Changes

Last Saturday morning we found out that we would be without a valued friend during the long, cold winter - the super-Soviet laundry where I have all of my shirts washed is closing up for a renovation. This makes a lot of sense, since it's located on prime real estate 50 yards from Pushkin Square (right across from the entrance to Scandinavia's summer terrace, for all you expats who know Moscow). No doubt in the new "remonted" laundry when it reopens you won't be able to reach an agreement with the washerwoman to do your shirts for 10% cheaper off the books, and they will hand out clean shirts on hangers so you won't have to bring your own and then count them when you get your laundry back to make sure they haven't cadged one. It will be more efficient, more transparent, but there will be less flavor to it.



The shoe store which is in the same building as the cleaners and always used to have loud music blasting was apparently some sort of Mecca for provincial kids - the stairwell was always full of graffiti that they left on their pilgrimage to the Camelot shoe store. Now the walls have all been painted over and the only thing left of the former decor is the door pictured above. The wild, no-holds-barred 1990's are definitively over and bland, middle-class-oriented stability is the rule now.

I do like some of the changes - like when the Eliseevsky grocery store (their official site appears to be down, but I am posting the link in case it recovers) was renovated and turned into a self-service, western-style (well, except for the decor) supermarket from a place where shopping meant pointing to what you wanted, finding out the price, having subtotals calculated on an abacus, paying at the appropriate cashier's booth (of which their were many), and taking your receipt back to the counter to get your goods, then repeating the process at the next counter. So I am not knee-jerk nostalgic for anything that brings back the dehumanizing experience of being a Soviet consumer. And I guess that talking about the place where I get my shirts laundered as a "friend" is nothing if not bourgeois, so maybe I am a poor spokesman for this concept, but I always liked Moscow as a rough-and-tumble burg, a place where you never knew quite what might happen. Those days have been on the wane for some time, but I still often have a slight pang of nostalgia when I see a truly Soviet establishment biting the dust in favor of a mobile phone store, a fancy coffee shop, or a clothing store.

This happened recently to the Kulinariya affiliated with the Hotel Pekin - a tiny store with elements of what would be known in the US as a deli and a mini-mart - i.e., fresh food (sometimes of questionable freshness) as well as packaged food and beverages. This place had three cash registers in a space the size of your average American suburban living room, but you could always get fresh Berlinskie pastries there, and often khachapuri. You could often witness local working stiffs freshening up in the morning with 100 grams of cheap vodka at one of the "stoiki" - tables that you stand around rather than sit at. But now it is no more, its door has been bolted shut for months. Every so often at first while walking to work in the morning I would see someone go up to the door (to the right in the picture below) and try to open it, then shake their head and mumble or curse at the discovery that this once-reliable source of sustenance was out of commission, at least temporarily.



I predict it will be reincarnated as a coffee shop, or perhaps a more upscale bakery, with a single cash register that will take credit cards and cashiers that might have at least a chance of flashing a smile. At least the convenience store by our apartment building has stayed true to its roots - 5 cash registers in a 20-by-60-foot space and never more than two surly cashiers working at any one time - but even they have gone upscale a bit, with a new, fancy, branded beer display case replacing the old, nondescript fridge with an unlit interior.


The McDonald's on Pushkin Square (famously, at least at one time, the largest McDonald's in the world, and the first one in Russia) is also getting a facelift. They have added a fancy "McCafe" section that is Starbucks-like (there is still no Starbucks in Moscow) and always crowded, and have upgraded the furniture from those prefab plastic chairs bolted to tables so familiar to Americans to sleek, modern, leather-looking couches and other stylish items.


And the Pepsi sign over Pushkin Square provides a concrete example of the rollback of freedom of speech and expression under Putin. When the sign first went up (about a year ago, maybe?), you could send an SMS from your mobile phone for a small fee to a number that flashed up periodically on the word crawl, and your message would scroll across for the whole square - well, at least anyone who happened to be looking up and cared to read it. The one time I exercised this freedom felt liberating, knowing that my message ("DC represent -- Lorina eu te iubesc" - shouting out to my hometown and proclaiming my love for my wife in her native language) was reaching the masses.

Now the word crawl flashes a pro-consuming message of banal intensity: "Бери от жизни всё!!" - "Take everything from life!!" This is in keeping with the mentality of so many Russians today who are content to consume that which was unavailable 15 years ago but are no longer interested in attempting to exercise the freedoms which were supposed to have been the real point of getting rid of Soviet power. As it turns out, the authorities are now pulling the strings as they see fit in a non-transparent way behind the scenes, much as before 1991. What's frightening is that the new system may be more sustainable than the Soviet system, at least as long as the petrodollars keep everyone employed at wages which allow them to aspire to consume ever more expensive goods - bread and circuses for all is a potent recipe.