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General terms relating to the processing of personal data.

Welcome to the Paul Picot website.

Our activity is evolving and these terms are also changing. We invite you to refer to our website regularly to find out information regarding the most recent changes. Unless otherwise specified, our general terms relating to the processing of personal data apply to the use of all the information we have collected concerning you. We keep our promises and will never substantially change our policies or practices in a way that would reduce the protection of client information collected in the past, without the consent of the clients concerned. Click here to refer to the previous version of the general terms relating to the processing of personal data.

The company Paul Picot provides you with website features and other services when you visit the Paul Picot website (https://paul-picot.com) or make purchases there.

Paul Picot supplies its services by abiding by the general terms relating to the processing of personal data as defined on this page. Paul Picot pays special attention to the protection of personal data. With this aim Paul Picot undertakes to respect the applicable European and Swiss legislation regarding personal data processing.

The protection of natural persons with regards to personal data processing is a fundamental right whatever the nationality or residence of the natural persons. The right to personal data protection is not, however, an absolute right; it must be considered in relation to its function in the Paul Picot and balanced against other fundamental rights, in accordance with the principle of proportionality.

What personal data does Paul Picot collect about its clients?

• Website connection data: data relating to your browser (IP address, browser name);
• Analysis data: allows the analysis of the number of visits and habits of website visitors;
• Data coming from forms found on the Paul Picot website;

Examples of personal data collected

You supply information when you:

• Search for our services;
• Order our services;
• Contact us by telephone, email or by any other means;
• Insert personal identification data: username;
• Fill in forms found on the Paul Picot website.

Through these actions you give us information including: your name, address and telephone number, age, geographical location, the names, addresses and telephone numbers of the recipients of bought products, VAT numbers.

Lawful, loyal and transparent processing and determined, explicit and legitimate purposes

Personal data collected ensure the security as well as the correct operating of our website.

All information that we collect from you can be used to:

• Personalise your experience and meet your individual needs;
• Continually improve our products and services;
• Correct errors and improve the accessibility and efficiency of the services offered by Paul Picot;
• Supply personalised advertising content;
• Improve our website;
• Improve customer service and your support needs;
• Contact you through different channels (e.g. e-mails, telephone);
• Register and process orders relating to the supply of our services;
• Process payments and communications with you in connection with your service orders;
• Administer a competition, a special offer, a newsletter or a survey;
• Investigate, prevent or take measures concerning illegal activities, presumed fraud, situations involving potential threats to the physical safety of any person, breaches of our terms of use, or when the law compels us to do so.

We may also be called on to request your consent to process your personal information for a specific purpose that we will indicate to you. When you agree to the processing of your personal data for this specific purpose, you will be able to withdraw your consent at any time and we will stop any processing of your information for this purpose.

Does Paul Picot share your personal data?

Paul Picot does not sell the collected data to third companies. Your data are protected and only used in the framework of your relationship with Paul Picot.

We use other independent companies or persons who supply certain services on our behalf. Here are a few examples: the sending of regular mail or e-mails, the analysis of our databases, the supply of search results and links, the processing of payments and the transmission of contents. These third-party service providers have access to the personal information necessary for performing their services and are not authorised to use them for other purposes. Moreover, they are bound to process this personal information in accordance with these general terms and with governing laws regarding personal data processing. The Paul Picot website will not store information relating to payments. We use PayPal and Stripe to deal with this.

We disclose personal information when we are legally obliged to do so or if this disclosure is necessary to enforce our general sales terms or other agreements, or to protect the rights, property or security of Paul Picot or those of the users of the Paul Picot website or other persons. This includes the exchange of information with other companies and organisations with the aim of protecting against fraud. In all other cases, you will be informed if your personal information had been shared with a third party and you will have the chance not to agree to such sharing.

Protection of personal data

We are concerned with the safety and protection of your personal data.

Your data is stored on secured Swiss servers. They are equipped with the latest technologies and enjoy the best protection.

We protect the safety of your personal data while it is being transmitted by using SSL software (Secure Sockets Layer Software) that encrypts the information you enter before it is sent.

We respect the safety standards of the payment card industry (PCI DSS) when we process payment card data.

We maintain physical and electronic safety measures and back-up procedures in relation to the collection, storage and communication of clients’ personal information. Our safety procedures may require us to ask you for proof of your identity before being able to pass on your personal information to you.

Data minimisation

The personal data required by Paul Picot are appropriate, relevant and limited to what is necessary regarding the purposes for which they are processed.

Data accuracy

The personal data collected by Paul Picot are exact. All reasonable measures are taken so that inaccurate personal data, with regard to the purposes for which they are processed, are either deleted or rectified without delay.

Limitation of data retention

Personal data collected by Paul Picot is kept in a form allowing the identification of the persons concerned for a period not exceeding that necessary for the purposes for which they are processed, for a period necessary to carry out such legal obligations as, for example, tax or accounting obligations, or for any other duration that may have been communicated to you.

Integrity and confidentiality

Personal data are processed by Paul Picot in such a way as to guarantee the appropriate security of personal data. They are protected against unauthorised or unlawful processing and against the loss, destruction or damage of accidental origin, with the help of appropriate technical or organisational measures. The data are stored on secured Swiss servers. These servers are equipped with the latest hardware technologies and enjoy the best protection. Moreover, SSL encryption is used to protect sensitive information transmitted online. Offline information is also protected. Only employees that need to carry out a specific job have access to identifiable personal information. The latter is subject to professional secrecy. The computers used to store identifiable personal information are kept in a secured environment.

Data processing concerning children

You can only give your consent regarding the processing of your data if you are over the age of 16. If you are under the age of 16, consent must be given by a person who has “parental responsibility”.

Use of cookies

Cookies are small files stored in your browser or your appliance for a defined period. They allow your browsing data to be kept, such as, for example, the choice of language. Here for example are cookies stored during your visit to the Paul Picot website:

• The WordPress CMS uses cookies for preferences and display tests:
• Google Analytics uses cookies intended for visitor statistics (relating to the Paul Picot website) as well as for its own statistics (use by Google);
• The Stripe payment systems uses a cookie for its needs;
• Standard cookies aim at protecting you as a visitor or to record your preferences.

On the Paul Picot website, they are intended for statistical purposes. No personal data is sold or given to legal entities or natural persons. These data are only used to analyse our website’s traffic as well as analyse the security and correct operating of the latter. Our cookies improve the user experience thanks to the monitoring and targeting of his/her interests. However, this use of cookies is in no way linked to personal information identifiable on our website.

The processing manager

Paul Picot established in route de Soleure 136, 2504 Bienne is the processing manager of data collected and processed via the Paul Picot website.

For any questions or requests relating to the processing of personal data within Paul Picot or if you wish to contact the processing manager, please send us a detailed e-mail to the following address: [email protected] .

We undertake to deal with your request within a maximum of one month. In order to be able to access your request, we ask you for proof of your identity for the purpose of identification and confidentiality.

Notification in the event of a data breach

An incident must be reported to the supervisory authority and the person concerned, less than 72 hours after being aware of it. Paul Picot shall avoid this obligation if the personal data breach has little chance of resulting in risks to the liberties and rights of natural persons.

What rights are you entitled to?

The right to be informed.

You have access to information about the processing of your personal data and the reasons for this processing. You can obtain basic information on this subject. The controller will give you the necessary information even if the personal data has not yet been obtained.

The right of access

You are entitled to obtain confirmation from the controller that the personal data concerning you have not been processed.

If the controller confirms that the personal data have been processed, the person concerned is entitled to have access to his/her personal data and obtain such information as:

• The aims and reasons for the processing;
• The categories of personal data concerned;
• The recipients or categories of recipients to which the personal data have or shall be communicated, in particular the recipients in third countries of international organisations;
• The existence of the right to ask the controller to correct or delete personal data, limit the processing of personal data relating to the person concerned, or the right to oppose this processing;
• The right to oppose and complain to a supervisory authority.

The right to correction

You are entitled to correction of the personal data concerning you that are inaccurate, as soon as possible, by the controller.

The right to deletion

The controller must delete your personal data if these are not necessary for the purpose for which they have been collected or processed; if the person concerned withdraws his/her consent on which the processing relies; or if the personal data have been processed unlawfully.

The right to data portability

You are entitled to receive your personal data. The personal data received must be structured in a legible format by a machine, because you have the right to pass on your data to another controller, with no interruption resulting from the controller, to whom your personal data have been supplied beforehand.

The right to oppose

You are entitled to oppose the processing of your personal data at any time. The controller shall no longer process your personal data, unless he/she proves that there are legitimate and pressing reasons for the processing, which prevail over your interests, rights and liberties, or for the observation, exercising or defence of rights in court, notably in the framework of a technicallegal investigation. The controller must show that there is reasonable proof to process the data, or that this data processing is within the limits of your legal rights. If Paul Picot cannot respond to one of these requirements, it must stop the processing.

The right to limitations

You are entitled to ask for the processing to be limited if this is unlawful. You are also entitled to oppose the deletion of your personal data and demand instead a limitation of their use.

The right to unsubscribe

Paul Picot uses the email address you supply to send you newsletters. If at any time you wish to unsubscribe and no longer receive emails, detailed instructions on how to unsubscribe are included at the bottom of each email.

If you wish to assert one of the rights set out in these latter paragraphs, please contact us at the following e-mail address: [email protected] .

Revised on 20nd August 2019.

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Paul Picot C-Type Yachtman 3 Watches

Paul Picot offers these new C-Type Yachtman watches for 2011. The naming schemas confuse me. The C-Type I know, but I am not sure whether these are C-Type and Yachtman watches, or C-Type Yachtman watches!? Screw it, I’m just going to use the Yachtman name for now. Yachtman 3 to be exact – which sounds like an awful movie name. The watches are still cool looking, though, and this year they make equal jabs at Rolex and IWC wanting to be something like a Submariner or Aquatimer.

Regardless of what the Yachtman watches are trying to be, they can stand on their own. As you can see, there are two versions of the new Yachtmaster 3. The “Classic” three-hand automatic and the “Chronograph.” Like the Aquatimer watches, Paul Picot says the bezel inserts are sapphire but that there will also be all steel bezel options.

Size wise, the Yachtman 3 watches are decent at 43mm wide and the cases are steel. They are water-resistant to 200 meters and have AR coated sapphire crystals. The watch dials are textured, which is nice. They have little waves that are meant to remind of you being in the water (or drowning) and feeling secure that your watch will survive. The blue and yellow dials are fun and sporty but might be a bit too reminiscent of IWC Aquatimers. There are likely to be other color combos available as well.  Overall, I am a big fan of the dials for their polished looks with easy to read hands and markers, and it is OK that they aren’t super unique.

For that Rolex Sub homage look, the Yachtman Classic is the way to go. I almost like it better than the Chronograph. Paul Picot makes their own interpretation of the Submariner dial and, to be honest, I think it is one of the nicest ones out there that combines the making brand’s DNA with that Submariner look that they are trying to emulate. Inside the watch are Swiss ETA automatic movements. The Yachtman 3 Chronograph has a Valjoux 7750 while the Yachtman 3 Classic has an ETA 2892 – or similar, I don’t know exactly which. Paul Picot obfuscates the matter by calling the movements their PP1600 and PP1700 – where do they come up with these names? Prices are $2,750 – $3,190 for the Yachtman, and $4,200 – $4,290 for the Yachtman Chronograph. Look for the new Paul Picot C-Type Yachtman 3 Classic and Chronograph watches soon.

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Paul Picot Yachtman, the Winds of Tradition

The Yachtman Club marks another chapter in a story in which the sea plays a central role for Paul Picot .

The new Paul Picot Yachtman Club is for sailing enthusiasts but is also intended for daily use.  Hence the stainless steel bracelet which is perfectly integrated into the case, thereby making it even more pleasant to wear. Such novelties are in line with a collection which began life in 2006. The 316L grade stainless steel case is waterproof at up to 200 metres.

The new Paul Picot Yachtman Club houses the PP1700 ETA 2824/A calibre, a self-winding mechanical movement with a 38-hour power reserve. The scratch-resistant anti-reflective sapphire crystal protects a black galvanic dial which features rhodium-plated metal and bright white hour, minute and seconds hands. The date window is at 3 o’clock, while the unidirectional sapphire bezel comes in a broad range of colours.

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Paul Picot - your thoughts and experiences

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Up there a bit in $$$$ ...at least on Joma...really haven't heard or read about this brand at all... Sent from my SM-G900V using Tapatalk  

Like the brand, they have come out with some very interesting watches.  

Pretty good movements = ETA. Most of the Paul Picot are therefore overpriced.  

Other companies are using the same movements and are technically overpriced too. If you like the watch, get it. The benefit of having an ETA movement is having the ability to get it serviced anywhere instead of sending it back to the company. In that case, I think buying watches for full retail with ETA movements is not worth it. Anyways back to the watch, I am currently eyeing the Paul Picot Yatchman Auto. Looks like a great piece and something that is close to looking like the IWC aquatimer.  

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Shooter Files by f.d. walker

Street Photography Tips, Interaction, Travel, Guides

Apr 24 2017

City Street Guides by f.d. walker: A Street Photography Guide to Moscow, Russia

*A series of guides on shooting Street Photography in cities around the world. Find the best spots to shoot, things to capture, street walks, street tips, safety concerns, and more for cities around the world. I have personally researched, explored and shot Street Photography in every city that I create a guide for. So you can be ready to capture the streets as soon as you step outside with your camera!

At over 12 million people, Moscow is the largest city in Russia and second largest in Europe by population ( Istanbul is #1). An urban, cosmopolitan metropolis with more than enough glitz and glam to cater to the elite, but without losing its fair share of Soviet era roughness around the edges. It can be fast paced, brash, busy, and trendy like other big cities, but it has its blend of West meets Russia atmosphere and beauty that provides plenty of unique interest. The Red Square is as famous as it gets, but there’s so much more to this city, including the most beautiful subway system you’ve ever seen. It would take years to capture all of Moscow, but that means you have an endless amount of areas to discover.

So here’s a Street Photography guide so you can be ready to capture all that Moscow has to offer before you even arrive!

• Patriarch’s Pond
• Old Arbat Street
• Maroseyka Street
• Tverskoy Boulevard

Top 5 Street Spots:

1. red square.

The Red Square is the most famous square in not just Russia, but all of Eastern Europe. The name actually doesn’t come from the color of the bricks or communism, but from the name in Russian, Krásnaya, once meaning “beautiful” before its meaning changed to “red.” This large plaza is what you see on the cover of guide books and magazines for Moscow, with St. Basil’s Cathedral being the center piece next to Lenin’s Mausoleum surrounded by the Kremlin Wall. Of course, the Red Square attracts hordes of tourist due to the main attractions, but all that activity around an interesting atmosphere does provide street photo opportunities. It’s also the central square connecting to the city’s major streets, providing a good starting point to explore outward.

You’ll also find the popular pedestrian only Nikolskaya Street connecting the Red Square to Lubyanka Square. This line of expensive shops includes plenty of activity, while also leading you to another popular square. Filled with history rivaling any city, the Red Square and surrounding areas are the heart and soul of Russia.

2. Patriarch’s Ponds

Patriarch’s Ponds is one of the most exclusive neighborhoods in Moscow. Despite the name being plural, there’s only one large pond, but it’s worth a visit with your camera. It’s a popular spot for locals and expats to come relax or take a stroll around the pond. You get an interesting mix of young and old too, from young love to “babushkas” feeding pigeons. It’s a very peaceful park atmosphere in one of the nicer areas within the city center, while bringing enough activity for street photography. 

The pond is shallow and in the winter becomes a popular spot for ice-skating too. The area is also well-known for the location in the famous Russian novel, The Master and Margarita. 

3. Old Arbat (Stary Arbat)

Old Arbat is the most famous pedestrian street in Moscow, and dating back to the 15th century, also one of its oldest. Originally, it was an area of trade, but soon became the most prestigious residential area in Moscow. During the 18th century, Arbat started attracting the city’s scholars and artists, including Alexander Pushkin. Cafes lined the streets and impressive homes filled the neighborhood. Since then, New Arbat street was created as a highway in the area, while Old Arbat was paved for a 1km pedestrian only walkway.

Due to the historic buildings, famous artists that lived here, and the bohemian atmosphere, Old Arbat has become a big attraction for tourists today. Now, there’s a mix of cafes, restaurants, souvenir shops, street performers, street merchants and other attractions for visitors, and some locals, to come enjoy. It can get really busy here and there’s usually something interesting going on so it’s a good street to come walk with your camera for guaranteed life.

4. Gorky Park

One of the most famous places in Moscow is Gorky Park. The official name is Maxim Gorky’s Central Park of Culture & Leisure, which gives you an idea of what goes on here. When built, it was the first of its kind in the Soviet Union. Divided into two parts, it stretches along Moscow River. One end contains fair rides, foods stands, tennis courts, a sports club, a lake for boat rides, and more. This end brings more active life due to its number of attractions, while the other end is more relaxed, where you’ll find gardens, trees, older buildings, and an outdoor amphitheater.

Gorky Park attracts mostly locals so it’s a good spot to capture the non-tourist side of Moscow life. Muscovites come here to escape the city and unwind in a picturesque setting. The park remains alive outside of the warmer months too, especially when the lake turns into the city’s largest outdoor skating rink. I’d recommend taking the metro out here to spend at least half a day exploring the massive park’s life with your camera.

5. Maroseyka Street

Maroseyka Street is a popular area not too far from the Red Square. The long, winding street turns into Pokrovka and is lined with restaurants, cafes, bars and places to stay. It’s actually where I like to stay when I’m in Moscow due to its location and solid street photography opportunities itself. You have Kitay-gorod station near and if you keep walking southwest, you’ll get to the Red Square. But if you walk northwest, as it changes to Pokrovka, you can find a long street of activity for photography with its own interesting atmosphere.

6. Tverskoy Boulevard

Tverskoy Boulevard is the oldest and longest boulevard in Moscow, beginning at the end of Nikitsky Boulevard, and finishing at Pushkin Square, a spot to come for activity itself. The boulevard is made up of two avenues, with pedestrian walkways in-between. You’ll find grass, shrubbery, trees, benches and more walking it’s almost kilometer length. Many people come here to enjoy some relaxation, walk their dog, or just to use it to walk wherever they’re going. Its center location also provides a nice place to walk with your camera near plenty of other spots you’ll want to check out anyway.

Sample Street Walk:

For a full day of Street Photography, covering some of the best spots, you can follow this sample street walk for Moscow:

• Start your morning walking around the Red Square (1), while exploring the surrounding area, including Nikolskaya Street
• Then walk northwest to Patriarch’s Ponds (2) and slowly walk the pond and surrounding area with your camera
• Next, walk east to the Pushkin Monument and stroll down Tverskoy Boulevard (6)
• Once Tverskoy Boulevard (6) ends, it will turn into Nikitsky Boulevard. Follow this down until you get to the start of Old Arbat Street (3), across from Arbatskaya station
• After you’re done walking down Old Arbat Street (3) for more street photography, spend some time checking out Moscow’s beautiful metro stations
• To finish off the day with more street photography, get off the metro near Red Square (1) again, Maroseyka Street (5) or wherever you’re staying for the night.

3 Things I’ll Remember about Shooting in Moscow:

1. museum metro.

The Moscow metro system was the first underground railway system in the Soviet Union and today includes 203 stations across 340km of routes. The elaborate system has some of the deepest stations in the world too, with escalators that seem to go on forever. None of this is what makes it so special, though. Many of its stations feel like stepping inside a museum, making it without a doubt the most interesting and beautiful metro system I’ve been in.

When built, Stalin wanted to make the metro stations “palaces for the people” with marble, chandeliers, and grand architecture. The best part is the variety of architecture and styles used, making many of the stations a completely different experience visually. You could easily spend a whole day traveling the stations and there are even tours available for people who wish to do just that. My advice, though, would be just to buy a ticket and hop on and off at different stations, while exploring different lines. The museum-like surrounding mixed with the crowds of characters can make for a great photography experience.

Since there are so many stations, here are some of my favorites to check out:

• Novoslobodskaya
• Mayakovskaya
• Elektrozavodskaya
• Komsomolskaya
• Ploschad Revolyutsii
• Dostoyevskaya
• Prospekt Mira

2. Moscow is Big

It’s no secret that Moscow is a big city, but it can feel even bigger with how spread out much of it is. This is especially true if you compare it to cities outside of Asia. If I compared it to cities in Europe, I’d probably say only Istanbul would warrant more time to really discover the depths of this city. Most only explore around the Red Square and surrounding area, but that is such a small part of the city. Although, that central area does give you plenty to see on its own.

Fortunately, I had a good friend living in the city to show me around, but it opened up my eyes even more to how much there is to discover in Moscow. It’s a big city with a variety of atmosphere that can take you from “east” to “west” and trendy to rugged depending on where you go. I’d imagine you’d have to live here a while to really know the city.

3. Cosmopolitan Mix of East meets West

Modern skyscrapers mixed with amazing architecture, a world-class metro system with museum-like beauty, trendy fashion and chic clubs, Moscow is a rich mix of Russian culture and history in a more western cosmopolitan package. There is a push to keep the Russian culture, while also pushing forward with a modern metropolis the whole world will envy. This comes with an impressive skyline, that continues to grow, and endless modernities, but with soviet nostalgia and atmosphere mixed in for good measure.

Mixed in with this grand western cosmopolitan atmosphere, is a strong national pride in Russia. This includes their famous leader, Vladimir Putin. Maybe no other place will you see a country’s leader more often. All over, from the pricey tourist shops to the underground walkway stalls, you’ll find goods with Putin’s likeness covering them. From t-shirts to magnets to Matryoshka dolls. There’s a strong national pride that can be seen around the city, which also extends to their leader. Moscow is many things. It’s East meets West, modernizations meets Soviet era, and a whole lot more.

What To Do For a Street Photography Break?:

Eat at a stolovaya.

Stolovayas are Russian cafeterias that became popular in the Soviet days. You grab a tray and walk down the line of freshly prepared local dishes, and select whatever you want from the chefs. They’re usually inexpensive and a much better value than restaurants, while giving you the opportunity to try from a wide selection of everyday Russian food. They’re also very tasty. I always include some borsch on my tray and go from there. The places themselves are all over Moscow and usually come with Soviet-era aesthetics to complete the experience.

Street Safety Score: 7

*As always, no place is completely safe! So when I talk about safety, I’m speaking in general comparison to other places. Always take precaution, be smart, observe your surroundings and trust your instincts anywhere you go!

Being the 2nd largest city in Europe with over 12 million people, you’re going to have your dangerous areas, but for the most part, it feels safe walking around. Russia is statistically higher in crime compared to most of Europe, but this generally doesn’t apply to tourists and visitors. Around the Red Square and surrounding city center, you should feel completely safe walking around. Pick pocketing can happen, but no more than other touristic places. I always explore Moscow freely without coming across too much to worry about. It’s a spread out city, though, so of course it matters where you are. Just use basic street smarts, know where you are and Moscow shouldn’t give you a problem. 

People’s Reaction Score: 7

Moscow is fast paced, big city life, which usually means people aren’t too concerned with you, or your camera. I don’t find people notice or pay much attention to me when I’m out taking photos in Moscow. For the most part, people just go about their day. You shouldn’t get too many looks or concern. But it can depend on the area you are in. The more you stick out, the more you might get noticed with suspicions. I’ve never had any problems in Moscow, or Russia, but just be careful who you’re taking a photo of if you get out of the city center. Other than that, it’s about average for reactions. 

Street Tips:

Learn the alphabet .

Much of Moscow, including the metro system, doesn’t use english. The Russian alphabet uses letters from the Cyrillic script, which if you aren’t familiar with it and don’t know the sounds, can be hard to decipher the words. This is most important for street names and metro stops when trying to get around. It can save confusion and make it easier getting around if you learn the basic alphabet. At the very least then, you can sound out the words to see which are similar in the english conversion, which can help matching them to maps. When out shooting street photography, getting around is as important as anything. So save yourself some time and frustration by learning the Russian Alphabet.

Use the metro

While Saint-Petersburg feels very walkable for a city its size, Moscow can feel very spread out, even for its bigger size. Outside of the Red Square area, you can have plenty of walking before getting anywhere very interesting, so you’ll need to take the metro a lot if you really want to explore the city. Maps are deceiving here too, it will always be further than it looks.

Another reason it’s less walkable than Saint-Petersburg is its completely different set-up. Moscow’s streets are mostly contstructed in rings with narrow, winding streets in-between. This is common with medieval city cities that used to be confined by walls, but you usually don’t have it in a city this massive. Saint-Petersburg has a more grid-like pattern that also uses the canals to help you know your way around. When it comes to navigating on foot in Moscow, it can be more difficult, so bring a map and take the metro when needed. It’s why Moscow’s metro carries more passengers per day than the London and Paris subways combined.

Explore other areas if you have time

Moscow is really big. While most people stay around the Red Square within the Boulevard Ring, there’s so much more to the city. I covered some other spots outside of this circle, but if you really want to see the city, you’ll need time. If you do have time, some other areas I’d check out first are Zamoskvarechye, along some of the south and western Moscow.

Inspiration:

For some more inspiration, you can look through the Street Photography of Moscow photographer Artem Zhitenev  and check out 33 of my photos taken in Moscow .

Conclusion:

Moscow’s name brings a certain mystique, but once you’re there it might bring a different atmosphere than you expect. It’s big and sprawling, but beautiful in many ways. It can feel like a European capital on a grand scale, but you can definitely find its Russian side in there.

The urban sprawl of Moscow can be intimidating, but give it enough time and you’ll be rewarded with plenty to discover. All with the world’s best metro system to take you around.

I hope this guide can help you start to experience some of what Moscow contains. So grab your camera and capture all that Moscow has to offer for Street Photography!

If you still have any questions about shooting in Moscow, feel free to comment below or email me!

(I want to make these guides as valuable as possible for all of you so add any ideas on improvements, including addition requests, in the comment section!)

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To Live, Love and Die Hard in Moscow

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The red brick walls and fir-shaded alleys of Novodevichy Cemetery embrace Russia’s pantheon of writers, poets, cosmonauts and Communist leaders.

Those who knew Paul Tatum, a brash young businessman from Middle America, believe that he too deserves a place among the departed elite.

Like Communist revolutionary John Reed, another American who died trying to build a better Russia, Tatum had traded the security of his homeland to march in this country’s tumultuous vanguard.

While Reed was drawn to the red glow of communism, Tatum was lured by the green promise of its defeat.

Both men died before their time in the chaotic aftermath of revolution.

Reed, who succumbed to typhus in 1920 at the age of 33, lies buried at Russia’s most prestigious cemetery--the Kremlin wall.

Tatum, 41, was gunned down at dusk on a gray November day in Moscow. His ashes are stored in the basement morgue of Moscow’s Botkin Hospital, awaiting judgment.

The decision on his final resting place lies with the Moscow city government--his nemesis and the ruthless political machine from which many believe came the order to kill him.

While friends press on with the fight for a dignified interment, his enemies probably see the effort to bury him at Novodevichy as one last display of the impudence that proved his downfall.

The ghost of Paul Edward Tatum haunts every Westerner in Russia who has ever silently wondered: Could the worst really happen?

Was there some explanation why it happened to him? Was he so blinded by ambition that he failed to see the warnings? Was there some misstep along the way that marked him for coldblooded murder, some reason that would let those still here rest a bit more assured?

Tatum was born in 1955, sandwiched between two sisters in a devout Baptist family in the comfortable Oklahoma City suburb of Edmond. His father, Edward, had an insurance business that did well in the postwar quest for security. Like most mothers in those days, Millie Tatum stayed at home.

Young Tatum was a good student, a Boy Scout who once sang in the church choir. When the Tatums designed and built a new home in the early 1960s, he was set up in his own third-floor quarters where he would be unable to taunt his sisters.

More interested in books and TV than sports, Tatum broke his hip at the age of 12 and suffered a hernia when he tried to recover too quickly. The resulting yearlong absence from school precipitated a weight problem that nagged him through his life.

Persuasion Skills

At Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, where he studied business, Tatum proved his knack for persuasion.

“Paul was the kind of person who would put up fliers in dorms and organize ski trips so that he could go for free,” recalls Matt Seward, a friend from college and later his business partner.

During a “semester at sea” program that took Tatum around the world by ship, he paid his way by bending customs rules and selling cigarettes from duty-free port calls to consumers on land at a 300% markup.

When Ronald Reagan ran for president in 1980, Tatum, only 25, borrowed $10,000 to become a Republican “eagle,” winning entrance to the party’s most vaunted circles. At quarterly meetings of the big donors, he rubbed elbows with high rollers at Newport, Hilton Head, Palm Springs.

So charismatic was the young fund-raiser that he was named the Oklahoma GOP financial director and recruited more than a third of the 450 “eagles” signed up in Oklahoma in 1980. National party leaders rewarded him with an invitation to the 1981 inaugural ball.

At the time, Tatum was dating Mary Copeland, a state government clerical worker from Tecumseh, Okla., population 6,000, who was awed by his charm and ambition.

“He could be flamboyant at times,” she recalls. “He bought me a beautiful ball gown and whisked me off to the inauguration.”

That self-styled “small-town girl,” now Mary Fallin with a husband and two children, is lieutenant governor of Oklahoma.

Flaunting his money when he had it was, for Tatum, an irresistible indulgence; he once owned both a Porsche and a Ferrari. When he and Seward were putting together lucrative oil and land deals in Oklahoma City, he would splurge for family vacations to show his parents and sisters he had made it.

But his high rolling ended with the Penn Square Bank failure in 1982. Coinciding with the economic disaster that dried up Oklahoma oil money, the savings and loan crisis stripped Tatum of financing for his trade deals and left him broke and entangled in litigation.

He moved to Arizona, then to Orange County, returning on occasion to see what business life stirred in Oklahoma. In August 1985, old acquaintances in the Republican Party talked him into joining a Chamber of Commerce agricultural delegation to Moscow.

He arrived a mere five months into the heady leadership of Mikhail S. Gorbachev, but Tatum recognized at first glance that Russia would be his destiny.

“It was like standing on top of a mountain from where I could see everything--my past, present and future,” Tatum was to recall later. “I immediately felt that here, all my life’s hopes would be realized and that I would be able to affect the future in a greater way than I ever could in stable America.”

Appalled by the conditions on offer for visiting businessmen, he came up with the idea of creating a hotel and business center that would meet Western expectations. He embarked on the fund-raiser of a lifetime, forming Americom Business Centers in Irvine and approaching friends, fellow gamblers and anyone who owed him a favor. He canvassed his extensive contacts, drafting the likes of Watergate figure H.R. Haldeman to talk to the Radisson hotel chain and muscle together the money for the American half of a joint venture.

What was to become his obsession was in 1989 an unfinished hotel being built by Yugoslav contractors on the banks of the Moscow River. It was a time of tumult and dislocation in the Soviet Union, with the Communist economy crumbling but no capitalist foundation yet built in its place.

The Russian government was more than happy to let Western management and know-how move in. RadAmer--the partnership between Tatum and the Radisson chain--cinched a 20-year lease on the new hotel with the Soviet travel agency, Intourist, giving the Russians 50% of the profits, Tatum 40% and Radisson 10%.

Working with a single-mindedness born of the certainty that he had finally hit pay dirt, Tatum used his state connections to acquire rare international phone lines for the hotel and won permission to import quality furniture and equipment. The British Broadcasting Corp., Reuters news agency and an array of Western businesses abandoned their musty offices to set up in the swank new Radisson-Slavyanskaya.

During the first years after the June 1991 opening, “times were good, and everyone played well together,” says Margaret McLaren, an American who worked for Tatum.

Occupancy was phenomenal. The business center was packed. President Clinton stayed at the hotel during his January 1994 visit, the start of a year that saw a 50% operating profit and yet another transfer of ownership for the Russian side of the joint venture. After the Soviet Union collapsed and its Intourist agency with it, the hotel was inherited by the Moscow City Property Committee.

A Celebrity in Moscow

Tatum soon began exploring other hotel ventures in the Czech Republic, Yugoslavia and across Russia. The picture he painted for those back home was one of boundless opportunity, a canvas spanning 12 time zones between the Austrian border and Alaska where his was still the only hotel up to international standards.

With his Armani suits and Burberry trench coat and the hotel’s fleet of chauffeured luxury cars at his service, the pudgy Oklahoman with flyaway blond hair became a celebrity in Moscow.

He reveled in the role of eligible bachelor, cruising the party circuit with other well-heeled pioneers in the Wild East atmosphere of the new Russia. Spandex- and leather-clad trophy girls of the clubs and casinos hung on both arms.

“He always went around with girls, but he wasn’t really with them,” says Herb Van Dyke, a frequent Tatum companion on the club crawls. “He would always tell girls he was looking for a woman who would bear him seven children,” Van Dyke recalls, mimicking the horrified reactions of the young women.

While riding high, Tatum brought his whole family to Russia for a fortnight in 1993, treating his parents, sisters, nephews and nieces to helicopter tours of this city--his city--and forays into the countryside he had yet to conquer. His sister Robin and her husband, Rick Furmanek, stayed on for a year to work for Tatum.

By 1994, Tatum was anxious to expand. Big on ideas but only a minority partner, he criticized Radisson for being too complaisant, content to milk its one cash cow when it could be acquiring whole new farms. The Russian partners sided with Radisson, preferring to rake in what they could today rather than invest in an uncertain tomorrow.

The fight over the direction of the company soon became a fight for control. Temperamentally unsuited for compromise, Tatum went on the offensive.

He sued for breach of contract. He cut off the phone lines to the office of Vladimir Draitser, the joint venture director. Draitser retaliated by posting security guards at the hotel entrance to bar Tatum. That worked for a few days. Then Tatum pushed back in with his own bodyguards, who would accompany him day and night until the day he died.

Tatum’s most crucial error was misunderstanding the culture of business in Russia, says his lawyer and friend, Ray Markovich.

“Although he only controlled 40%, he really treated it like his baby, which rubbed a lot of people the wrong way,” says the attorney still fighting Tatum’s battles in court.

“He made the fundamental error of applying U.S. concepts--the rags-to-riches idea, Horatio Alger, David and Goliath--as if it was a movie,” Markovich says. “Maybe it happens that way 20% of the time in America, but it almost never happens that way here.”

The rules are different in Russia, and Tatum thought he knew them. He relished the unconstricted environment reminiscent of America in the 1950s, when smoking, joking and carousing were expressions of success. But a fellow businessman says Tatum erred in “acting like a Russian, then thinking he could still call in the U.S. Cavalry when he got in too deep.”

In the spring of 1994, Radisson sued to dissolve its partnership with Tatum. It was an act that could have led to Tatum’s ruin, and he knew it. Dissolution of the U.S. partnership would abrogate its 20-year lease and leave the lucrative hotel complex in the sole hands of Moscow. (Despite their dispute, Radisson officials would, after Tatum’s death, praise him as “a courageous entrepreneur who was a pioneer in bringing American business into Russia.”)

While the American partners squabbled, Umar Dzhabrailov arrived on the scene to head the Russian half of the joint venture. Like Tatum, Dzhabrailov was a dapper, ambitious man, and the two hit it off for a while.

When they fell out, suddenly and bitterly and for reasons neither side’s allies seem to understand, Dzhabrailov tried to pack the joint venture’s board with figures loyal to the city. Tatum deemed the moves illegal and said they were an attempt to dilute his power so as to allow “Mafia rule.”

Tatum began wearing a bulletproof vest and beefed up his bodyguard contingent, although friends say those moves were mainly theatrics. He called news conferences and issued statements so often that journalists began to avoid him.

“Paul believed very much in the fourth branch of government--the press,” Markovich says. “He way overdid the publicity thing and offended a lot of people.”

Defying Warnings

The tension eventually turned violent. One bodyguard was stabbed in the chest outside Tatum’s hotel room one night and was told to warn his boss it was “high time for Paul to leave.”

Unflinchingly defiant, Tatum announced: “I’m here until they carry me out.”

He turned up the heat and adopted his enemies’ tactics. When Dzhabrailov accused him of embezzling, he countered that the Chechen businessman was using the hotel to launder money and house criminal gangs. Burly men in leather jackets had indeed been plying the glitzy foyer, and a casino and currency-exchange office had moved in. Moscow’s only international press center, originally founded on the ground floor, was forced out by a staggering rent increase.

As hostility escalated into soap-operatic confrontation, Tatum demanded an outside audit and a ruling from the International Court for Arbitration in Stockholm. His angry partners cut off his access to all bank accounts and halted payment of his share of the monthly profit. For the last 18 months of his life, Tatum bummed money, cigarettes and sympathy from friends.

Through it all, Tatum maintained his posture of mover and shaker, champion of democracy, doer of good deeds. He and Natalya Bokadorova, a kindred spirit in his love of Russian culture, worked tirelessly to form a board of sponsors for the cash-strapped Bolshoi Theater. Devoted to children although he never married or had one of his own, he cobbled together a “Toys for Tots” program for Moscow’s army of poor and once promised to buy an English dictionary for every child in a 400-student schoolhouse.

Even when cut out of the hotel business, Tatum was constantly in motion. “He was a meeting maniac,” Van Dyke says. “Sometimes he would have 15, 20 meetings a day.”

But it was often only keeping up appearances. “People thought he could do more for them than he actually could,” Van Dyke says.

Generous beyond his means, Tatum often disappointed people, like the children at the school who never got their dictionaries. But the role of would-be philanthropist soothed an ego dented by his disintegrating business.

The ritual and ceremony of the Russian Orthodox religion gave him some solace. During his salad days, he had made a donation to the city campaign to rebuild Christ the Savior Cathedral, and that had earned him an engraved place on its marble tribute to key sponsors. Spiritually bereft in a strange and hostile country, he was studying Orthodoxy and contemplating conversion.

“He told me several times that this country was his fate,” says Igor Kharichev, a friend and political advisor on the staff of President Boris N. Yeltsin.

In a moment of candor, Tatum told Kharichev that he felt such a forceful familiarity with Russia it made him believe in the possibility of reincarnation.

Links to Leaders

Certainly, Tatum loved the way his status put him in touch with those in power.

He had supported Yeltsin during his 1991 standoff with Communist hard-liners, offering the defenders of democracy use of what was then rare--a cell phone. He felt he had helped good triumph over evil.

The hotel played host to every notable U.S. delegation that hung its hat in Moscow, affording grip-and-grin shots with world leaders and entertainers. Friends rolled their eyes at the umpteenth telling of how he had squired actress Sharon Stone around Moscow during her visit.

But the hotel dispute was beginning to taint his social standing. When Clinton came to Moscow for last April’s nuclear security summit, White House handlers decided a presidential photo op with Tatum would be too controversial. McLaren had a picture of her own meeting with the president but, attuned to her boss’ feelings, she never hung it in her office.

“Paul said to me more than once that he was too visible for anything to happen to him. He started believing himself,” she remembers. “No matter what anyone told him, he started pushing things too far.”

As his cash dwindled and fair-weather friends began to avoid him, Tatum’s devotion to saving his business bordered on obsession.

“It was his baby. It was his life, his breath and his passion,” McLaren says. “It was all that he had, and he felt like they were trying to take it away from him.”

McLaren describes the bodyguards and girlfriends as “window dressing” that covered a truly lonely existence. “I’d like to think it was otherwise, but Paul didn’t really have anyone close to him. He’d do anything for anyone, but he really didn’t have a best friend.”

The war between Tatum and Umar--as Dzhabrailov is universally known--became bitter. They communicated by memo when contact was essential. Mostly their points were made with lawsuits and court orders.

Some U.S. officials have suggested that it was Umar who killed Tatum, and although his contempt for his former partner is palpable, he is seen by those with a closer view of Moscow as more likely the city’s fall guy.

From behind his polished desk and a plate of handmade chocolates, Umar fidgets with his cellular phone as he describes how he felt toward Tatum.

“This guy behaved badly toward me--toward my friends, toward my family,” says the slight executive with a nervous habit of shaking out his 1960s Beatles-style hair. “He told lies about me. He talked about Chechen gangsters, just because I’m a Chechen.”

He casts Tatum as the villain--the one in the partnership who wanted to cut legal corners. With hand over his heart in a gesture of sincerity, Umar says he couldn’t abide stealing. Neither could he have killed his onetime friend, the city’s steward insists with equal emotion. “I could not raise my hand against one to whom I had once extended it as a friend,” he says. When Tatum was locked out during his clash with Draitser, Umar took the American in.

“Paul used to always say, ‘What goes around comes around,’ ” says Umar--a fitting epitaph for the man who he feels betrayed him.

Public Accusations

What destroyed the relationship between Tatum and him remains a mystery. But the American was notorious for publicly accusing the Moscow power structure of rot, violence and corruption.

At a March 1995 dinner party in the suburb of Zelenograd, attended by Moscow dignitaries, Tatum launched into a diatribe about Moscow Mayor Yuri M. Luzhkov and the “capital mob,” saying that no one wanted to do business with city officials because of the corruption.

“You could have heard a pin drop--it got so quiet at the table,” recalls Steve Gray, a Tulsa, Okla., attorney and old Tatum acquaintance who was at the dinner.

By the time his appeal was taken up by the arbitration court in Stockholm, Tatum was broke. Already in debt to friends, he had no prayer of borrowing the $600,000 needed to make his case.

He hit upon a rescue mission for himself: freedom bonds.

The idea was classic Tatum. Gambling that he would win the court case, he offered a 100% return on all investments by April 2, 1997, his 42nd birthday. He cast the bond issue as the ante that would win security and investor rights, the imposition of a little order on the wild frontier. He hawked his bonds in full-page ads in the daily Moscow Times.

As he prepared to give testimony to the Stockholm court last October, Tatum had reason for optimism. He had located the original registration of his company and thought it supported his position that the city had violated the agreement.

It was time, his friend and business advisor Robert Brown believed, for Tatum to keep his mouth shut and be patient. But the strident Tatum wouldn’t listen.

“He had this one bad habit. When he got a hold of something, he would tell everyone about it,” Brown says with regret. “He went around waving the evidence under their noses and calling the press.”

Then, Tatum got a warning. On Saturday, Oct. 26, as he sat alone watching Demi Moore in “Striptease” at the Americom movie theater in the hotel, two armed Moscow policemen burst in and removed him. He was accused of entering without a ticket.

There was an argument and a brief scuffle, as the police refused to heed his claims of being the theater’s owner. Americom colleagues were summoned and tempers cooled.

Three days later, Tatum waited for his friend Kharichev, the political advisor, at Moscow’s funky Starlight Diner, a neon and aluminum eatery that dishes up burgers and meatloaf, comfort food for homesick Americans.

“I saw him sitting in the bar, having a Coke and waiting for someone,” recalls an American businesswoman. “I didn’t know him all that well, but I went up to him and told him how much I admired what he was doing. I told him I thought he had real courage standing up to these people. He just said, ‘Someone has to do it.’ ”

That was a sentiment harbored by many foreign entrepreneurs, that the battle for fairness should be fought but that someone other than themselves should wage it.

“Paul was a flag bearer for those who do business here, and all of us, openly or secretly, hoped he would win,” businessman Thomas DeShazo was to tell mourners at Tatum’s memorial two weeks later.

Kharichev showed up at the diner with a banker friend interested in helping democratic candidates in the provinces. Although Tatum was distracted by his worries over the hotel, the political action committee seemed to be coming together, and the trio agreed to meet again Sunday at the same place.

Tatum spent much of his last days alone, holed up in his hotel room while bodyguards played cards by the door. He told an interviewer that he was reading the latest Frederick Forsyth espionage novel and that it had fascinating parallels to his own plight. In the novel, “Icon,” Moscow in 1999 is in the death grip of corruption, and the American hero conspires with a Chechen hotelier and warlord named Umar to rescue Russia from ruin.

“I asked him how the story ended,” journalist Sergei Mitrofanov says of the discussion he had with Tatum in late October. “He said he hadn’t finished it, that he would tell me later.”

In the novel, the American and Chechen hang together and succeed in thwarting a bloody nationalist coup.

On Nov. 1, two days before his death, Tatum underwent another mood swing, bursting into McLaren’s office to announce that he had been inducted into a Russian fraternity of descendants of Scottish knights.

His friend Bokadorova smiles as she recalls his childlike pleasure: “It made him feel like he belonged.”

“On Friday, it was like he had been given the keys to the city,” McLaren says, smiling over the last memory of her colleague. “Those were the fun things with Paul. He thought that was the height of cool--to hell with business.”

Mother’s Dream

The night before his Sunday meeting, Tatum’s mother called. She had dreamed the night before that her son had come home to surprise them. He had not visited for several years, and his phone calls had become less frequent as he sank deeper into financial despair. The dream “was so real, I had actually started down the stairs,” his mother says. When she talked with him that Saturday, “he still sounded upbeat.”

Like all who were close to him, Tatum’s mother concedes that “he wasn’t perfect. We realize he could be very obstinate and overconfident. It was just that he had this dream.”

Meanwhile, elsewhere in Moscow, the owner of a battered Zhiguli sedan had a windfall. A man approached him at the automotive flea market, offering $5,000 in cash, no questions asked.

As dusk grew to darkness about 5 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 3, the Zhiguli idled outside the hotel as Tatum exited and descended into the nearby Kievskaya subway entrance, headed for the diner to meet Kharichev. As he reached the foot of the bleak stone steps, a single gunman opened fire from the parapet around the stairway. Twenty shots rang out, and 11 ripped through Tatum. He died 30 minutes later, just as the confusion had subsided enough so that an emergency medical crew was summoned. The murder weapon, a Kalashnikov free of fingerprints, was left at the scene in a plastic bag. The abandoned Zhiguli was found two hours later, just across the river, stripped of any contents or clues save an empty soda can on a back floor mat.

What little property Tatum had left consisted mostly of paintings. They had been loaded onto a truck in mid-October, when he was forced to give up a Boulevard Ring apartment he never lived in because he couldn’t afford furniture or another year’s $40,000 rent. The truck has since gone missing.

His business files, keepsakes, clothes and impressive video collection remain under police seal in his offices and in Suites 850 and 852 at the Radisson-Slavyanskaya, the space that was his home for half a decade. The Moscow prosecutor’s office ordered the premises off limits for the investigation.

As with most of the 500 or so other contract murders in Russia last year, no one has been arrested for killing Tatum. City officials refuse to talk about the case, but detectives say privately that the trail has gone cold.

The same might be said about the effort to bury Tatum.

Although the city government promised an answer by late December, the appeal is still pending.

Bokadorova, now back at her job teaching Russian at the University of Grenoble in France, still occasionally inquires about the interment request among indifferent city officials. The U.S. Embassy, formally the Tatum family’s representative in the burial effort, has relegated the case to the list of unsettled issues to be raised at each diplomatic meeting.

Tatum’s friends say they will press on with the campaign to inter him in Novodevichy, not just to give him a proper burial but to let their outspoken friend have the last word.

“Being buried in Moscow would probably please him,” Seward says. “He would really like that idea--that even when they killed him, they couldn’t get rid of him.”

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AMERICAN SLAIN IN MOSCOW

Businessman gunned down gangland-style.

MOSCOW, NOV. 4 -- One of the best-known American businessmen in Russia died in a hail of automatic rifle fire Sunday afternoon near a luxury hotel whose control was in bitter dispute between him and the city of Moscow.

His death prompted a stern call from the United States today for a "very aggressive investigation."

Paul Tatum, 41, a high-profile pioneer in Moscow's rough-and-tumble real estate market, was murdered gangland-style about 100 yards from the front gates of the riverfront Radisson-Slavyanskaya Hotel, where President Clinton has stayed on trips to the city. Two of Tatum's bodyguards were reportedly injured in the attack, which took place on the steps leading down to one of Moscow's busiest subway stations.

In Washington, State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns said, "The United States deplores the murder of Mr. Tatum. We are working with the Russian government to try to make sure that the Russian government mounts a very aggressive investigation, a criminal investigation, into this brutal murder of an American citizen," the Reuter news service reported.

Burns said at a news briefing today that the slaying was at least the second time an American businessman has been murdered in Moscow in recent years "and we are very, very concerned about it."

The murder stunned the American business community here, of which Tatum was a singularly colorful, well-known and long-standing member. Russian entrepreneurs and Moscow underworld figures are occasionally the victims of car bombs, pipe bombs and assassins, but Americans doing business in Russia largely have been immune from violence.

Nonetheless, the public and nasty nature of Tatum's drawn-out fight with his partners at the hotel tempered the shock over his shooting. Tatum had made it clear that he knew he was at risk, seldom venturing out in public without bodyguards and often wearing a bulletproof vest under his business attire.

"People are very disturbed, very upset," said Peter Charow, executive director of the American Chamber of Commerce in Russia. "This is something I'm not sure we expected would never happen. But certainly to have one of our own -- a representative of the American investment community -- assassinated on the streets of Moscow is something we had not yet seen. It sent a chill down people's spines."

Tatum was a founding partner and president of Americom Business Centers, which owns 40 percent of a Russian-American joint venture that ran the four-star hotel. The other major shareholder in the venture -- and Tatum's main antagonist in the fight to control the hotel -- is the Moscow City Property Committee, which owns 50 percent.

The Minnesota-based Radisson Corp., which has a 10 percent stake in the hotel, sided with the Moscow property committee in the dispute, and together they were trying to evict Tatum from his suite of offices on the hotel's eighth floor.

Before coming to Russia, Tatum, a native of Edmond, Okla., made money in his home state in real estate and oil investments, then lost most of it in a bank failure. According to the Moscow Times, he formed Americom Business Centers in the late 1980s, then attracted a group of partners that included H.R. Haldeman, Richard Nixon's one-time chief of staff. Haldeman died in 1992.

When launched in 1990, the joint venture to create the hotel broke new ground. It was one of the first and most ambitious deals to open a world-class hotel in Moscow -- a 430-room showcase with opulent shops, restaurants, conference rooms, business facilities and a fitness center. It began showing English-language films, attracted high-profile tenants, including the Moscow bureaus of NBC News and Reuter, and became a magnet for jet-set Russians and visiting business executives.

But control of the partnership became strained, and the conflict peaked in 1994 when Tatum, who also lived in the hotel, tried to evict the director of the joint venture. He failed, and his partners retaliated by posting guards at the hotel entrance and barring him entry for two weeks. When he returned, he had a dozen bodyguards in tow.

The fight flared again this year when Tatum and an assistant tried to stop the joint venture from removing equipment from a store in the hotel. Police ejected Tatum from the store, but the incident aggravated the hard feelings between the partners.

Tatum publicly blamed Umar Dzhabrailov, a representative of the Moscow Property Committee and acting director of the joint venture, for trying to cut him out of the hotel. He also alleged that Dzhabrailov was an organized-crime kingpin.

Dzhabrailov called Tatum's slaying "an awful tragedy" and said it was unrelated to the litigation in Russia and the West over control of the hotel. "He was surrounded by strange people lately," Dzhabrailov said. "I think this {his murder} is connected with his personal financial dealings. It shouldn't affect the work of the joint venture."

As tensions increased, Tatum reported to the police that he had been threatened, Interfax news agency reported. Journalists and friends asked Tatum why he did not leave the country, but he called Russia an "entrepreneur's heaven." Some, however, believed that it was not simply the opportunity to make money that kept him in Moscow. "It's not as if {Tatum} was the employee of a multinational corporation," said Charow. "So he couldn't just get the next plane out. This was his investment, this was his business. You create something like this with your own bare hands and it's hard to walk away from it."

Tatum's corpse, with 11 bullet wounds from a Kalashnikov assault rifle, was shown on Russian television tonight in graphic detail. Police said a single gunman shot Tatum as he entered the subway. There was one report of a white Zhiguli sedan -- perhaps the most common car in Moscow -- speeding from the scene.

According to Interfax, the assailant left behind a plastic bag containing a Kalashnikov, three bullets and five cartridge cases. In Washington, spokesman Burns said the United States is prepared to cooperate in the probe if Russia were to make such a request. CAPTION: Paul Tatum, shown here in his Moscow office last year, was slain about 100 yards from the hotel over which he was in a bitter dispute for control.

Symbol Matches

Symbol starts with, company matches.

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The Radisson was something of a gem, by Moscow standards. Tatum and his partners had taken a desolate, pre-perestroika concrete skeleton and transformed it into a gathering place for foreign and Russian entrepreneurs, with a steak house, Parisian fashion boutiques, and a glittering lobby bar. In 1990, Presidents George Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev had blessed the 430-room riverfront tower as a shining example of the role joint ventures could play in Russia's slow, sanctioned march away from Communism.

But by 1996, the Radisson had become a model of how severely such ventures could go wrong. The Russian stake had changed hands three times and was being administered by a charming young Chechen whom Tatum suspected of having ties to the mob. Western lenders, fearful of Moscow's deteriorating business climate, had turned down Tatum's loan applications. Tatum had appealed to the public for funds to pursue his lawsuit, hoping other Western businessmen would, in effect, invest in his $35 million damages claim.

So when a call came late on a Sunday afternoon last November from someone with information--or offering to help finance his case, was it?--Tatum leaped to the phone. After a rapid conversation in English, he grabbed his coat and headed with two bodyguards for the dingy metro station a stone's throw from the Radisson. Tatum's Russian partners long before had taken away his cream-colored Mercedes. Lately the metro was the safest means for him to get around anyway, and certainly the cheapest. Bankers and other important people "got killed in cars," he reminded anyone who would listen.

The three men--Tatum in the middle, a bodyguard fore and aft--hustled out the hotel gates and past the Kievsky train station's pageant of kiosks, cabbies, and street vendors. They took the first steps down to the seedy underpass below, and in the darkening five o'clock hour, Tatum's killer, his Kalashnikov rifle wrapped in a plastic bag, took aim.

Very few, except perhaps Tatum himself, foresaw that the son of Edmond, Oklahoma, would die by violence. True, in the seven years he spent in Moscow, friends came to see Tatum as a sort of crusader defending foreign investors' rights in the ever more barbarous Russian business environment. And critics--he had many--felt his inability to let go of a project that outgrew him had drawn Tatum into an obsessive, deliberately public battle for control. But until now, Western business people had been mostly immune from the gangland brutality passing for commerce in Russia. Tatum often said he carried a shield: He believed that if he kept his case firmly in the public eye, he might safely wage the kind of anti-mafia battle that other businessmen only wished they could. He took out newspaper ads, gave interviews promiscuously, and sought out politically connected Muscovites. "In our joint venture, and in most cases where there are problems, there is fringe or deep mafia involvement, and people are scared to put themselves at risk," Tatum said in an interview seven weeks before his death. "I have put myself so much in the open that it's only later when I'm going to have to worry."

For a Westerner, Tatum was reasonably well connected in Moscow--among other things, he had scrambled over the barricades of the besieged parliament building during the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991 to offer Boris Yeltsin's aides the use of his cellular phone--but he remained a naif in many ways. He ended up running a multimillion-dollar venture more on the strength of persuasive charm than of expertise. "Paul had not had any business experience running a company," says Bernie Rome, one of Tatum's original backers.

But Tatum was a convincing talker from his earliest days. When he was an undergraduate at Oklahoma State University, he persuaded friends to pool the money to send him on a "semester at sea" aboard a sort of sailing classroom. He tasted travel, and commerce too: On the streets of Tunis, he earned a quick 300% profit and a few thousand dollars selling cigarettes bought from the captain of his ship.

Tatum dropped out of college after his junior year and made what was, for a young person, a clever but genuinely odd career move: He borrowed $10,000 and donated it to the Republican National Committee. A donation that size made a person a "Republican Eagle" and guaranteed a certain amount of access. Tatum, perceiving a route to prominence, plunged into GOP fundraising in Oklahoma.

It was on an Oklahoma trade mission to Russia in 1985 that Tatum fell under the spell that Gorbachev's perestroika had cast on much of the West: a market of nearly 200 million Russians hungry for Levi's jeans, and Detroit cars with automatic transmission. Tatum took special note of the bewildered foreign businessmen negotiating million-dollar deals on crackling phones in drab Soviet hotel rooms. What Moscow needed, he was sure, was a place for these people to do business: a shiny, Western-style hotel and business center in the heart of the capital, where corporate cowboys could get a room, buy a bourbon, rent an office, do a deal. "It was as if I found myself standing on a mountaintop from which I could see everything; my past, my present, and my future," he said later.

Tatum knew his deal had to be a joint venture. Gorbachev had just legalized them, and about the only way Western businessmen could penetrate this market was to take a Russian partner. Tatum needed a Western partner too: he had no money and no idea how to build or run a hotel. Now his Republican Party ties paid off. Tatum formed a company called Americom Business Centers in 1989, and H.R. "Bob" Haldeman, Nixon's former chief of staff, out of jail and dabbling in hotels, hooked up Americom with Apollo Acquisitions, a tiny holding company in Florida that was publicly traded, had cash to invest, and was looking for a good idea. Apollo and Americom merged.

That same year, Tatum found his property: a gray, half-finished monstrosity on Moscow's Berezhkovskaya Embankment, facing east toward the Moscow River. It was owned by Intourist, the Soviet tourism monolith, which wanted to erect a hotel that could earn hard--that is, foreign--currency.

Tatum started talking to big U.S. hotel chains and found that Radisson Hotels International was itching to establish a beachhead in the Soviet Union, then a closed market. And so a three-headed joint venture was born: Tatum's Americom held a 40% stake, Radisson 10%, and Intourist 50%. Radisson would manage the hotel's rooms and restaurants, and Americom would manage its retail shops, office space, and other services. The venture was called Intourist-RadAmer Hotel and Business Center.

Of course, there were problems, as there always were in Russia. Intourist was still run by Soviet bureaucrats; the Yugoslav construction company refused to hand over the master keys after finishing the hotel, wanting to cut itself in on the deal; Radisson was testy about which floors would serve as hotel rooms and which Americom would lease as office space to business clients.

But by 1990 the Radisson Slavyanskaya (meaning "Slavic") was up and running, and it quickly became Moscow's poshest new address. Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Warren Christopher, and their armies of security men swarmed over the hotel during summits with Yeltsin; Sharon Stone sashayed across its polished marble floors; the NBC and Reuters Moscow news bureaus anchored the high-hat tenant list. In the hotel's European restaurants, expatriates clinked imported beers and ate sirloins, grateful to escape the slog of daily life in Russia, if only for a few hours.

Then, the ground shifted.

Western businesses learned quickly that the "Wild East" held many perils, and all of them seemed to befall Tatum's venture. First, the Soviet Union came apart. No one knew what belonged to whom, or whether contracts signed under Soviet rule would remain valid. In Radisson's case, the new Russian Federation fell to sparring with the old Soviet tourism machine about who owned the Slavyanskaya property. After months of wrangling, ownership was transferred to the Moscow City Council, and Tatum found himself with a new Russian dance partner. That spooked Tatum's banks in the West, which withdrew their promise of roughly $20 million in commercial loans. Tatum decided to run the Americom business center from cash flow, violating the original joint venture charter and enraging his new Russian partners. But Tatum felt he had no choice: There were offices to renovate, furniture to buy, salaries to pay.

Outside the Slavyanskaya's climate-controlled opulence, a new class of biznesmeni--some of them legitimately self-made millionaires, most of them not--cropped up almost overnight. Once-underground mafia like Moscow's Solntsevo ("Sunny") gang, bosses of the shadow economy in the Soviet years, were criminalizing nearly every facet of Russia's economy. The new musclebound tycoons donned black turtlenecks and Armani blazers to party in members-only night spots like the Metelitsa casino and the exclusive Up and Down club. Foreign cars of every make cruised like sharks over Moscow's crumbling streets. Hoods murdered elderly pensioners for their newly privatized apartments. When consumer price inflation hovered around 1,600% between 1992 and 1993, housewives worked late shifts as casino prostitutes to make ends meet; policemen would sometimes give them a lift to their shifts, if bribed on time.

Murder evolved into a business strategy, and high-profile killings were an early part of Russia's post-Communist collective memory. Vladislav Listyev, the popular television journalist, was shot dead outside his apartment in a crime linked to control of the lucrative TV advertising market. Ivan Kivelidi, chairman of the Russian Business Round Table, was killed by nerve toxin, applied, it was said, to his telephone receiver. The year 1995 produced roughly 560 recorded contract killings. Police solved just 60; of them, two-thirds were found to have been committed by the victims' bodyguards.

The Russian business community was decimated. "I take a look around this room," says Oleg Kiselev, the new president of the Russian Business Round Table, "and I see about a dozen empty seats. All my friends."

The deliberate, gangland-style killing remained a Russian affair, however. When Western businessmen were threatened, they generally fled. A few, though, like Tatum, clung to the peculiarly American belief that Russia would bend to the inevitability of progress, free markets, the rule of law, and the force of their will.

In a baldly political move, President Yeltsin in 1993 handed Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov exclusive control over privatization of property and businesses within the city limits, in effect a monopoly on one of Europe's most lucrative real estate markets. So Tatum had a new Russian partner once again: the Moscow City Property Committee, which overnight rose up as the most potent agency in town, a smoothly running profit center with a percentage cut in nearly every Russian and foreign business setting up shop. The Property Committee eventually settled on a dapper Chechen businessman, Umar Dzhabrailov, to represent its interest in the Radisson Slavyanskaya.

For the moment, though, Tatum's major problem was with his American partners, who accused him of using money from the company to live above his means. Nights he could be found at Moscow's decadent hot spots seated at a front table, waving hundred-dollar bills at Russian ecdysiasts. Tatum's backers sued him in Florida, alleging misuse of company assets. "Tatum told investors what they wanted to hear until he got what he needed," says James McDonough, founder of Apollo Acquisitions, the company that merged with Americom. "The court was his friend when it could fend people off, but the law didn't apply to him. When he broke it, he'd say, 'Go ahead and sue me. I'm in Russia...you can't do anything to me.' "

Radisson too was flexing its muscles. It provided stopgap funding during the venture's cash crunch, and it claimed that in return it was owed a larger stake in the RadAmer partnership. Tatum sued Radisson, and that same day, Radisson sued him back. John Norlander, then president of Radisson Hotels International, says, "We wanted to manage a hotel and ... to expand globally. He wanted the same thing, we thought, and to manage the business center for fees." But the headstrong Tatum hated ceding as much as a hint of control, even when his financial straits called for compromise. Radisson and Americom began to clash over everything, swapping accusations of bad management and shoddy bookkeeping. Eventually, in 1994, Radisson went to court in Minneapolis and sought to have its partnership with Americom dissolved. As Norlander describes it, "Paul had a personal problem that spilled over into a business problem."

Tatum began to tell associates about plans to bring in a deep-pocketed rescuer to solve his cash difficulties. "As soon as he gets here, you'll see," Tatum said of a reputedly wealthy Pakistani he'd invited to Moscow. The investor never showed up, getting only as far as Frankfurt's airport before being arrested for shoplifting.

In 1995, a federal judge in Minneapolis ruled that Radisson and Americom should sever their partnership, each retaining independently its stake in the Moscow property. In his ruling, the judge said the partnership should be dissolved, partly because the parties were "unable to trust each other." By that time, though, Tatum had much bigger problems.`

Inside the hotel, the tone had changed. Tatum's Russian partners kicked out the nonprofit International Press Center for nonpayment of rent and talked of filling the space with a disco, or worse, a casino. The lobby bar had a new clientele. Men in black turtlenecks with lumps under their blazers began to outnumber the ex-pats in suits and ties. Leggy Russian jezebels strolled in and out of the hotel's retail stores, looking bored and fetching in Chanel suits and impossibly high heels.

In the spring of 1994, Tatum accused the joint venture's general director, a man named Vladimir Draitser (whom Tatum himself had recruited) of embezzling funds. Tatum cut Draitser's phone lines and access to bank accounts, barred him from the hotel, and declared his contract expired. Draitser posted a brigade of guards at the Slavyanskaya entrance to keep Tatum out. Not long afterward, a crack team of Moscow police raided the hotel lobby bar and held ten alleged gangsters at gunpoint.

"There has been a putsch," Tatum reported breathlessly at an impromptu press conference that day in the hotel driveway. No one could figure out who called the police. But suddenly there were lots of guns being pointed around the Slavyanskaya.

Tatum won a court order allowing him back into the hotel. He returned with a battalion of bodyguards and refused to leave, camping out in his office. He might have left the country, but as his old friend Matt Seward puts it, "It was still Paul's dream, and still Paul that made it happen. If it were your dream, and your tens of millions of dollars, would you leave?"

Tatum didn't have the kind of formal government support enjoyed by multinationals like Exxon or British Telecom, with billion-dollar investment carrots to dangle in front of Russian industry. Seward, for one, believes that "if Paul had been an executive at a Fortune 500 company instead of an entrepreneur, he'd still be alive." But he wasn't, so he bet his life on the courts, and on the power of publicity.

Tatum began telling reporters that Umar Dzhabrailov, the city of Moscow's representative on the joint venture's board, was a Chechen mafia lord. (Much later, Dzhabrailov was identified by the Russian Interior Ministry as a "known contract killer, and one of a handful of Chechen mafia bosses operating in Moscow.") When President Clinton arrived at the hotel for a summit meeting, Tatum handed out 300-page binders documenting his legal battles and accusing Moscow officials of corruption in their dealings with the hotel business. He titled this tome The Environment for Business Success in Russia; on the cover, in bold red letters, was printed the word DECEASED.

On Valentine's day 1995, one of Tatum's bodyguards, on his way back from the bathroom to Americom's offices, was stabbed in the chest with a penknife. His assailant said, "Tell Paul it's high time he left for home." Tatum hired a 24-hour brigade of guards, started wearing a bulletproof vest, and began using a cellular phone exclusively, contending his phone lines were bugged.

For the better part of a year, the Slavyanskaya resembled a chessboard. The Russian side forced out tenants that hadn't paid; Tatum let them back in with his master key so they could continue supporting him in his fight against the joint venture.

That April, Tatum decided to pitch what he hoped would be a decisive battle, filing a $35 million lawsuit against the Moscow City Property Committee for discriminating against foreign investors. The case would be heard in Stockholm at an international arbitration court, which increasingly had been sought out by embittered Westerners seeking an escape route from deteriorating joint ventures. But Tatum needed $150,000 to pay court costs. So he took out full-page ads in Moscow newspapers offering to sell investors "Freedom bonds," promissory notes that would pay back a 100% return in six months, when he expected to be flush with court-awarded winnings. The bonds were to mature on April 2, 1997, his 42nd birthday.

In an interview at the Slavyanskaya shortly before he was killed, Tatum was asked whether, considering the circumstances, Freedom Bonds might be a bit of a risk. "In one sense, they're risky," Tatum sighed, as if he had considered it for the first time. "But in another sense, they're something that people can support without being noticed. You can vote for the good guys and get rewarded." Then he smiled winningly. As Star Trek music played on his computer, he said, "Like war bonds, which provided money to fight World War II, Freedom Bonds allow us the right to fight for freedom of investment, safety in investment, all of the words of investors' rights. Is this society one of the rule of law and of civil means, or is it a society of whoever has the biggest gun or the most money to pay people off? This case can be the first example showing that the rule of law can be enforced, and can make a difference in creating a civil, safe investment environment."

Tatum's killer took considerable care even with the date, according to Alexander Fefelov, a former KGB agent with his own security firm and an adviser to the American Chamber of Commerce security subcommittee. Sunday evening, November 3, was the perfect time for murder. Because of an upcoming midweek Wednesday holiday, many people were stretching the weekend into five days. Thomas Pickering, the longtime American ambassador in Moscow, had recently left his post; an interim ambassador was on duty. The U.S. embassy would close Tuesday to observe Election Day back home.

The 5.45-caliber Kalashnikov assault rifle was fired so expertly as to rule out a nonprofessional. Five of the 12 bullets entered at the neck, indicating the killer knew Tatum might be wearing his bulletproof vest. Whoever fired was well trained in preventing the weapon's powerful kick from spraying passersby. Both Tatum's bodyguards were unharmed.

The shooter threw down the rifle, serial numbers filed off, and leaped into a white Zhiguli sedan, perhaps the most common make in Moscow. The same day the car was found ten minutes from the scene on Rostovskaya Embankment, unlocked and empty. A week before, police said, the owner had sold it for $5,000 cash at an outdoor market to a man who did not give his name.

On January 27, the Stockholm tribunal handed down its judgment--in favor of the Russian partners' claims that Americom had diverted funds to offshore bank accounts and failed to keep proper accounting records. Americom's management contract to run the retail shops and business center is to be "terminated," and Americom to pay $2.6 million in damages to the Russian partners.

Few expect Paul Tatum's killer to be found. Russian Interior Minister Anatoly Kulikov, who has said he is personally supervising the investigation, pointed to the long-running dispute over control of the joint venture as the likely motive. But he did not rule out the curious theory that the killing was somehow connected to the U.S. presidential elections. Moscow Western District prosecutor Alexander Yegorov says that in view of Tatum and Dzhabrailov's well-known "conflict," Dzhabrailov remains a suspect. Dzhabrailov says he had nothing to do with it. "It's nonsense," he said not long after the shooting.

Congressman Christopher Cox (R-California) has been pushing to keep the case on front burners at law-enforcement agencies in Russia and the U.S.; Tatum had been appealing to Republican congressmen, through his old RNC contacts, before he was killed. But even Cox is pessimistic. He wrote to FBI director Louis Freeh that "the grip of organized crime on Moscow's city government is so pervasive that, absent intense outside scrutiny, [Tatum's] killers will never be brought to justice."

Whoever shot Tatum is "probably no longer alive," says Natalia Bokadorova, a longtime girlfriend who believes his death could have been sanctioned only by someone at "the highest levels" of the Russian government. It's even possible, she contends, that Tatum stepped into the middle of some unknown battle between the city of Moscow, mafia groups, and the federal government--all of which would like a slice of the Radisson gem, with its lucrative, cash-rich operations. In his final months, Tatum had appealed to a lot of powerful people about rescuing his vision. Bokadorova figures that someone offered coercive terms to Tatum and sent an assassin when Tatum wouldn't bend. Whoever committed this crime, she says, "had a plan, but Paul didn't accept it. He told me, 'I don't want to change one mafia for another.' "

REPORTER ASSOCIATE Maria Atanasov