From Russia with Gloves

Belonging to a swanky new boxing gym is the latest Western-inspired status symbol in class-conscious Moscow

By Julia Ioffe

On a windy May evening, seven perfectly respectable, well-paid professionals —including two women—trudged up three flights of dusty concrete stairs in an abandoned Moscow factory and strapped on boxing gloves. For the next hour and 15 minutes they twisted and ducked, jabbed and cut, and sweated through their T-shirts as their hair turned to wet spaghetti. "I'll quit drinking, I'll quit smoking! I promise," one moaned, slinking, paunch first, out of the room and past the boxing club's owner, his wife.

"Get back in," she snarled. "Stop whining."

Her husband obliged, and Elena Molova went back to monitoring the class from the studio's doorway. It was the second day of operations at her October Boxing Club, a high-end boxing studio located on a thin island in the middle of the Moscow River and named for the now defunct, Soviet-era Red October Chocolate Factory next door. Tan, thin, and leathery—with a bob of peroxide blonde hair and vertiginous platform shoes—Molova is around 50 years old and has no prior boxing experience. (Her previous career? "Let's just say...construction," she demurred.)

About a year ago, in the throes of a financial meltdown that hit Russia especially hard—and hit its construction industry even harder—Molova sensed a trend wafting from the West. It started about a decade ago when Gleason's, the hallowed Brooklyn training ground for boxers, started admitting the occasional neophyte. The trend moved across the East River to Wall Street, where overpaid and overfed bankers, traders, and analysts began gathering in places such as the financial district's Trinity Boxing Club to release their competitiveness and, in some cases, vanquish their inner nerd. These soft-pawed bankers trained and competed in charity smackdowns that, during the good times, brought in as much as $100,000 a night. The trend quickly leapfrogged the Atlantic. From London, a city crawling with Russian expatriates, the hop to Moscow—where the sport remains popular from its 1930s proletarian heyday—was inevitable.

In a strange riposte to boxing's hardscrabble roots here, four gentrified clubs have opened in Moscow in the last eight months. All claim they are open to everyone, but they're actually targeting one particular demographic: men under 50 from the higher rungs of corporate management. "Our clients have achieved a certain stature in life—they know what they want," says Evgeny Tresko, a former boxer and the owner and manager of the Put' Boksera (Way of the Boxer) Club. "These are not people with too much time on their hands who just want a dumb fight. Of course, a couple of those types have shown up here. But they were intimidated by the prices and left."

As aspiring oligarchs seek out ways of differentiating themselves from other bourgeoise strivers, belonging to an exclusive club where only the wealthy can afford to pummel each other makes sense. "This is the most expensive equipment that exists in 2010," boasts one thirtysomething fighter at October, invoking the standard Russian metric for quality. The club is stocked with Johnson weights and Title gloves and punching bags. Says the fighter: "It's what Mike Tyson uses."

When it comes to price, this is not your mother's Russia—and that's the point. Way of the Boxer's one-on-one sessions can top $100 per class. And with membership at $2,000 per year, October's denizens are not your average street brawlers, either. Tatyana Arno, a TV personality, is a regular; so is Andrey Boltenko, the artistic director of Channel One, the main state-owned TV network. Filipp Yalovega, a Moscow hedge fund tycoon, usually rolls up on his Augusta motorcycle.

October is a favorite of Deutsche Bank (DB) employees as well as their counterparts at Merrill Lynch (MER) who work across the water. "The English and American guys just spar politely and break it up," says Eugenia Kuyda, Molova's daughter and a fighter herself. "