Barbarians at the Gate
By JOSHUA YAFFA, Published: September 25, 2009

They walked up to the club with the confidence of young Russians with money, all clicking heels and the sated, greedy smiles of cats licking cream. It was someone’s birthday. Earlier in the week, they had sent over a cash deposit of 7,000 euros (about $10,000) to reserve a table at Soho Rooms, which, at the moment, was the most glamorous and expensive place to spend a night out in Moscow.

Slava Kaz, however, was not impressed. They were young. The girls weren’t all that pretty. And look at him, look at his shoes. It was a quick calculation. They did not pass face control.

It was a damp, gray evening in early August, the time of year when everyone in Moscow heads out of town, whether to tend garden plots or to sunbathe in the south of France, depending on the depth of their bank account. In two days, the promoters at Soho Rooms would be hosting a private party on the Italian island of Sardinia. But this night, the few people with means or style still left in the city were trying to make their way past Kaz and into the club.

Outside, the birthday party group was still waiting, trying to negotiate. Kaz was not budging: I’m sorry, there needs to be a pretty picture inside, you understand. A moment later, a man in a black suit emerged onto the street from behind the club’s oversize wooden doors. He handed over an envelope stuffed with their deposit. They would have to celebrate elsewhere.

Such are the often brutal vagaries of Moscow face control, a culture of quick-draw aesthetics that is both humiliating and exhilarating, depending on which end of Kaz’s gaze you fall. Money, looks and attitude are all weighed and ranked in a few seconds, along with a more ephemeral sense of whether you belong in the club that night. In Moscow, a strict face control policy is respected as a necessary and proper part of going out. At Soho Rooms, one woman came back to the club’s entrance three times in one night, each time in a slightly different outfit, each time turned away by Kaz.

Everyone in Moscow uses the English term “face control,” though the phrase is often transliterated in print as “feis kontrol.” Most every nightclub in Moscow and an increasing number in other cities around the country employ a face control director — the more enigmatic and impenetrable, the better.

The most famous is Pavel Pichugin, or, as he is more popularly known, Pasha Face Control. He is 28, but his round, boyish face and soft, deep-set eyes make him look younger. For the last nine years, Pasha has worked the door at a changing roster of Moscow nightclubs, most recently at an outpost of Pacha, a global franchise with roots in Ibiza. He has become a celebrity in his own right, posing for photos with fans when they spot him outside the club, and is the subject of a Russian pop song with a chorus that features a throaty female voice purring, “Pasha, let me into the club” and “Pasha, do you want some sex?”

Not that Pasha doesn’t take his role seriously. As he sees it, his job, or that of any face control expert, is necessary because Russia is filled with “people who have just made their first million and think they deserve to be in the club, that they should get everything they want.” This, of course, is a problem. “But in fact they’re just a bunch of miners and day laborers,” Pasha said. “They don’t have respect or culture.”

With the onset of Russia’s capitalist surge, which reached its peak in the summer of 2008 with oil at around $140 a barrel, he began to see them everywhere, these newly gilded novye russkie — at Moscow’s most expensive clubs, at ski resorts in the Alps like Courchevel and, during the summer, along the beach towns of the French Riviera. “With every year there’s more and more of them,” Pasha said.

The global recession has hit Russia especially hard, with the buckets of cash from the oil and metals trade flowing in at a much slower rate than they once did. Still, Moscow’s clubs are full of people who managed to stash enough away over the last few years, or fatalists who are simply intent on burning the disposable income they have left. These days, Pasha makes a lot of his money from local clubs in Russia’s far-flung regions, who pay him to stand at the entrance and work face control for opening night. “I’m like a brand,” he said.

Another of Moscow’s more recognizable face control masters, 26-year-old Pavel Kuryanov, who goes by the nickname Pashu, spent the last two summers in St.-Tropez and Cannes, where he brought Russian-style face control to the nightclubs that line the beach. “At first they were surprised,” he said of the bewildered European guests he rejected at the door for lacking style. “They were like, ‘Who is this Russian guy?’ ”

In Moscow, Pashu is in charge of face control at Black Star, a hip-hop club backed by Timati, a Russian rapper and teen icon. On the street outside the club, there is a special face control system for cars; a thick man in a black vest lets only the most expensive, late-model Ferraris and Bentleys up to the roof, where Pashu guards the entrance to the club itself.

Pashu looks for watches and shoes, a lot of color, things that he said made the club feel like one big celebration. “You know,” he said, “white jeans and moccasins, something designer, like Dolce & Gabbana or Galliano, maybe an expensive suit, Hugo Boss, Pal Zileri, anything bright pink, yellow.”

What impresses the face control gods varies from one club to the next. Pashu wants money and flash, while others rely on personal connections. “If I don’t know your face, it’s impossible,” said Pavel Beryozko, the tall, broad-shouldered master of face control at Rai, a cavernous, overdesigned nightclub that features a giant snake’s mouth hanging off the wall and a transparent orb that hovers above the dance floor with a bikini-clad dancer inside.

Why, then, do the masses hang around Bolotnaya Embankment on Friday and Saturday nights? “Some people like to stand around,” Beryozko said with a cold shrug. “Maybe they have nothing better to do.”

Neither fame nor wealth is any guarantee.

A few years ago, the supermodel Natalia Vodianova showed up with her husband, Justin Portman, the English-born aristocrat, at the aptly named Billionaire club, where Pasha was working face control at the time. Both, Pasha Face Control said, had had quite a bit to drink. “They were behaving terribly, completely uncultured,” he remembered. He didn’t let them in.

The rejection, when it comes (which is more often than not), is frequently wrapped in an almost paternal sense of charity: it’s for your own benefit; you wouldn’t like it in here anyway. “We get a lot of people who are just walking past and decide to stop in,” said Sergei Pleshakov, the art director of Denis Simachev Shop & Bar, run by the designer of the same name, perhaps the only Russian fashion figure to achieve real international recognition. The club, on a busy pedestrian street, has black lacquer walls and leopard-skin rugs. “But this place isn’t for them,” Pleshakov said. “It wouldn’t be good for them.”

It is a tough job, most practitioners of face control agree, both on the body and the spirit. There are long nights standing around in Russia’s midwinter frost, not to mention regular threats from the groups of moneyed toughs who frequent Moscow’s nightclubs.

A few years back, someone let off a few gunshots in the direction of the face control guy in front of the Moscow club Tseppelin. The guys who work face control at the clubs in Kazan, a Russian regional capital, wear black ski masks to keep their identities secret. Pasha himself was beaten up pretty badly a couple of years back by a group of disgruntled clubgoers who were waiting for him outside his apartment.

Pasha can’t imagine doing this forever. He has been studying at a dental school. Later this year, he’ll finish his dissertation, on the feasibility of dental implants in patients with diabetes. He has been talking about opening his own dental clinic. “Maybe,” he said, “I will call it Pasha’s Face Control.”

After a while, all these snap judgments of a person can weigh on the soul. “Sometimes,” Pashu said, “there’s a guy who is frozen from standing out in the cold. He seems like a good guy, you want to let him in, but you know you can’t. He looks bad. There’s no way he can pass face control. So, yes, you feel sorry for him.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/27/style/tmagazine/27moscoww.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&