The most famous club promoter in moscow is a bald, slightly dumpy man called Gorobiy. He cruises around town in a limo accompanied by bikini-clad models. I remember when Gorobiy started out- at the first rave he made we all dressed up as huge crocodiles to dance behind the stage. He has come a long way since his crocodile days. He organised the most succesful projects in Moscow over the last few years. The clubs were moveable feasts, they would change their locations and designs each season- there was Autumn, Winter, Summer and so on. The idea was brilliant, as even the most succesful promoter in Moscow can't keep a club fashionable for longer than three months. In effect he kept the same team together, but kept on renewing the idea. His clubs tapped right into Moscow's glam psychology. He made sure that all the fashion and entertainment people were there, brought Grace Jones and Naomi Campbell from the west, made sure everyone was talking about it- and then milked the money from the oligarchs and their hangers on who were desperate to be seen with these people and for whom money is no object. The oil boys would pay tens of thousands to make sure they were in the VIP room with Naomi and the photo guy. Leto had a massive dance floor, and lodges up the walls. Dependeing on where the lodge was, you paid different money to be in it. The girls would dance below, looking up hopefully to the darkenss of the lodges where oligarchs and want-to-be oligarchs would look down on them with theatre binoculars and choose their 'of-course-I'm-not-a-whore-but-500-and-I'm-all-yours' girl for the night. Oligarch hunting is not just a sport for Putin, it's also the main activity for any clubbing girl in Moscow.
Leto was witness to hilarious nights. Moscow clubs aren't divided into different scenes. Everyone whose anyone, from whatever world, is in the same club. So oil boys party next to coked up classical conducters and hip writers. I remember a night where hundreds of oligarchs were all jumping up and down chanting a hard techno remix of a classic Russian perestroika rebel anthem: 'we want changes' chanted the Gucci-suited billionaires.
And then Gorobiy asked me and my friend if we wanted to organise a night at Leto. We decided to have it on February 23, a Russian holiday which celebrates both the birthday of Catherine the Great and the Soviet Red Army Day. We wanted to combine all these themes- our plan was to decorate the club like the Winter Palace in St Petersburg, then Red Army soldiers would storm the club on horseback and the evening would be rounded off with a duet by Catherine the Great and Lenin. My friend and business partner Natasha was to be Catherine, and she would host the evening. Gorobiy realised pretty quick that if it worked, our party would upstage all his other nights, and he was determined to fuck up our plans. He started by slashing our budget by half. This meant we had to make all the costumes and decorations ourselves. We boshed amphetamines and stayed up five nights to get everything ready. But we weren't going to make it. So everyone helped out in the end- not just our friends but even my granny was up half the night sowing the soldier's costumes. Catherine's costume we got from a classical Moscow theatre. Natasha had played Catherine there a few years back, but had been thrown out when she started sleeping with the Theatre Manager's boyfriend. So we had to steal in and borrow the costume at night. Things started to go pear shaped on the night. The stables phoned to tell us the horses were sick. So with two hours to go, I grabbed a car and drove round Moscow looking for horses. I found some which are used to give tourists rides round Red Square, I persuaded the stable boys to bring the horses to the club. We stopped all the traffic. Me in a cab directing a dozen horses across central Moscow. We got to the club just as the Bentleys and Porsches were driving up. The guests were awe-struck- they had just arrived in the middle of the Russian Revolution. The actors playing the soldiers made a huge bonfire at the entrance. We had given them a lot of vodka to keep warm. They had drunk too much, and were getting far too much into their roles- 'death to the bourgois' they shouted at the oil boys and their model girlfriends, who had all paid thousands to be here. It could have gone either way, but the guests got into it and started shouting communist slogans too. It turns out billionaires can do irony.
Inside, our Lenin was getting carried away too, and was reading communist speeches through the PA. Catherine tried to shut him up, but he just wouldn't stop. Catherine the Great and Lenin brawled on the stage. Then the soldiers charged onto the dancefloor on horseback. But the guests loved it, and started ripping off their clothes so they could dress up as Red Army soldiers too. Then came the second charge of several dozen female soldiers. They were all strippers, and they jumped off their horses, stripped down to their G-Strings and jumped to dance on the bars.
The night was a great success. Gorobiy was upstaged. Our career was launched.
… the other night I went to Gorobiy's new place, Dhiaghalev. A bad brit-pop band whined in the corner. The guests stood around bored. Gorobiy's magic is wearing thin…

http://www.simonproduction.com/flashindex.html (look for the video "Baltic Tea")