March–November 1994 – The First Issues of Ptuch Magazine

Igor Shulinsky:
«In the mid-'90s our whole crew – me, Sasha Golubev, Asad – often travelled abroad. Back then I was writing scripts for the BBC and regularly visited England, America and Germany. When some new kinds of relationships between people started appearing there, some new kind of communication was emerging. It was a very generational story, the breath of a different life, a new spiritual upsurge. Impressed by all this, we decided to become the heralds of this culture in Russia: to publish a magazine, to build a club.
The magazine, for instance, was meant to tell about everything new. Back then we were very fond of Timothy Leary's sayings about a new era in which computers and drugs would merge into one. At the time everyone was into neo-cybernetics, cyberpunk, new people, and truly believed in a global transformation of the human being. These slogans were taken seriously, without the slightest shade of irony. The early '90s was exactly when the computer boom began, people's eyes were burning, and everyone really expected radical change. This was happening not only here but in the West too. There, hierarchy was collapsing, people were becoming millionaires very fast, at the age of twenty-two to twenty-five. Then, true, they lost it all just as fast. But at that moment it seemed that new forms of communication and their preachers would rule the world. «Ptuch» was meant to stand at the head of that column.
It was on this wave that we burst into 1990s Moscow. We just got lucky. At some point one man from our crew, Sasha Golubev, also known as Ptuch, became a businessman. He was ready to partly finance our ventures, but to put in our own shares, Asad and I sold our apartments. It's hard for me to recall the details now, but the initial budget of the project was around a million dollars. Part of the money went to building the club, part to publishing the magazine.
The heroes of the first issues of «Ptuch» were artists – Andrei Bartenev, Vladik Monroe, the group «Fenso» (Fenso Light). It was altogether an era of artists, an era of all sorts of performances. They were the freest people, and were the engine of the movement back then.

The first three issues of «Ptuch» were made by Dmitry Likin and Yevgeny Raytses, today art directors at Channel One. They were pro-Western guys who took the layout of RayGun magazine as their model. Which «Kommersant» promptly and snidely pointed out: they took a «Ptuch» spread and a RayGun spread and placed them side by side with the caption «Spot the three differences».
At first the magazine left people astonished. The resonance was incredible. For one, we threw an insanely bold launch for the first issue, renting the «Krasnye Vorota» metro station for it. We all lived nearby, in a high-rise, and decided to hold the launch literally right under our own windows. At rush hour, at seven in the evening, we closed off one entrance, set buckets of punch on the escalators, Kompas-Vrubel played together with a quartet. Back then Moscow wasn't spoiled by high society, and everyone came: Alla Pugacheva, Konstantin Ernst… Something like that is impossible to even imagine now, but in 1994 this celebration cost us 800 dollars.
We took extraordinary pleasure in the process of publishing the magazine and thought ourselves very cool. People interviewed us endlessly, foreign correspondents were constantly hanging around the office. Now, of course, it all reads differently. Today I see that «Ptuch» had extremely pretentious design and unusually pompous texts that, on top of that, nobody could read. But at the time you couldn't come up with anything more fashionable. Then again, there weren't really any competitors either, since magazines weren't being published at all. That let us pull in advertising that's wild by today's standards – for instance, whole spreads for Rolls Royce».