(3 of 5)
But Moscow's makeover is not just due to the crime explosion. A stroll through the center of the city reveals the transformation nearly everywhere. The city's seemingly ubiquitous statues of communist-era heroes, such as "Iron" Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the KGB, and Mikhail Kalinin, an early Bolshevik who once authorized the death penalty for children as young as 12, have been disdainfully torn down. Gone too are the metronomic boot clicks of the goose-stepping guards outside Lenin's tomb, who once immutably marked off the minutes and hours of the Soviet state. Remarked a Russian father as his family paid a visit to the mausoleum: "They used to stand for hours in line here." Now virtually no one comes.
Tourists and shoppers flock instead to the McDonald's in Pushkin Square or to Tverskaya Ulitsa, Moscow's Fifth Avenue. There, dazzling neon signs invite motorists and pedestrians to savor the sensations of a swinging metropolis awash in restaurants, nightclubs and luxury boutiques. This is the new Russian capital, Moscow as Vegas of the North.
The city's noviye bogati, or nouveaux riches, are a small but growing elite numbering some 300,000 (a class of notables whom 13% of the country, according to a survey conducted by Moscow News, would like to see thrown in prison). These are the post-Soviet sybarites who patronize Moscow's Volvo and Mercedes dealerships, pamper themselves with Estee Lauder "exclusive skin-care consultations" and blithely plunk down the equivalent of an average worker's monthly pay for French champagne and Danish liqueur candies at the gilded- mirror displays in Yeliseyevsky Gatronom, the grande dame of Moscow supermarkets.
"These people feel good about themselves," says Alexander Fyodorov, a suntanned nuncio of the nouveaux riches who divides his time between homes in Moscow and Miami and business trips to Europe. "They earn good money, and they deserve to spend it however they want."
Fyodorov, a former engineer, is the CEO of a company that sells everything from Twix candy bars to $80,000 Jaguars. His well-guarded headquarters, a suite of offices stylishly caparisoned in halogen lamps, marble tiles and tastefully understated artwork, occupies several floors of a converted kindergarten on Marshal Zhukov Street. Scurrying around the cubicles is a multilingual staff that manages Fyodorov's advertising firm, his home-security company, his men's clothing shop and his private day-care company (which supervises the offspring of wealthy jet-setters for $300 a day). Fyodorov's other enterprises include Wild Orchid, a popular women's lingerie shop, and Collection, a luxury-car dealership.
Unlike the old Soviet elite, who led quiet, if profoundly hypocritical, lives of sequestered privilege while paying lip service to Marxist notions of egalitarianism, the noviye bogati seem determined to part with their newfound wealth in the most ostentatious manner possible. "Russians who come to me want to spend their money and want it to show," says Mats Lofgren, a Swedish furniture dealer. "They won't waste their time on functional furniture. I show them the gold-plated faucets and ornate lamps, and they take it. I had a Russian come in recently who announced, 'My friend just spent $50,000 doing his apartment, and I want the same. Only make it $60,000.' "