> Have you *seen* the high-rises that ring Moscow?
I visited some of those hi-rises, back during the Yeltsin years. Quite comfortable, mostly, with lots of green space and mass transit. It's when I traveled outside of Moscow into the countryside, that I finally understood why communism was so popular. I visited a small village somewhere southeast of Ryzan: log cabins, well water, brick ovens for cooking and heating, rusted farm machinery, neighbors waging epic battles over tiny plots of land. The average peasant would regard a Soviet hi-rise the same way First Worlders would regard an interstellar spacecraft. Which, come to think of it, is the formula for a great deal of Soviet-era science fiction...
-- DRR