June-September 1993 - the First Hermitage

DJ Volodya:
"My personal club history began in June 1993. It was right around then that Artyom and I were returning from Belgium with a haul of six cassettes onto which we'd dubbed the Solid Sound compilations. Back then, in Belgium, we got hooked on this music. One day in Belgium I went into a record shop, saw the words "Digital Orgasm", and they made a wild impression on me - non-standard music, something I'd never heard, yet something reminiscent of Space. I liked it, and that's where my passion for electronic music began. On returning to Moscow, I started looking for something similar here, some discos with that kind of music.
By then I'd already heard about the "Gagarin party", but that party already existed on the level of legend. At that moment the fashionable club was Jump, where all my friends and acquaintances - the "hustlers" - went. I too belonged to this commercial caste, hustling on the Arbat along with other figures who later became well known and who were part of Bogdan Titomir's cohort. So Jump, in theory, ought to have been "my" place too. But by then Jump had already become a "crooked" club, and there was nothing to do there.
And then one day Artyom and I come to the Irish House on Novy Arbat, grab a Moscow Times and look at where to go - somewhere cheap. In the end, for five dollars, we bought a ticket to the "Hermitage", where I ran into an old acquaintance, also a "hustler", Yura, who introduced me to Dima Petrov, at the time Sveta Vickers's live-in partner and a co-owner of the club. Half an hour into the "Hermitage" I told Dima that their music was shit, and that Artyom and I were ready to fix their musical policy for a bottle of vodka.
Sveta and Dima, to my surprise, agreed. The following weekend we came to the "Hermitage" with those six cassettes, some compilation CDs and recordings of, for some reason, grunge bands. That's how my DJ career began.
The terms were ironclad. For 25 roubles cash and a bottle of vodka we played everything under the sun - from real techno to Rage Against the Machine. Plus the slow dances, without which there was no getting by. Of course, it was hard to call it playing. We didn't really mix anything properly, but we sincerely tried to. Without any schooling, by intuition.
We played off CDs and cassettes, as was the custom then. Nobody had even heard of vinyl back then; there was practically none of it in Moscow. Personally, I got acquainted with the vinyl aesthetic much later, when Mick Nice came on tour to Jump. Back then literally all of Moscow came to that party, Artyom and I included. For me, Nice's performance was an utter shock. That was the first time I saw Technics turntables in Moscow, and how deftly the DJ handled them. What especially impressed me then were the mysterious records with only two tracks recorded on them - nothing like it had been seen in Moscow before.
But at the "Hermitage" these innovations weren't needed. We played there every Friday and Saturday, still on cassettes and CDs, invariably drawing "all of Moscow" to the club. Sveta and Dima made very good money from it and lived rather large. Since everyone paid at the door, and everyone paid at the bar.
The crowd at the club was most splendid. There were beautiful women, there were rich men, there was the bohemia, there were the "hustlers", there were drug addicts - there was everyone! And everyone got along. I remember that Nastya Mikhailovskaya was a regular; Yegor Schuppe, now the husband of Katya Berezovskaya, was constantly around. This whole bohemian life, with its scenes of jealousy and drunken showdowns, unfolded before our eyes and amused us no end.
It was there that I first heard something about "acid", but somehow I paid it no mind. Drugs, of course, were present, but they weren't the dominant factor. All that came much later, in the era of gangster raves and quatrains: "We party just fine / We bother no one / We blew all the dough / We'll earn some more". Back then none of us used. I knew people, of course, who were into it, but we were "clean". The general energy of the parties was enough for us.
The summer of 1993 passed in a kind of frenzy. We even caught the attention of Volodya Fonarev, by then already a fashionable radio host, who was the first to say on "Maximum" that decent parties were being held at the "Hermitage". That was a moment of glory.
And suddenly, in the autumn of 1993, the first "Hermitage" closes. It turned out that the chief director of the Hermitage theatre, Levitin, was extremely displeased with everything going on there, and by an act of will shut the whole operation down.