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For a stark contrast to this conspicuous opulence, one need only walk to the nearest metro station. Filled with lavish mosaics, frosted chandeliers and archways of stained glass, the metro offered a magnificent expression of Soviet splendor that belied the brutality of the era that produced it. Yet for millions of Muscovites who ride the trains each day, the metro no longer provides a voyage through a subterranean communist cathedral, whose effect is both sumptuous and muscular. Today it is overrun with beggars, reeling drunks and small-time entrepreneurs dragging trollies laden with crates and boxes.
The scene is similar in the city's bustling train stations. In the crowded waiting room at Kursky station, one of the city's seediest, a teenage gypsy girl stood screaming while blood spurted from gashes on her arms. "I want to die," she wailed. "My life is nothing. I am pregnant, but no one believes me. They think I am lying." She raised a blood-splattered cardigan that reeked of urine to reveal her puffy belly. A middle-aged woman stopped to stare, as the howling resumed, "I can't bear this. I hate this life!" Several militiamen who work at the station turned to find out what the commotion was about. When they spotted the girl, they nodded their heads and continued their rounds. "What kind of people have we become?" asked another woman. Such scenes fill Muscovites with a sense of dazed anguish, partly because in the past any castoffs of the socialist state foolish enough to make a public appearance were either deported from the city or thrown into psychiatric prisons.
Today at least 40,000 street tramps sleep in Moscow's metro tunnels and solicit change outside its new temples of affluence. That is still less than half the estimated homeless population of a city of comparable size, such as New York City. But places like Kursky station have become overrun by these panhandlers. Some are tubercular. Others are covered with skin ulcers and body sores. The existence of most is sufficient to provoke the spleen of passersby. "Disorder, dirt and a total lack of care for others," says Vera Alexeyev, a housewife who has lived in the city for more than 10 years, "is what strikes me most about Moscow today."
Barely a step above the denizens of the streets are those who haunt Moscow's hard-luck flea markets. At these outdoor bazaars, the bottom of the city's economic food chain -- mainly pensioners who brew "tea" with shredded carrots and can't remember the last time they bought a new scrap of clothing -- peddle their household goods to pay for tomorrow's potatoes. A short stroll from Moscow's Kiev train station, the sidewalks teem with faucets, shower fittings, cartons of milk, boxes of laundry powder, lamps, washbasins, doorknobs, frying pans, toothpaste, glue, string and old pairs of shoes.
Back in the Soviet era, when the criminal code barred trading, there were no peddlers. Now much of the country's economic engine is driven not by the haut monde boutiques on Tverskaya but by the corrugated larki, or street stalls, which have sprung up across Moscow (and which the city government moved in to control earlier this year). These sidewalk clearinghouses offer a bizarre inventory of items, from Pierre Cardin cigarettes to banana-flavored liqueurs, exotic massage oils, cut-rate lingerie, canned ears of baby corn and pirated videos of Western B-movies.