1997 – the closing of the Ptuch club

Igor Shulinsky:
«By 1997 everything had changed. The decline was inevitable: after any revolution and after any upswing, a regression is bound to follow. It coincided with the peak of our personal problems. Our circle of friends fell apart, Golubev left for America, Asad went into medicine. The club slowly began to fade. There were objective reasons for this too: the movement as such had petered out, and by 1997 it was practically all over. It was impossible to keep going for so long on sheer enthusiasm alone. This general «exhale» happened not only in Moscow but across Europe as well. What happened in England at the end of the 90s, for instance? The wave subsided, and a third of the movement's participants happily moved on to something else: that same DJ Django now works as a designer. A third of the people simply vanished — there are always heroes, the Viktor Tsois, who die in car crashes. And the remaining third turned it all into a profitable business, became the Paul Oakenfolds.
We, on the other hand, failed to make a business out of it. When the enthusiasm died down, commerce should have stepped in. The heroes of the movement, in my view, should have taken matters into their own hands and turned it all into a conveyor belt. But that didn't happen. Recording was left to the pirates, and there was absolutely no point in releasing records legally. As a result, dance music made it neither onto radio nor television, and everything stalled. Yes, young people still danced, but they're not the kind of people you can make a lot of money off».
And that's when the corporate sponsors entered the game. Since a Russian DJ couldn't make a living off records, his only source of income turned out to be gigs and tours. And the organisers of such tours were the cigarette companies, who could afford to sink hundreds of thousands of dollars into shows and clubs. In the end the whole DJ brotherhood, once considered independent and counter-cultural, started serving corporate sponsors. The time of the big corporations' triumph had come, and the sweet-natured era of small independent clubs, like «Ptuch» itself, was gone for good».