Lisa Dickey - Bears in the Streets

After 1995, he said, his career began soaring. His “Dance in Extazy” video won Video of the Year at a festival of Russian regional TV shows, he got a commercial gig creating musical presentations for the chipmaker Intel, and in 1997, he founded the Festival of Soul and Funk, a three-day extravaganza with shows in multiple Moscow clubs. Through it all, he kept performing and making new music, and in late 1997 he took another trip to New York City.

“I needed to recharge my batteries, to hear some new stuff,” he told me. While there, he played with the legendary jazz vibraphonist Roy Ayers and went to numerous clubs. “I would walk around the city in this orange outfit,” he said, laughing, “and people would go, ‘Hey, Orange Man from Moscow!’” He even made deals with New York record labels to send him their latest releases, so he could pitch his own TV show about funk music back in Moscow.

The TV show never got off the ground, but Pavlov began hosting a radio show called Funky Time . Broadcast in nearly two dozen cities and towns, “it was the only radio show about funk music in Russia,” he said proudly. Flush with his growing success, he moved out of his parents’ apartment in 1999, rented his own place, and built a makeshift recording studio inside. Then, as a treat, he booked a trip to Thailand with one of his dancers, a beautiful young woman named Polina who’d been performing with him since the early 1990s.

On their first day in Bangkok, the couple visited a Buddhist temple and wandered around the city taking pictures. On the second day, getting ready to cross a busy street, Pavlov looked left, as one does when traffic travels on the right-hand side. In Thailand, however, traffic travels on the left. Pavlov stepped off the curb directly into the path of an oncoming bus. He never even saw it.

The impact nearly killed him. An ambulance rushed the gravely injured Pavlov to a Bangkok hospital, where he underwent three operations. He was in a coma for nearly a month; it was unclear whether he would ever recover.

Almost as soon as the accident happened, friends and fellow musicians in Moscow began planning a benefit concert for Pavlov, who had no way of paying the $1,000-a-day hospital bills he was incurring. “They didn’t raise too much money,” he told me with a shrug. “But more important was the good energy they sent. All of Moscow was praying for me.”

When Pavlov finally awoke from his coma, he was flown back to Moscow to continue recuperating. “I had my fourth operation after I got back,” he said. “During that one, they held a special service at the Krishna temple. They lit a sacrifice fire, and chanted special mantras.” For a man whose stage act is all clever wordplay and high irony, there’s no hint of that irony when he talks about the power of prayer. “It definitely helped,” he told me earnestly.

The accident and surgeries left scars running across Pavlov’s scalp, but he told me he had no memory loss, save for not remembering the accident itself or the comatose weeks that followed. He referred vaguely to other lingering health problems, though he refused to elaborate or dwell on them.

“Hey, I’m alive!” he said, throwing his arms wide in a pose I remembered well from 1995. “That’s what matters.”

Pavlov spent a full year recuperating in Moscow hospitals before finally being allowed to go home. Spending a year in the hospital would be a discombobulating, depressing experience for anyone. But as soon as Pavlov got out, he went right back to work. “First thing, we released the CD I’m Back ”—a compilation of dance and funk tracks he’d recorded before the accident. “There’s one track at the end that goes, ‘People ask me where I was—I was on vacation! I had a good vacation! I got healthy!’” he told me, laughing. “For those who know what happened to me, they know what I’m talking about. Those who don’t, don’t.”

He also resumed doing commercial presentations for Intel, to pay the bills. “We go in and do this rap about Intel: ‘Pentium 4 is the most powerful center of your digital world!’” he exclaimed, waving his hands in excitement. “Then we get someone from the audience to come up and say, ‘I love Pentium! I want Pentium!’ and right then, during the presentation, we make a mix of that.” A sound engineer would then burn a DVD for the audience member to take home as a funky, Intel-branded souvenir.

As startled as I’d been by Pavlov’s physical changes, little else seemed different in his life. He was still making music, still a vegetarian, still a Krishna. But the music scene around him had changed dramatically. In 1995 he was an anomaly, but now Moscow was flooded with rappers and DJs—some of whom were too young to remember their predecessor’s heyday.

“They’re like, “MC Pavlov? Who’s that?” he laughed. “They maybe have heard of Public Enemy, but that’s about it.” He was still able to find work in clubs, though now he was switching his focus from rap to funk music. “Russia wasn’t ready for funk a few years ago,” he said, “but it’s time now!” We’re gonna teach the people!

When I started preparing for my third trip, I wondered how different Pavlov’s life might be now. We hadn’t been in touch, so I had no clue—but one thing I did know: Moscow had changed, yet again. Each time I went there, it was like visiting a completely different city.

The first time I set foot in Moscow was in the summer of 1988. I was 21, fresh out of college, and had scored a job working as a nanny for the family of a U.S. diplomat. Mikhail Gorbachev was the Soviet leader, the Cold War was in full swing, and Moscow was a drab, gray city where stores had thrilling names like “Meat,” “Bread,” and “Milk.” At the official exchange rate, set by the Soviet government, one U.S. dollar bought 60 kopeks—less than a ruble. On the black market, a dollar was worth more than 20 times that.

I lived on the U.S. embassy compound, a walled-in, city-block-sized Little America that boasted not only apartments and offices, but a cafeteria, gym, bowling alley, swimming pool, and barbershop. There was also a small grocery store where we could buy treats from home such as Oreo cookies, California wines, and Lay’s potato chips. None of these items could be bought elsewhere in Russia, yet it didn’t occur to me how exotic they were until the day I unthinkingly walked out of the embassy with a can of Coke. When I popped it open while strolling down nearby Kalininsky Prospekt, people stared as if I were clutching a glowing alien baby in my hand.

One of the only American brands Russians could buy back then was Pepsi, which had been sold in the USSR since the 1970s—though many people probably didn’t even know it was an American product, as it was bottled locally and bore the name in Cyrillic: пепси-колa. [3] In 1959, in what would have made a beautiful TV commercial, Vice President Richard Nixon urged Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to try a sip of Pepsi at an exhibition of American products in Moscow. Khrushchev loved it, and in 1972, the USSR struck a deal to manufacture and sell Pepsi in Russia in exchange for PepsiCo’s agreement to import and sell Russian vodka in the United States. There was a Baskin-Robbins near Red Square, but locals were forbidden from buying ice cream there; it was a “hard-currency” store, meaning you had to pay with foreign money, which was illegal for most Soviets to own. [4] Payment in hard currency was intended to guarantee a stability the ruble couldn’t offer. There were other hard-currency stores in the Soviet Union, called Beriozkas , which sold souvenirs and imported goods. I took a Russian friend there as a treat one evening, and she nearly wept with excitement. On another night, I walked by after closing time and noticed that the long mirror behind the counter was backlit; it was actually a two-way mirror, presumably so Soviet authorities could keep an eye on who was coming and going.