--- "Steven L. Robinson" <srobin21 at comcast.net> wrote:
> The Road to Riches and Ruin
>
> You'll find $800 pens and luxury cars, decrepit
> homes and desperate
> pensioners along a highway that epitomizes
> post-Soviet Russia.
>
How is this description different from the United States?
>
> The route starts out at open fields and birch
> forests, passes poor rural
> homes more fitting for a dying mountain village than
> Europe's largest city,
They're in the Oblast. They're not part of Moscow.
> and ends with some of the most expensive shops in
> the world just a few
> hundred feet from the Kremlin.
>
> "The road from Sheremetyevo into Moscow is like a
> symbol of all processes
> underway in Russia," said Igor Korolkov, a
> commentator with Novaya Gazeta
> newspaper.
NG, as I have mentioned before, is a yellow press newspaper with tiny readership.
>
> Zhivin's and his wife's pensions total $290 a month,
> and like millions of
> Russians left out of the new prosperity, they are
> bitter about being so poor
> amid so much ostentatious consumption.
10 years ago Zhivin's and his wife's pensions probably totalled %110 a month, and were probably paid months late. (For comparison, a beginning employee in a Moscow McDonald's after the probationary period makes a bit over $500 a month.)
>
> "How can our life be called normal?" said Zhivin's
> wife, Alexandra, tears
> welling in her eyes.
(I seriously doubt this scene ever happened. My experience with pensioners is that they are far to proud to break down in tears over some foreigner.)
> Two miles toward downtown from the decrepit Zhivin
> home stand two landmarks:
> a memorial marking the spot where the Nazis were
> stopped in their 1941
> assault on Moscow, and behind it a huge shopping
> complex that's a
> free-market mecca to the city's emerging middle
> class.
>
The "emerging" middle class has been "emerging" for a decade now. It's probably a quarter of the population of Moscow.
> The Mega Mall boasts a year-round ice-skating rink,
> a 12-screen theater
> complex, more than 200 small to medium-sized shops,
> and five large stores,
> including an IKEA and an outpost of the French
> supermarket chain Auchan so
> big it has lines for 90 cashiers.
>
I almost went to this Auchan to buy the blanket for my bed in the new apartment, but bought it in the market by the metro instead.
From the
> airport into Moscow, the
> highway is eight or 10 lanes for much of its length,
> but traffic moves
> slowly, partly because there are many crossroads and
> stoplights.
And mainly because there are over 10 times as many automobiles in Moscow as in 1991.
>
> The gap between rich and poor recalls czarist times.
Russia's gap between rich and poor is approximately the same as that of the United States. This sucks, but "czarist times"? That's silly.
>
> Today's critics speak in remarkably similar terms.
>
> "The closer to the Kremlin, the more the city looks
> like the capital of the
> filthy rich," said Korolkov, the newspaper
> commentator.
Commentator in the yellow press.
>
> "There are some fancy shops in Moscow that make you
> wonder what is their
> purpose, where shop assistants, guards and managers
> can wait all day long
> for a single customer. You may start thinking that
> they are just a
> money-laundering operation, but then at the end of
> the day this customer
> comes along, buys several thousand dollars worth of
> hugely overpriced
> trinkets and makes their day."
Unlike in New York or London.
>
> At this point, the road's name changes to Tverskaya,
> itself a change from
> the Soviet-era Gorky Street, which boasted such
> institutions as an Intourist
> Hotel and the Friendship Bookstore.
>
> Now there are European brand-name boutiques,
> cellphone stores, expensive
> restaurants, nightclubs, the Moscow City Hall and
> the refurbished
> czarist-era Yeliseyevsky gourmet supermarket,
> boasting floral chandeliers,
> stained-glass windows, mahogany furnishings and
> golden trim on its ornate
> columns and ceiling.
This is silly. I go to Tversky Boulevard every other week to pick up the mail for work (specifically, the area between the Puskin and Mayakovsky metro stations, near the TGI FRiday's). There are ritzy stores, but it's hardly the whole thing. My favorite bookstore is there and a lot of mid-range coffee shops. There are usually huge groups of teenagers hanging around by the metro station drinking beer and busking on their electric guitars.
>
> Beggars can also be seen along this stretch -
> although most Muscovites
> believe only professionals panhandle in this
> district, because they must
> bribe police to avoid being driven away.
The beggars over there are very few in number and mostly old women. There are far fewer beggars than in the past, mostly because pensioners are much higher than they formerly were (see above), child beggars are picked up by the cops, and the Gypsy panhandlers have been kicked out of town. I should no -- I was mobbed by Gypsy kids panhandling on Novyi Arbat years ago.
In short, this whole thing could have been a description of many American or European cities.
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