RUSSIA: The Metro

For years, a favorite joke in the West was that the people of Moscow had a clean, sumptuous, artistically constructed subway, admirable in every respect except one: there were no trains. Unlike many other jokes about Soviet Russia, this one contained no grain of truth. The Moscow subway trains run, and they run well.

This week Moscow's hordes of subway-riding white-collar workers and bureaucrats were full of stir as workmen put the finishing touches on a new subway line. It is the first segment of a Great Circle line that will intersect...

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