Where swinging Russians let their hair down

Press, 15 January 1986, Page 18

Where swinging Russians let their hair down

MARTIN WALKER

of the London “Guard-

ian” has a taste of the high life in Moscow.

They call it the best night club west of Tokyo, and for about 5000 miles there is not a great deal of competition. Way out in Moscow’s northern suburbs, far from the tourist zones, stands the plush, new Soyuz (Union) Hotel, with its huge restaurant, and daring, dazzling floor show that would not look out of place at the Crazy Horse in Paris.

But the Soyuz is the Russians’ own night spot. It is not an Intourist hotel, geared to milking Western tourists of their precious hard currency. Westerners who live in Moscow get to hear of the place only from Russian friends who are in the know, because the Soyuz is where the demi-monde of the Moscow elite goes for its kicks. The audience on the night I tasted Moscow’s high life included

former Bolshoi dancers who have “married well,” as they say here, the sons and daughters of top Kremlin officials, and Moscow’s new rich. In one corner, there was the composer of glutinous popular ballads, and in another, a sleek Armenian restaurant boss, his solid gold Cartier watch gleaming beneath the silk cuff, and his wife decked out in diamonds so big you could see her wrists strain.

When complimented on her dress, she said airily: “It’s from Paris, they do them so well there.” The tables groaned under the most lavish array of caviar, smoked salmon and sturgeon, roast beef and confections of ham in aspic. The new campaign against alcohol was evidently having little effect; the bottles of Soviet champagne, vodka, and Armenian cog-

nac were emptying fast. At 8.30 p.m. precisely, the floor show began, a rather good rock band playing soft chords around a giant golden samovar, and the first dancers paraded slowly into the room. They were long, leggy blondes, dressed in traditional Russian head-dresses and colourful robes that stretched down, barely, to their rumps. They were followed by the Armenian dancers, black-eyed beauties in the kind of diaphonous, flowing skirts and skimpy bras that bring back memories of steamy belly dancers. Their partners wore the tightest of black tights, danced bare-chested and won sighs of approval from the women in the audience. The dance was superbly done, suggestive and graceful at the same time.

Then came the medieval tumblers, complete with dancing bear, romantic love songs, rumbustious choruses, a magic cat, and a magnificent blonde with hair down to her knees in a skin-tight golden cat suit that served to emphasise her endowments. There were chorus dancers dressed in vast butterfly wings that loomed over low cut constumes of pearls and paste jewels and there were exotic head-dresses.

Interweaved with all this was a thin, but ideologically correct plot, about a buffoon of a king who was

trying to steal the innocent bride of a fine Russian boy, until the magic cat and Moscow’s busty version of Tina Turner found a way to make all end happily. With a considerable stretch of the imagination, you could have seen the cat as an allegory for the Communist Party, saving young marital innocence from a lecherous monarchy. Or at least, you could until the finale when the cat leaped out from the giant golden samovar.

“You should have seen it 18 months ago,” one of my friends

said when the applause died down. “Before all this new puritanism came in. The costumes could have come from Paris. There were Gstrings, the dances were more lascivious. We used to get off-duty policemen in the audience.” The customers began to dance to a melody of jazzed up Soviet tunes, and remarkably good versions of Michael Jackson, U-2 and Bruce Springsteen. Like any louche nightclub anywhere on earth, the dance floor was filled with middleaged men dancing with pretty girls, and stunningly dressed plain women dancing with handsome young men. A Moscow millionaire told me about the Soyuz. He made his money from Magnetizdat, which is like samizdat publishing with cassette tapes instead of manuscripts.

He obtained new Western records, and had a small studio with banks of cassette machines that turned out hundreds of copies of the latest Western music, and a small printing machine to produce uncannily genuine-looking labels. I looked out for him among the tables, but he was not in the cheery wedding group, nor at the table with the Libyan diplomats with the pretty Russian girls, not even at the handful of tables where stolid Russian foursomes were having the time of their lives, paying about the equivalent of 350 a head for the best restaurant fare and night club entertainment that Moscow has to offer.

What they had to pay, or what strings they had to pull to get a table, would be something else again.