With the recent inauguration of new president Dmitry Medvedev, how have things changed in Russia? Is the authoritarian freeze of the Vladimir Putin years starting to melt into a glorious new spring of freedom? Mark Ames, founder of Russian newspaper the Exile (and Radar contributor) will provide occasional dispatches in pursuit of an answer to that question ... if the authorities don't lock him up first.

Thursday morning, Moscow time, four Russian government officials came to the office of my English-language newspaper, the Exile, and conducted an "unplanned audit" of our editorial content. They are carrying out an inspection of my paper's articles to see, in their words, if we have committed "violations." And they specifically asked to question me, since I'm officially listed as the founding editor-in-chief.

I started up the Exile 11 years ago with a Russian publisher, and it grew into a kind of cult phenomenon, with an online readership of 200,000 visitors per month, launching the careers of Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi and the "War Nerd," Gary Brecher, but ensuring that anyone who sticks with the paper is condemned to a life of poverty and paranoia.

In all my years I'd never heard of an "unplanned audit" of editorial content. The insiders whom I contacted all said, "It's ... strange." That's how my Russian lawyer reacted, it's how an American official reacted, and it's even how the head of the Glasnost Defense Fund reacted, even though his NGO focuses on problems between the Russian media and the Kremlin.

"As far as I know, there has never been a single Moscow-based media outlet which has been audited like this," Glasnost's lawyer told me. "We've seen a few of these in the far regions, but never Moscow. But really, don't worry about it, Mark, I don't think you're in any personal danger at this point."

Whenever a Russian tells me, "Don't worry, Mark," or, "It's no problem," I start to sweat.

I first learned of the government audit last week while I was out in California dealing with a family illness. I was already in a heightened state of paranoia at the time—one week in my native suburbia is all it takes to trigger panic attacks—so when the government sent notice of the "unplanned audit" to our office, my first thought was, "Can an American get political asylum in his own country?" Then I remembered some of the articles I'd written from Moscow—for example, my post–2004 U.S. presidential election editorial titled "Gas Middle America," and how former U.S. congressman Henry Bonilla (R-TX) once used his office to pressure the Russian authorities into arresting me because of a prank I'd played—and the next thing I knew, I was rifling through my mother's medicine cabinet looking for something strong to steal.

Eventually I calmed down and flew back to Moscow in time for the audit. At 11 a.m., four officials from the Federal Service for Mass Media, Telecommunications, and the Protection of Cultural Heritage arrived—the men in shabby Bolsheviki suits, and a squat middle-age woman with pudgy arms and hands that pinched the seams of her wrists. On the advice of a Russian attorney, we greeted them with a box of dark chocolates. It was solid advice, and probably did more to protect us than a hundred attorneys' briefs could have.

These days, Russia is all about getting serious and respectable. And it's also in the grips of a national persecution mania, in which grievances and complexes about the West have exploded into a frenzied hunt for evidence of Western disrespect or unfairnessThe Exile's office is in a radon-poisoned basement in an old part of downtown Moscow called "Clean Pond," which refers to a toxic puddle in the center divider of a nearby road. The office is so small that we have to take shifts showing up for work. So it wasn't easy fitting the four bureaucrats and the few Exile staffers who turned up.

The varied emotional responses to the meeting were interesting. The Westerners, who until last week supported our paper and kept it alive, immediately cut all ties with us, so they weren't there. The younger Russians on our staff were relatively calm about it. But when our Soviet-era accountant opened the office door and saw the four squat figures in bad official Soviet outfits, she turned white and vanished, the door closing on its own. When our middle-age courier arrived, she too turned white, stopped, then put her head down and walked past us, crossing herself three hurried times in the Orthodox Christian fashion before locking herself in the design room. You have to understand, to anyone with a memory of the Soviet era, those bad suits that the officials wore are extremely menacing, like red stripes on a reptile.

Their very first question was about the writer and opposition leader Eduard Limonov, one of my newspaper's star columnists since the beginning. It's not surprising—the Glasnost Fund people thought that Limonov would be their main focus. When I told Limonov about the audit, he seemed proud of me, kind of like how the Goodfellas gangsters greeted the teenage Henry Hill after his first trial: "Well, it's finally happened!" Limonov said. "You should prepare to be taken to a stadium somewhere, like they did in Pinochet's time!" he said cheerfully.

The officials asked us why Limonov was in our paper. Did we know much about him? Why did we publish him? Why was he on our masthead as a contributor? They asked to see an example of a recent Limonov column—the first one I pulled out was titled "Mr. Limonov on Mr. Medvedev"—I quickly shoved it under a pile and grabbed the next column I could find. They took that issue, and two others, with them, and told us that they'd have experts translate and check to see if we'd violated laws on printing "extremism," "inciting national hatred," "pornography," and "pro-drugs propaganda."

Here are a few of the Limonov lines from the article I gave to the officials, written in his trademark broken English: "Russian Government is bloody beast eating human flesh. It is deeply medieval in its principle conceptions ... Russian women are very, very bad. The worst of all. Russian women is like the Russian Government. Millions of bitches walking our streets. I am absolutely and positively on the side of Muslim strict code of behavior for women. Their system of separation of sexes if effective and healthy." Imagine now that you're a Russian government official tasked with reading this column. Because I sure imagined it. And then I imagined them sending me a new notice, which is why a voice in my head started whispering, "There's no place like home ..."

Next, they asked us to explain our newspaper's editorial style and concept. It was a good thing that our gorgeous young sales director, Zalina, was speaking for me, because how do you explain to a Russian bureaucrat that a newspaper whose motto is "vanity and spleen" is a low-tech suicide bomb designed to destroy our journalism careers and take down a few assholes with us?

After a difficult and failed attempt at explaining ourselves—a subject they came back to a couple more times—they said that some unspecified Russians had filed complaints about the Exile because it supposedly offended Russians, and mocked and degraded Russian traditions and Russian culture. What did we have to say about it?

Zalina, bless her heart, defended me: "No, Mark loves Russia and Russian culture! Really!"

All four of them turned and looked at me; I could feel a cheesy grin straining over my deer-in-the-headlights expression. Ahem ... is this mike on? Hello? So, anyone here from Tomsk-7? No? Tough crowd.

In my opinion, this is the real reason they're moving to shut us down. What offends the Russian elite more than anything about the Exile is its aggressive refusal to play by the "serious" rules. The authorities can deal with serious print-media criticism of the Kremlin—so long as that media outlet makes everyone look serious and respectable, with serious dull language quoting serious dull think-tank analysts. These days, Russia is all about getting serious and respectable. And it's also in the grips of a national persecution mania, in which grievances and complexes about the West have exploded into a kind of mass grievance obsession, a frenzied Easter egg hunt for evidence of Western disrespect or unfairness in order to feed this grievance jones. The fact that our paper has also exerted a lot of bile in savaging the West's Russophobe industry is irrelevant to them, even annoying; all they care about is sifting for evidence of humiliating Russia.

In the current climate, the authorities don’t need to jail or destroy you; all they need to do is notify you that you’ve earned their attentionAt one point in the three-hour audit, they started leafing through our February Barack Obama issue, in which we posted a comparison chart of Russians and African Americans in order to tweak Russian racism (examples: "Blacks: Freed by Abraham Lincoln in 1863/Russians: Freed by Tsar Alexander II in 1861"; "Blacks: plastic covering on furniture/Russians: plastic covering on remote control").

The lady-bureaucrat, who headed the audit team, leafed through the issue ... and stopped when she saw a bad drawing of a semi-limp penis.

"What's this?" she asked, putting her glasses on.

"It's a column called 'The Recession Penis,'" I explained. "You see, the Recession Penis reacts to America's economic crisis, so every time American banks default and housing prices collapse, the Recession Penis gets more excited. It's, uh, humorous, you see."

She folded up the issue and handed it to her subordinate to bring back for the inspection.

From there, much of the meeting focused on all of the newspaper's petty administrative fuckups: missing addresses, missing license number, something should be in Russian here, a registration number there. In all, the violations led to a $25 fine, which was levied on me personally as editor-in-chief.

The official with the mullet took over one of our computers and typed up a "protocol," which essentially summed up our three-hour meeting. I signed it, only afterward wondering if in fact I'd signed some sort of confession admitting my role in a Trotskyite plot.

After all of the nervousness and fear in the buildup to the meeting, when the three hours were up and they got up to leave, we felt fairly confident. Too confident, in fact. Because today, I'm starting to think differently. I'm thinking this:

A: I live in a gangster police state that's hell-bent on being respected.
B: These people are now auditing my articles to see if they're extremist, pornographic, or if they humiliate Russia.
C: Before they left, they took our most recent issue, in which I wrote that the Exile "farts in Russia's face" and that Medvedev is so liberal our paper can "urinate into the president's mouth without any fear of consequences," and he's so small he should be "zipped up in a squirrel costume and put in a Habitrail."
THEREFORE, D: The California suburbs are sounding pretty nice to me.

The Russians I consulted with before and after the audit all came to the same conclusion: The authorities are planning to either tame us or shut us down. There's no more room for the Exile in the new serious/respectable Russia, the Russia of fanatical consumerism and materialism and vile conformism. This is a country where two separate magazines launched proudly billing themselves as the "New Yorker without political reporting."

In the current climate, the authorities don't need to jail or destroy you; all they need to do is notify you that you've earned their attention, and if you're on their radar screen, then you immediately comply with whatever you think they want you to comply with, and you get abandoned by everyone around you who doesn't want to get sucked into your vortex.

And if you do fight the law, then ... well, just this past week there have been two examples of what can happen. The opposition webzine ingushetia.ru was closed by court order, and its lawyer had his apartment raided last week (I was planning to use him to help the Exile until that happened); and one of Russia's largest radio companies was raided by armed police, leaving it temporarily off the air.

Now it's like I have the Ebola virus. Longtime friends won't call, contributors want their names expunged from the online record. Even the American media is eerily silent about this story, despite the fact that one of their own is being attacked—could it be because we've spent 11 years savaging the Western media here? Or because we once threw a pie filled with horse sperm into the New York Times bureau chief's face? Just as a single controversial article in Russkii Korrespondent led its rather brash billionaire backer to immediately shut it down last month, so this single audit means that the Exile is now, after 11 years, dead.

The biggest fear of every foreigner in Russia is becoming the focus of Kremlin attention. Any attention. Russians fear it as well, but they've internalized it since birth and deal with it differently. Foreigners here operate with a kind of looter's mentality: On the surface is overconfidence derived from the general sense that there is no authority over us because we think that the Russian authorities would never mess with a Westerner, but underneath that arrogance is a constantly bubbling terror of being stopped at the border, turned back, and subjected to Russia's arbitrary and brutal state. It's such an alien country to Westerners that it's easy think you operate in some kind of H.P. Lovecraft–like parallel plane with the Russians: In one reality, the Westerners as the humans; in the other parallel reality, the Russians as those flying fanged eels. Now that my paper is being examined, it's as if everyone around me suddenly grew a giant pituitary gland, and all they see are Lovecraft's fanged eels orbiting around my head, snapping at anyone who comes near me.

Meanwhile, I'm still here in Moscow, waiting for the Kremlin's experts to audit my dead newspaper's articles.

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