Interview with Kit!

About his past, present and future. About business, life and love.

The nickname, Kit, is familiar to almost every Russian AWM who takes adult business seriously. Kit is one of the most famous webmasters in Russian adult industry who has achieved a success on his own. Therefore I was really glad to have a chance to interview this person.

I was preparing for this interview for a quite a long time thinking about questions to ask and not to ask. I didn’t want to repeat the questions which he has already answered in other interviews. Thus, I looked through all the information I could find about this person and decided to ask him more about his personality. Having these thoughts in mind I headed to the meeting with Kit.

Q: - Before our meeting I read all the interviews you gave and noticed that you, unlike most others, fully express your thoughts. However, all interviews with you were only about business. I failed to find any information in them about what person you are, how you’re living, what your interests are etc. In this interview I would like to bridge this gap.

Q: - Let’s talk about your personal life. Are you married?
A: - Yes, I am. Officially I’m married a little over a year but we’ve been living together for about five years.

Q: - Do you have children?
A: - I have a foster-daughter who is 10 years old now. I have plans too. If you ask me if there is a plan to have children, my answer will be rather “yes” than “no”.

Q: - What was the last time when you took your daughter to the zoo or any other entertaining places?
A: - About 2 weeks ago.

Q: - Does this mean you go out with her often?
A: - I can’t say too often but we spend some time together. I often take her out when my wife is too busy. My wife has a crowded schedule: she works, gets a second higher education and has lots of things to do around the house. So, I take my daughter and sometimes her friend to the movie theaters and zoos.

Q: - Do you think you are a good farther?
A: - No, I don’t think so.

Q: - Then how can you define “a good parent”?
A: - I’m a perfectionist by nature. It seems to me that there is no limit to perfection! When I ask myself what an ideal parent should be and try to compare myself with this image, I find lots of variances. In my opinion, an ideal parent should give more attention to the child and be more involved in his upbringing.

Q: - Based on what you’ve just said, I want to ask you the following question. How often do you feel regret for your actions?
A: - It happens sometimes. You know, from one side, perfectionism has many positive aspects but the negative side leaves no feeling of deep satisfaction.

Q: - Does it happen that you toss and turn at night thinking about something you could do in a different or better way?
A: - I think I haven’t made fatal mistakes in a long time. It seems like something is protecting me from serious failures and troubles. I had a tough period in life in 1998 when I was working on company automation. I’ve become a specialist in this area and there were even articles about it in some magazines. But the company went bankrupt and I was left jobless. It was the time when I came to adult business as many others. When I came, I was such a newbie in comparison with professionals already existing in a relatively new industry. I took this business seriously only in 2000. Before that I was studying a lot about it: downloaded the whole Madam forum, then Maestro forum which is unfortunately closed now. While I was reading them, I was thinking that I was not ready. Thus, I was preparing to start working in adult business for almost a year. It was difficult to decide.

Q: - Do you blame yourself for your failures and troubles or calm down blaming a set of circumstances?
A: - Of course, I blame myself. Generally speaking, everything what happens with a man is his own desert or guilt except the case with an unexpected brick which could fall on your head. I tend to think that all problems are inside me, because when a person blames something else, he shows a sign of weakness. It means that he couldn’t find strength within himself to admit that he might be wrong. It’s often just an excuse in his incompetence.

Q: - Do you believe in fate or you consider that every man is the master of his own fate?
A: - I believe in concatenation of circumstances. When I was working in a company, I didn’t have required disposition to be a successful businessman. I started as a developer and worked for a salary. Altogether, I was satisfied with my job. But when I was left on the street, I had to struggle to survive. This was a set of circumstances that I lost my job, found a way to earn some money on the Internet, and received my first check when I almost gave up my hope. In 2001 the delivery of checks took a good deal of time. I had to wait for about 2-3 months to get a check by ordinary mail. I don’t believe in fate. When I person drinks every day and leads a riotous life, you can say that he will become an alcoholic in about 10 years. It’s not fate, it’s just a predictable sequence of actions.

Q: - Do you think that one of the most necessary leadership qualities is the ability to manage human resources? The ability to find a skilled worker, organize his job and provide good working conditions for him?
A: - In my opinion, it’s one of the most important qualities. Even a good understanding of business is the quality #2, while the #1 leadership quality is the ability to manage and control human resources and delegate authorities.

Q: - One can hire a specialist…
A: - You’re right but this is the question of good stuff selection. In a large wellestablished company manager is precisely a manager, hired as a manager not an employee who worked his way from the bottom.

Q: - Do you think your work brings benefits to the society?
A: - I think, it does because I give jobs to people. In my opinion, it’s enough to consider my work useful. Sometimes I hired people with bad life situation. Now when I see that they have a stable salary, that they didn’t die from hunger and improved their living standards for years of working with me, I think that my work does bring some benefits. First of all I managed job placement, now I plan to provide my staff with medical insurance and fitness facilities. Then find a new better office for my employees. As for the benefits to the society in general, I think my work has an important function. It utilizes or neutralizes negative emotions that exist in modern society. City people often feel lonely, that’s why lots of them spend most of their free time online. The city brings people together physically, but separates them morally. I was born and raised in a small village where everybody knew each other. The fact that people now don’t know their neighbors living close to each other for many years always shocked me. People suffer from loneliness. Many problems come from this loneliness including sexual dissatisfaction. I consider that it’s better for people to masturbate than vent anger on others.

Q: – And another personal question. Remember your childhood. Did you like to go school?
A: - I didn’t until the 8th grade.

Q: - Did you make friends with your classmates?
A: - Yeah, I did. But I had a quite tough childhood. I was arrested by a police several times…

Q: - Does it mean that in the game “cops and robbers” you were on robbers’ side?
A: - I can’t say I was a brutal and wicked character, it just happened that I was a child with problems. Conflicts, fights, early smoking…

Q: - Did you believe in ideals of socialism in your boyhood days? Were you excited about them?
A: - No, I didn’t believed and definitely wasn’t excited. I refused to become a communist and it was a conscious decision. I was the first person in my school that refused to do it. The social system at that time started to collapse. But when I became a pioneer, I was really proud of myself. “Red tie…it has the same color with the red flag”.

Q: -Do you keep in touch with your classmates?
A: - I keep in touch with only one of my classmates because we came to St. Petersburg together. We entered the same university, studied together but then our paths diverged. He still lives in St. Petersburg. We meet and call each other from time to time although we have completely different lives. I have a successful live while he struggles to survive. However, I wouldn’t make any predictions now because we both are still quite young. The diagnose should be made at 50 or 60 but definitely not at 30 or 35-40.

Q: - When was the last time you were on a holiday?
A: - My last two-week vacations were about a year ago. I usually go to Crimea to visit my mother and have some rest. By the way, in late autumn this year I found some time to come to my mother’s birthday. I came to Moscow for my sister. We took the last plane to Crimea and in two days flew back on the same plane. Operation «Happy Birthday» was accomplished successfully. It was a big surprise for our mother and she was incredibly happy as we were.

Q: - Do you travel abroad?
A: - Almost not. I’ve been abroad only once in Prague but I’m planning to make up for lost time. First of all, I’m going to the “AWM Open” conference, and then I’m thinking about a trip to make with my wife and child.

Q: - Do you like to live in Russia? Have you ever had thoughts to leave?
A: - No, I haven’t.

Q: - Do you like to live and have business here?
A: - Yeah. I’m an unpretentious person. I don’t have an irresistible dream to leave, especially now. I don’t even consider these alternatives, because I have people working for me and I just can’t leave them.

Q: - Are you glad you were born in Russia?
A: - Generally speaking, yes. I’ve never had a reason to regret about it. You know, life has never been easy but I don’t feel like deficient of something. I’ve never thought why I’m not a Japanese living in Tokyo or why I wasn’t born somewhere in sunny Florida.

Q: - Does your peace of mind depend on quantity of money you have?
A: - Some time ago it was really important to me. But now when I work in adult business, I can say it paled into insignificance. But before money was something way to important.

Q: - What was a maximum amount of money you’ve ever held in your hands?
A: - Can you say seeing and holding in hands are the same things?

Q: - No, they are different.
A: - Then several tens of thousands of dollars.

Q: - How much money you’ve seen?
A: - A million of dollars.

Q: - What did you feel at that moment?
A: - In 1995 I was shocked when I saw this million of dollars. It happened in Moscow when one of my relatives was working with large foreign exchange operations. The company he worked at was one of the most serious operators in foreign exchange market in Moscow. They exchanged unbelievable sums of money, ten thousand dollars was nothing for them.

Q: - If you see this amount of money now, you wouldn’t be impressed that much?
A: - Of course, not. At that time perception of a dollar was different. Besides that I was a poor student that’s why it left strong impression on me back then.

Q: - Tell me truly, are you a vain person? Do you feel satisfaction when people talk about you?
A: – I like when people respect me for my work because I’ve done something heroic (breaking through the wall for a long time and finally broke it) but not because I just successfully huddle some job through. I live on the principle that everything comes from hard work.

Q: - Who is the absolute authority for you in this business?
A: - I wouldn’t say absolute authority, but there are people to whose opinions I defer. Maybe, one of the authorities would be... But still, I don’t want to name anybody. I defer to experts’ opinion now. For example, if the issue is about content production, the authorities would be people whose content works I like, as for finances – there would be other authorities, as for organization management – there would be completely different ones. This is the situation. I wanted to name one person in the beginning but then I thought it would be unfair in relation to other people.

Q: - Can you name three people who, in your opinion, represent Russian adult business?
A: - I would name several people because it’s quite difficult to distinguish just three.

Q: - Whom can you name?
A: - As a matter of fact, I would name them in the following order: Alex Xe and his team, Goth and Alex Prototype together, several years ago I would name Unimaximus but he works mostly on non-adult projects now, MOrphey with his partnership program – TeenCore, RedEye but he is gradually leaving adult business, Mamir but he is involved in something else now. There are also lots of authoritative webmasters and these people do not always have a large number of postings in forums. There are serious webmasters who don’t post in forums at all and general public doesn’t know much about them. From well-known ones I’d also mention the following teams – Point, Scorp and PaxaQ.

Q:- What do think, are there people without whom it would become much better on the Internet?
A: - Of course. There are a lot of them.

Q: - Can you say specific names?
A: - I can name general types of these people. Let’s say carders and cheaters. Serious online criminals are people I wouldn’t like to see on the Internet. I’d most like if all of them together with their relatives die tomorrow. I’m so “blood-thirsty” in relation to these criminals because they drank lots of my blood. They also indirectly prejudiced Russian webmasters’ reputation. And of course, people who make money on child porn. However Child Porn occurrence widely defeated. Special services from different countries fight with child porn production quite effectively.

Q: – There is a question which lots of webmasters are concerned about. Do you think that legalization of adult business in Russia is not far off?
A: - At the current moment legalization of this business is impossible. The Russian electorate is quite conservative and there are laws which appear to be fetish for certain political groups, for example, the formulation of article 242. As Cath22 says there is a strong faction in the Russian Orthodox Church which is opposed to the passage of any new legislation. I don’t think that legalization of adult business will occur any time soon. Probably a year after elections…

Q: - Do u feel that any legislation will be passed concerning the legalization of adult business under President Putin’s administration?
A: - Definitely not under President Putin’s administration. The pornography law is rarely applied because everybody is aware of the fact that it comes into conflict with the real situation. By the way, Cath22 once wrote in a forum that if adult business was legalized, it would become a very popular industry. Lots of people either clever but broke or with heavy purses would be involved in this business. Then present business struggle would seem «a complete nonsense” to us. This statement is correct but the drawback of societies’ negative attitudes towards this profession is discouraging. For example, my employees who work in the business find the work morally questionable. They’ve achieved success and become professionals but they can’t tell where they work and what they do…

Q: - Does it mean that besides money you wish to have recognition by close people?
A: - It’s not a problem with close people. As far as I know, all the close relatives and marriage partners of my employees know what they do.

Q: - Yeah, the hardest part is to tell parents.
A: - You know, I have an employee whose daughter knows what her mother is doing. They don’t have any problems based on it.

Q: - «As far as I understand, our problem is not in the existing but non-operational law, but in society’s attitude towards adult business?»
A: - Definitely. «The existence of this law is allowed only because a portion of society feels that the pornography business is harmful. Young people under 35 are tolerant of this business because they were born and raised in a different time and they are not a part of the electorate. Those under the age of 35 are traditionally apathetic in their attitudes towards participating in elections because elections are not “cool”. They would prefer to drink some beer than to vote on the election.

Q: - What do you think about the fact that there is a wide-spread opinion even among young people that pornography is extremely harmful? Have you ever come across the way carders justify their behavior? – “Yes, we steal, but we are not involved in porn industry”.
A: - I think it’s just the repetition of what they had already heard or read before. They say it in order to justify what they do. I think this is just the mantra they repeat, not a deep belief that they have. After all, they don’t consider visiting sex-shops disgraceful.

Q: - You suppose that these are not the beliefs they have but one of the ways to justify what they do at least for themselves?
A: - That’s right. Moreover, sometimes it goes too far and a person thinks that these thoughts are his own ones, while actually it’s just his certain mental sets. I can’t imagine that there are people under 40 who suppose that such magazines like “Hustler” or “Playboy” and various sex-shops are immorality of our society. No doubt there are such people, but their amount is limited. Some of them at the age of 15-16 decide that sex is immoral and disgusting; they become asexual people. By the way, recently I’ve seen a TV program devoted to such people. Usually, these are people who experienced some psychological trauma in childhood and they speak about sex with disgust. Moreover, it’s interesting that I didn’t notice a single woman among them. Four men were interviewed on the topic. There was also a wife of an asexual man. Later I compared my opinion to that of the audience and we shared the same conclusion: firstly, she is cheating on him; secondly, she won’t bear him for a long time. In the interview she said she wants to have a baby, but her husband objected that he does have time and money for the child. He told things offensive to any woman.

Q: - Maternal instinct can’t be eliminated by any rules. Well, do you think there is a tendency towards the increase of masturbators who satisfy their sexual needs via Internet? On the one hand, it contributes to the business promotion, but on the other hand, how would it influence humanity in general?
A: - It’s difficult to say. The obsession to watch porno itself is not typical of human nature. It is the evidence of deeper problems.

Q: - To say that porn somehow influences the decrease of birth rate in America is groundless. In Russia, for instance, the rate of birth is falling down as well, while the Internet is not so widely spread like in the US.
A: - Of course, that is why these things are interconnected – they have a common reason of the origin. Porn is not genetically determined, though, for instance, I have read an article about the experiments carried out in a monkey house. They showed porn to a monkey, i.e. a film with coition of monkeys. The result was positive – those monkeys, who were watching it, had an erection. Our business as well as the oldest profession of the world reveals the loneliness of a person.

Q: - Did people loose the ability to socialize?
A: - Not only this, a male individual has an instinct of coition with a female, and if under some circumstances a male is deprived of it for a long time, he will be ready to copulate with any female individual. This is a premise of prostitution, the demand followed by the offer. It is the essence of humanity. I don’t think that if all people were happy in their marriage and sexually satisfied by a spouse, prostitution would vanish.

Q: - This is a controversial issue. If I weren’t an interviewer, I would definitely argue with you on this matter…
A: - I know what you are trying to say. There are people who regard marriage as happiness, harmony and all the stuff. However, polygamy is an integral part of the male’s essence.

Q: - And prostitution is just an easy way to solve the problem of polygamy?
A: - Yes, you are right. Actually, prostitution is a result of this genetic, so to say, paradigm, idea which was put into us by nature. A male should fertilize females. Suppose that human beings are organized the same way. A male is monogamic, but if a beautiful woman pays her attention at him, and he is free, he might want some adventures. I don’t find it immoral, I just want to say that it is the result of human imperfection. I clearly see that if all people on Earth were absolutely happy, prostitution and porn would take place, but at a smaller scale, because this sexual energy would be utilized in everyday life.

Q: - I have last few short questions for you. Do you think you have a sense of humor?
A: - I hope I do have it. People say it is specific to some extend, but sometimes it works really good.

Q: - Which question made you think thoroughly?
A: - It’s difficult to recollect. I think there are no simple questions, there is a level of answering and understanding them, superficial or profound.

Q: - Which of the answers you have given today, you will deny later?
A: - About the list of people, of course.

Q: - Do you think this interview will give the possibility to understand what person you are?
A: - Probably, yes. However, with regard to business, it won’t clear it up.

Q: - You know, I believe that understanding of how one should live and think can be of more importance than detailed prescriptions of what to do...
A: - Perhaps, you are right.

Q: - Well, it’s about time to conclude our discussion. I am very glad to have a chance to speak with you and think I got enough material to write. Thank you for coming.

The interview appeared to be much longer than I expected. Kit turned out to be a very interesting person to speak with, and sometimes we, captivated by our conversation, passed to issues which were not concerned with the topic. To my bitter regret, you won’t find most part of the discussion on the pages of the magazine. However, I hope that the part of the interview, which is presented here, will give you enough food for thoughts.

St. Petersburg, 2006
AWMOpen Magazine