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MOSCOW – The gamblers thought it was an empty threat. Politicians talked about the casinos, of course, sure as they talked about corruption and alcoholism. It didn’t mean that vice was going anywhere.
But Tuesday night, finally and anticlimactically, the games drew to an end – a last spin of the roulette; the final blackjack hand; one more jangle at the slots.
By order of the Kremlin, gambling halls throughout much of Russia edged the last die-hards to the door and turned their collective hundreds of thousands of workers into the streets.
The idea of outlawing casinos in all but a handful of far-flung, designated zones was pushed as an anti-vice measure by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin back when he was still president and Russia was still flush with oil cash.
The government remained unflinching as Wednesday’s deadline loomed, stolidly ignoring pleas to push back the closure in the face of collapsing oil prices and a floundering economy.
Gambling now will be restricted to Kaliningrad on the Baltic Sea, specific zones near the cities of Krasnodar and Rostov in the south, and the Primorsky region in Russia’s far east.
“This is a vivid example of the authorities thinking they know best and imposing their will,” Konstantin Kopylov, managing partner of the Golden Palace casino, said Tuesday. “They adopt a law about an industry, and they don’t bother to discuss it with us.”
The Golden Palace already had nailed lumber in an X over its front door, just behind the brassy elephants that tower on pillars on either side of the roadway. By midnight, police would hit the streets to make sure all gambling had been stopped.
Inside the time-neutral cavern of fake gold and winking lights, Kopylov fielded calls from casino operators around Europe. They were looking to buy his equipment cheap, and he was happy to sell.
“The state unleashed a struggle against us, and this huge political pressure was brought to bear,” Kopylov said.
With the fall of communism, gambling surged into Russia, and why not? Everything was up for grabs; solid chunks of resources and cash were suddenly liquid and untraceable. Soon casinos became an icon of post-Soviet Russia: microcosms that displayed the casual cruelty of capitalism’s whims; the apparent wildness that overlay a rigid rule set and pecking order; and, of course, the game of it all, the flash and adrenaline.
In Moscow alone, according to the Association of Gambling Business Development, there were 38 casinos and some 500 slot halls. The gambling network fed some $2 billion in taxes a year into Russia’s budget, the organization estimates. The closure leaves as many as 350,000 people jobless overnight, the association said.
