November 1994 – The Opening of the Ptyuch Club

Igor Shulinsky:
«In the autumn of 1994 Ptyuch opens. We found a very funny space for the club. It was a bunker run by guys from the civil-defence service, committed Nazis. And to negotiate with them came actual Jews, and even one black man. Nevertheless, we found a common language fairly quickly, and we got this basement, which the architect Ilya Voznesensky turned into a club.
By that point there were already quite a few venues in Moscow. There was Aerodance, there was Hermitage, there was Penthouse, and soon Titanic opened. But we stood out from them quite a lot, because from the very start we agreed that we wouldn't let gangsters into Ptyuch. We informed our security about this — back then it was impossible to open a club in Moscow without coming to terms with either the police or the gangsters. They gave the go-ahead, and from then on not a single man in a crimson jacket ever crossed the threshold of Ptyuch. In the first days I personally stood at the door and turned this crowd away. It wasn't easy: serious guys would show up, with automatic rifles. But we would simply shut the iron bunker doors in front of them and hold the defence to the end. They'd summon us to "sit-downs", but we never went. There was even a legend going around the city that a high-level gangland meeting had been convened over Ptyuch, deciding what to do with us. But the people who handled our security explained everything competently: if you want to come to the club — dress differently. And the conflict was resolved. This made us famous all over Moscow and people started flocking to us.
In the club's first year, Ptyuch was paradise. It was a completely Western place, very much like the equivalent European venues. We were total Westernizers, and so we tried to follow every trend of fashion. Magnificent, intelligent electronic music played at our place, without the slightest hint of commerce. Practically every week foreigners performed for us: The Orb, DJ Hell, Green Velvet, Jimi Tenor. Sergey Shutov and Mogilevsky were in charge of the visuals, gathering a company of cyber-artists around themselves. We worked from Wednesday to Saturday, every day was scheduled, and every day the club was packed. Admission cost twenty dollars on weekends and ten on ordinary days. Everyone paid. The money flowed.
People were already starting to say back then that Ptyuch had some kind of junkie aura. The junkie aura belonged to the times, not to the place. Back then you could find anything anywhere; in any place where electronic music played. Nobody, of course, was dealing in it professionally at Ptyuch. But we weren't able to control that process either. How could you keep track of pills? People from Petrovka infiltrated us, but even they couldn't catch anyone red-handed. And the Interior Ministry didn't really know anything about pills either. It took the police a year and a half to two years to figure out the situation and tighten the screws».