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Vijai Maheshwari

Vijai Maheshwari is a writer and former hair trader based between Moscow and New York. He graduated from New York’s Columbia University and worked briefly on Wall Street before heading off to live the expatriate dream in Eastern Europe. He was editor-in-chief of Russian Playboy in the late 1990s and has also written White God Factor, a novel about that insane decade in Russia after the collapse of Communism.

Stories By Vijai Maheshwari

Memoir

My Strange, Seductive Stint as the Hugh Hefner of Moscow

Story by Vijai Maheshwari | September 12, 2022

As a disillusioned cub reporter, I jumped at the bizarro job of a lifetime: editor-in-chief of Playboy Russia when nouveau riche Moscow was a hedonistic playground of sex, drugs, and early-stage capitalism — until Putin’s rise brought my reign to...

Super Subcultures

My Bizarre Reign as New York’s King of “Virgin Russian Hair”

Story by Vijai Maheshwari | May 13, 2021

Complete strangers wiring me $15k on the spot, smuggling blond ponytails across the Atlantic, secret rendezvous under the overpass — I just may have had the weirdest side hustle of all time.

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