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Moscow is a nice place just to walk around in, even if it isn't extremely exotic anymore, if you are somewhere from the Northwestern capitalist countries. The contrasts between luxurious jewelry shops, and old pensioners crouching in front of them begging for a little money, are not very different from what you can see in, for example, large German cities. The period of transition from the Soviet Union to the Russian Federation seems to have come to a calm - the economy is relatively stable, and the highest dream of a profession among young children is no longer flipping burgers at McDonalds ... 

Still, Moscow has its very own, very Russian, peculiarities. When it comes to beggars, for instance, you will soon notice what a large amount of war invalids there are among them (nowadays mostly from Afghanistan and Chechnya), as Russia has only had very short periods of time when it hasn't been involved in some sort of war. And when it comes to the general crowd, you can watch the hands of the male population and discover quite a few prison tattoos.

But transition has happened, all right. A nice illustration to this could be the small town of Долгопрудный, in the vicinities of Moscow, where an air force station was located once upon a time. In front of the main building of this station, the obligatory Lenin statue used to stand in the olden days. But after 1991, it started to dilapidate, and was moved somewhere else. Instead, a large rocket was mounted onto the same place. Surely an indication of changed values ... What perhaps can make it all, with the starving senior citizens and everything, a bit more sad in Russia's case is that it used to be a bit different not so very long ago. For instance, all health care was free. (Rotate on that, you privatising neo-liberals, who wonder why people don't go to the dentist anymore ...)

To the left, the Star boulevard, leading to the monument pictured above. On the left in the picture, the busts of Gagarin, Tereshkova, Leonov, and some other guys are barely invisible. In front of the space monument, there is a statue of the father of space travel - Tsiolkovsky, who was a normal school teacher who found out the secrets of breaking out of earth's gravity field.

Capitalism in Russia has taken quite vulgar shapes. To mention a relatively tame example, there is a gigantic Lipton sign mounted on top of the new Tretiakov gallery, for some reason quite unknown to me.  Still, many Russians (or, the ones who don't live too badly), don't think twice when asked - they prefer the new times.

After all, the new times have brought more than just market economy. There certainly is a sense of freedom qualitatively different from the one that existed before, and it has more to it than just enterprise and consumption. Nevertheless, there is still a lot to be done ...

 Not least because the former mostly just applies to the bigger cities. The countryside was plunged far back in terms of not only industrial development when the Kolkhoz administrations left and took the tractors with them. AIDS is rampaging in the region. And there is the case of those little old women begging together their lost pensions in the metro.

*   Transport   *

Getting around in Moscow can certainly be great fun. The most convenient options are the metro, trolleybuses, normal buses, маршрутки (minibus taxis, which follow the bus and trolleybus lines), and taxis (especially the 'black' ones ...).

If there is no conductor, it is quite possible to refrain
from buying a ticket from the driver, and ride them for
free. Still, there is not much point in doing that (especially
if you are a relatively rich westerner), because the fare
is very low indeed. One infinite ride on the city buses
costs 4 roubles (1$ is about 31 roubles). On the other
hand, the штраф when you're caught without ticket is
only 10 roubles ... So, buying tickets or not becomes
more a question of morale than a question of money.
(And isn't that the way it actually should be ...?)

Muscovite trolleybuses can be very entertaining, as they are very old, and the thingies that connect them with the electric lines jump off sometimes, so that the driver has to run out and swing them back up on the line.