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Russia in the 1990s: what better place for 20-something Chicano journalist José Alonzo to make his name? At the opening of a New York-style night club on Red Square, the free libations are flowing, the floor show is raunchy, and all of expat Moscow is wheeling and dealing. But things are never what they seem in this new post-Soviet country striving for freedom, democracy and … whatever — and falling far short. In fact, these party-goers will soon have a life-or-death national crisis blow up in their faces.
Recalling the techniques of Hunter S. Thompson and Oscar Zeta Acosta, Moscow 93 is a gonzo autofictional account of the author’s experiences before, during and after the 1993 “October events,” when a violent revolt against President Boris Yeltsin erupts in the capital. By the time it’s over, army tanks will shell the parliament building (aka “White House”), reducing it to a burned-out husk. And a hung-over Alonzo is right in the middle of it, dodging bullets like everyone else. All this and a Michael Jackson concert! Blending horror and farce, mashing up Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights Big City and Venedikt Erofeyev’s Moscow to the End of the Line (with a real-life armed insurrection thrown in), Moscow 93 presents Russia in the first decade after communism through the lens of a sordid expat scene. A scene that, one day, exploded into a war zone.
José Alaniz was born in Edinburg, TX, in the Rio Grande Valley along the US/Mexico border. He graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in 1993 with dual degrees in Radio-Television-Film Production and Russian Studies. He worked in Moscow, Russia as a journalist from 1993-1994. In 2003 he earned a PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley.
Since 2003 he has worked as a comics scholar and professor at the University of Washington, Seattle, in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and the Department of Cinema & Media Studies. He has published four monographs: Komiks: Comic Art in Russia (2010, University Press of Mississippi); Death, Disability and the Superhero: The Silver Age and Beyond (UPM, 2014), Resurrection: Comics in Post-Soviet Russia (Ohio State University Press, 2022) and Comics of the Anthropocene: Graphic Narrative at the End of Nature (UPM, 2025).
He has also co-edited two essay collections, Comics of the New Europe: Reflections and Intersections (with Martha Kuhlman, Leuven University Press, 2020) and Uncanny Bodies: Disability and Superhero Comics (with Scott T. Smith, Penn State University Press, 2019). He formerly chaired the Executive Committee of the International Comic Arts Forum (ICAF) and was a founding board member of the Comics Studies Society.
He has released five comics/prose collections: The Phantom Zone and Other Stories (2020) and The Compleat Moscow Calling (2023), both from Amatl Comix, and Puro Pinche True Fictions (2023), Tales of Bart: A Novel in Three Acts (2025) and Moscow 93 (2025, all from FlowerSong Press). His comics have also appeared in The Stranger, the Seattle anthology Dune, Tales From La Vida: A Latinx Comics Anthology (2018), BorderX: A Crisis in Graphic Detail (2020) and SCARFFF.
