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“Look at the guys who are coming back from the special military operation . . . they’re not going to jump around without pants at some party”, Vladimir Putin said earlier this month — following his pronouncement with a chuckle.
The infamous “almost naked” party at Moscow techno club Mutabor in December has been the hottest topic in Russia for weeks, plunging the country’s main pop stars, the party guests, from a life of glamour to public shame and opprobrium. The event — at which guests flounced around in semi-transparent clothing and jewellery worth as much as an apartment in the capital — provoked the ire of the Russian president, who believes such nudity and excess to be ill-befitting of a country at war.
Putin was particularly enraged by a video of guests pretending to lick a Balenciaga sock that rapper Vacio, otherwise naked, wore on his nether regions. “People in the provinces suffer from war and inflation . . . and here you are in Moscow, licking penises,” an ally explained to Russian news outlet Agentstvo.
The partygoers, desperate to show contrition, are now recording apology videos, fending off lawsuits, travelling to the annexed Donbas and even risk being sent to the trenches in Bakhmut, eastern Ukraine.
A few years ago, an event like this would barely have registered. However, since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin’s moral compass has radically shifted — though few were prepared because, superficially at least, life in Moscow has not changed much at all.
When Mutabor opened in 2019, the annexation of Crimea and the onset of the war in Donbas were already in the past and seemed distant to revellers in the capital. Mutabor, which regularly hosted queer parties and tolerated drug use, shaped an alternative, more “progressive” Russia, seemingly shielded from the Kremlin’s conservative ideology.
The partying extended beyond the club, or Moscow. In 2021, I was queueing for an Aperol Spritz alongside journalists now branded as “foreign agents” at a travelling circus-themed party hosted by Yandex, Russia’s technology giant. It was a warm midnight in St Petersburg, and several federal officials were among the party guests. I even spotted Maria Zakharova, press secretary for the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, gazing into a two-metre aquarium where an almost naked gymnast twisted and turned, suspended from a large hook.
By that time, Russia had already taken a conservative turn: laws against “LGBT propaganda” and “insulting believers’ feelings” marked a decisive shift towards traditional values. Yet many believed this was a Potemkin facade created for the masses, behind which the elite could maintain their extravagant lifestyles — provided they avoided politics. Their uncertainty was deepened by widespread confusion about what the values being promoted actually were.
The state’s attempt to define its new restrictions did little to help. They prioritised “the spiritual over the material”, “patriotism” and “strong family ties”— the latter being particularly ironic since Putin himself is divorced and refuses to discuss his daughters. Neither are these ideals aligned with public sentiment: pollsters at the Levada Center report that when asked to identify social ills, Russians consistently cite rising prices, poverty and corruption, rather than LGBT activists.
The fate of “progressive” Russia is possibly best symbolised by the GES-2, a former power station-turned-contemporary art museum designed by Renzo Piano and opened in 2021, just a couple of months before the Ukraine invasion. It could have been Moscow’s Pompidou Center, but the war deterred foreigners and prompted many local artists to emigrate, leaving this project, worth at least $300mn, as an empty shell.
Attendees at the nearly naked party, however, are suffering worse fates. Vasio, the rap singer whose outfit so enraged Putin, was sent to jail for disorderly conduct, fined for “spreading LGBTQ propaganda”, and then, in a sign of the times, summoned to a military recruitment centre. The event’s organiser, TV presenter Nastya Ivleeva, avoided two multimillion-dollar lawsuits but has lost business sponsorships.
Other partygoers, concerned that their attendance will prevent them from performing on screen or being allowed back on air, have made very public donations to victims of shelling. The owner of the Mutabor club surprised everyone by donating relics of St Nicholas — which he claimed to have sourced from the Vatican — to a local church. It later turned out that the relics were likely fake; a Moscow court, unmoved by his gesture, has temporarily shut the club down for violating hygiene standards.
It seems fitting that in today’s Russia, Mutabor, which means “I will be changed” in Latin, failed to change social attitudes. Instead, it has changed the lives of Russia’s elite — and not in the way they expected.
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