Searching For Yesterday's Moscow

I almost ran down an elderly woman this morning while driving along one of Moscow's main thoroughfares. She had hobbled into the middle of the street and bent down to pick up a one ruble coin, worth about three-and-a-half cents. On the seat beside me sat a modest bag of groceries I'd just bought at a luxurious shopping mall for $50.

Russia has always been a place of contrasts, but on my first trip here after an absence of four years they seem more acute that ever. Coming to Moscow these days -- to borrow a friend's remark -- leaves me searching for the city I once knew, now buried beneath neon, billboards and new buildings of surpassing garishness.

The old Soviet buildings, and the tsarist-era buildings that predate them, are still here, but now often covered in advertisements. The state-owned bread store is still down the street from the CBS News bureau, but it's been privatized and sells a lot more than bread: cold cuts, vegetables, booze. One of the high-rises built by Khruschev is now graced by a replica of an ocean liner, complete with smokestacks and flashing lights. It's a casino. In fact much of Moscow has the feel of an amusement park built over many years in distinct and incompatible styles, the Kremlin at its geographical and spiritual center, the ersatz ocean liner at some other extreme.

I've been visiting the city since 1979, and for many years coming to Moscow, the capital of our Cold War adversary, was a journey to the heart of darkness, sealed from the West to a degree difficult to describe to those who didn't experience it. It was also literally dark, the street lamps few and of low wattage, apartment vestibules unlit, a handheld flashlight essential.

While it would be an exaggeration to call today's Moscow a city of light, it's definitely brighter. Neon signs, improved street lighting, illuminated billboards. Drivers now even use their headlights (they used to drive at night with only parking lights, which partly explained the high accident rate).

And the brightness is metaphorical, too. Several competing TV networks put on newscasts every two or three hours. Newspapers are freewheeling. Russia's great ballet dancers and musicians may be performing in Europe and America for dollars, but the theater is vibrant (Russian-speaking actors can't as easily peddle their talents abroad). Just a selection of what's coming up this week on Moscow stages: two Shakespeare plays, a surreal production of Moliere's Amphitryon and a drama about yuppie life called "Shopping and F------."

The city I once lived in was a place of egalitarian shortage. The shops are full now, but the prices -- given most people's earnings -- mock any pretense of normalcy. And it can feel almost Dickensian. The day I went grocery shopping the store was full of successful young people filling up their shopping carts, but there were also two small boys begging and an old woman weeping at the prices.

But where four years ago the products wre almost exclusively imported, Russian yogurt, jam, flatware, etc. is now beginning to share shelf space. The collapse of the ruble in August, 1998, had a paradoxical result: imported goods became prohibitively expensive, creating a market for Russian products. One of the most successful new Russian businesses is Baltika, a first-rate brewery. A half-liter of Baltika sells for about half the price of a Carlsburg.

And outside Moscow? A Russian friend of mine said, laughing, "Nothing's changed in ten years, no, fifty years, no, four hundred years!"

Moscow today is like a kaleidoscope, says another friend, different each time you look. I was issued a pager upon arrival, with two phone numbers to call, one for English messaging, one for Russian. And a cell phone, though the phone comes with a laminated permit I have to carry with me to show to the authorities upon request.

Acting President Vladimir Putin has dramatically announced that Russian forces had captured one of the most notorious Chechen guerilla leaders, and that he had been taken to Lefortovo Prison in Moscow. In a different time, Lefortovo was the first stop for innocents headed for Stalin's gulag. The colliding imagery here, a Chechen "bandit" whisked to Lefortovo, to the evident satisfaction of my Russian colleagues in the CBS News bureau, is what passes for daily life here, as Russia hurtles along a path no one I know can quite grasp.