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Moscow has not always been this way. In 1916, a year before communism's whirlwind transformed Russia into the Soviet Union, the poet Marina Tsvetayeva described her native city as a vast hostelry of "forty times forty" churches, where small pigeons rose above the golden domes and the floors below were polished by kisses of the faithful. Under the Soviet regime, with its Stalinist housing bunkers and oppressive military bearing, the city became a grimmer place, but one that was anchored, orderly, predictable, even if, to many outsiders, drab and downcast. By 1976, the British journalist Geoffrey Bocca could describe the scene as a "crushing concatenation of faceless, shabby, shoving, rude and, above all, indifferent, uninterested people."
Today, however, both these visual keynotes have been replaced by the chaos of capitalism's dikaya zhizn, or "wild life": weather-beaten babushkas who beg from filthy sidewalks, marauding bands of gypsy children, Lycra-skirted strumpets cavorting with Western businessmen, bankers tooling around town in armor-plated Mercedes, mafia moguls in sharkskin suits who dine on Maine lobster with a $238-a-bottle champagne in five-star hotels. A sense of bewilderment plagues Moscow's residents as they attempt to sort out the conflicting claims of their half-remembered, precommunist culture from the hedonistic and corrupting pull of the West. It is the sort of spiritual vertigo that accompanies economic and cultural free fall, and it has left many ordinary Muscovites with an uneasy feeling of limbo.
And of fear. Criminal gangs have transformed a city that during the days of the Soviet police state was one of the safest in the world into a virtual criminopolis. Last year in Moscow police reported more than 3,000 murders -- an increase of 1,740% since 1987. Those seven years also introduced a rash | of previously unheard-of crimes, such as contract assassinations (about 100 last year) and murders by bombing (which the police now call "good-morning murders" because the explosions usually go off around dawn). A presidential study has concluded that virtually every retail trade booth, store, cafe and restaurant in the Russian capital pays protection money of up to 20% of gross receipts to organized crime. Resisters are beaten or killed. "In my 17 years on patrol," says police Lieut. Gennadi Groshikov, "I have never seen so much crime in Moscow; nor have I seen anything as vicious."
The authorities are trying to strike back. Last Tuesday, just after midnight, 20,000 soldiers and police in camouflage gear swept through several dozen Moscow hotels, businesses and banks, hoping to cripple the criminal gangs. In the meantime, citizens are afraid to go out at night; stores have difficulty keeping pistols, Mace and bulletproof jackets in stock; dinner conversations stop abruptly whenever a tail pipe backfires in the streets. "The crime problem today knows no limits," says Pavel Gusev, editor in chief of Moskovsky Komsomolets, who travels with a bodyguard. "In the U.S. your Mafia has already divided up spheres of business, so the bosses no longer kill each other off. Here we have a wild market where state holdings are being turned over into private hands."