsteen and Drew Barrymore hang on the walls, and the tables hold statuettes of Martin Luther King Jr., Abraham Lincoln and Rudy Giuliani - "America's mayor." Maywood's Pasadena came out in 1981, two years before Marina was born. She and the other dancers at the Tunnel are indulging in a kind of cross-cultural nostalgia: a longing for a past that never existed here, in a nightclub that would have been unimaginable in 1980s Soviet Russia.

At the door, a man greets patrons in English. Inside, in booths along the walls, women in tiny tops sip sweet drinks, and men with neck chains and tattoos sit back coolly, smoking, watching. A DJ spins Bryan Adams and Pink Floyd, and for a while, a four-piece Latin band plays. For about $6.50, you can get a "High Society" (gin, Campari, peach liqueur and orange juice), and for $10, a "Drink and Forget" (rum, tequila, Cointreau, gin, vodka, lemon juice and Coke). Marina is drinking a mojito, and her friend Anya Bulgakova is slowly draining a tall, white pina colada.

"We have a strong wish to get drunk," Marina says, but she is not the kind of girl to order a "Drink and Forget" or anything remotely like it. She is 21, tall and stylish, with an aristocrat's elegance. Her father is a Russian diplomat, and she grew up on embassy compounds in Austria and Hungary between comfortable intervals in Moscow. The strictures of Soviet life didn't seem unduly harsh to her, or to Anya, whose father played for a well-known Russian soccer team in those days, and whose mother was a government economist.

"I had no problems with Soviet times - no standing in lines or having ration cards," Anya says. "My mom worked in a good position and we had lots of nice food and my dad went abroad and brought things back. I looked at the world through rose-colored glasses."

That happy view of the past isn't unusual among 20-somethings here, even if they aren't as lucky as Marina and Anya. The fall of the Soviet Union was like a cork flying off a bottle of champagne: Russians embraced the West with abandon. "It was like, "Oh, you're going to live in America, lucky you!"' Marina says.

Now patriotism is popular again. Soviet movies are back on TV, alongside nightly episodes of Sex and the City. "You should love your country no matter what it looks like or what it does," Marina says. "Because it's your country."

Yet despite their nostalgia, Marina and Anya are unabashedly New Russians. On a recent evening at a chic restaurant in central Moscow, they share their ambitions over sushi. Anya's friend, Oleg Astashevskij, sits nearby sipping a Coke. Marina, who wears a diaphanous turquoise skirt and a string of oversized pearls, wants to be a fashion magazine editor. Anya, a blond, angelic-looking 22-year-old, might like to be a photographer. They want to go to Australia and Paris and live in Fiji for a year, not working, just lying on the beach. Anya thinks a vacation home by the sea would be nice.

"With some French men," Marina says. "Why not?"

Oleg's ambitions are simpler: to make a decent living, to get married and have kids. He's 22, an engineering student working in his father's business. Like Marina and Anya, he lives with his parents. He's a self-described nationalist who buys Russian-made food, drives a Lada and adores one particular Moscow soccer team.

Marina and Anya are hungry. They want Russia and they want the world. They want to be so wealthy that they don't have to think about money. Like their nostalgia, this desire is a strange hybrid, as if they could have Soviet-era sufficiency and still shop at Chanel. As if, in a city as decadent as Moscow, there was ever such a thing as "enough."

"I want to be able to go out without thinking, "Should I buy milk or go to a cafe?"' Marina says. "I'm a girl. I need shoes, dresses, makeup. I want Prada shoes every day. New ones."

Back in the women's room at the Tunnel Cafe, Marina brushes powder over Anya's cheeks and coats her lashes with mascara. Anya's tight white tank top says "Army." Marina's transparent black shirt shows her belly button.

As the night deepens, the band launches into a Spanish version of Gloria Gaynor's hit I Will Survive . In a second, the whole club is on its feet. Marina waves her arms and Anya shimmies her hips. Everyone knows the words.

Vanessa Gezari is on assignment in Russia; Anya Bulgakova is her translator.

[Last modified August 23, 2005, 02:45:30]