Moscow. -- February on Zubovsky Boulevard: a treacherous sidewalk packed with fur-hatted legions, grimly marching through the fourth month of winter; diesel-blackened snow plowed into a moonscape at the curb; 10 rumbling lanes of traffic jam, wheezing trucks looming menacingly over tiny Zhiguli sedans.
To a visitor who has been away for 29 months, since just before the red flag came down over the Kremlin, the first glance is as familiar as Lenin's stone-carved face. But the second glance reveals breathtaking change.
Weaving among the Zhigulis are Mercedes, Toyotas and BMWs, lots of them, with Russian tags and sometimes with telephones. On the sidewalk, vendors offer bananas from Ecuador, tomatoes from the Canary Islands, mandarin oranges from Morocco -- and there are no lines.
At the old Progress bookstore, only one-fourth of the building remains for books. Half of the ground floor has been taken over by a Honda showroom, its wares defiantly shiny through immaculate plate glass. Upstairs is a fancy supermarket, complete with laser checkout to read the bar codes on the Swiss chocolates and American instant coffee. At the entrance is a currency exchange booth, where a handsome young woman is ready to exchange rubles for dollars or dollars for rubles, with a smile.
Where am I? In 1991, in many of this capital's food stores, cases labelled "Meat" and "Dairy" were empty except for artfully arranged packets of Turkish tea, rumored to be radioactive. On a winter sidewalk the appearance of a basket of wormy cabbages or half-rotten potatoes drew a crowd. Trading rubles for dollars outside the state bank could earn an unlucky citizen eight years in a labor camp.
Whisked from that time to this, an average Muscovite might at first conclude that reform had at last worked miracles, making all his wishes for abundance come true. But the proverbial wisdom is right: Be careful what you wish for. You just might get it.
The smile on the face of our time-traveling Muscovite would twist into bewilderment at the magnetic sign announcing the day's market rate for a dollar, pegged by the state bank for many years at below one ruble.
"Buy at 1,675 rubles. Sell at 1,720 rubles," the sign says.
When he asked the fruit vendors their prices, the Muscovite would learn that a single grocery bag of such delicacies could cost 50,000 rubles, a pensioner's monthly income.
Finally, when he stepped into the nearby Gorky Park Metro station to buy a token, his discomfiture might turn to incredulity. The fare, stable for decades at five kopecks, or one-twentieth of a ruble, is now 50 rubles, or 1,000 times more.
The tokens now are plastic, since the value of a metal token might exceed the fare.
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The two reliable institutions of the Soviet economy -- the shortage and the queue -- were vanquished within months of President Boris N. Yeltsin's decree of January 1992, freeing state-controlled prices on nearly everything.
In a week's prowl around Moscow, the only line I saw was outside Chara Bank, one of scores of banks that have sprung up to compete for the public's money. Depositors were waiting to pick up their quarterly interest payments, paid out at an annual rate of 300 percent on ruble accounts, 60 -- sixty -- percent on dollar accounts.
If queues are history, so are shortages. Only one shortage remains, one well-known to denizens of all market economies: the shortage of money in a person's pockets. If you have the cash, you can buy anything you want, whether it's fresh strawberries, a CD player for your Volvo or a Kalashnikov submachine gun.
Economists used to call the long lines symptoms of "repressed inflation," a consequence of prices held artificially low. Now inflation has been liberated.
Our friends Boris and Masha, whose family of six insisted on giving up one of their three rooms to us for our stay, bought a white Zhiguli in 1989 for 8,000 rubles, the savings of many years. A year ago they bought their 3-year-old son, Gleb, a toy riding car -- for 8,000 rubles. Today the toy car costs 44,000 rubles.
To orient me in the new economy, Boris' father offered a formula many elderly people use. "It's easy," he said. "Fifty thousand rubles is 50 rubles. You just take off the zeros."
History has played a cruel trick on the Russians, dangling goods that for decades were the stuff of fantasy right before their eyes -- and beyond their economic grasp. Prices are close to American prices -- housing is the only item still cheap for most people -- yet even in Moscow, the average wage is about $50 a week. Pensioners without adult children to help them out struggle to get by on bread and potatoes.
Yet working people who before stole hours each day from their jobs to wait in line for sausage or to scour the city for batteries now take second jobs and third jobs to earn money. That cannot be bad for long-term economic progress.
Likewise, even as its value has shrunk, the ruble has taken on unprecedented dignity. A few years ago, imports were available only for foreign currency. Now rubles (a lot of them) can buy anything, so rubles have acquired the unaccustomed feel of real money.
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Westerners once pontificated about Russians' alleged incomprehension of markets and allergy to free enterprise. Those myths were swiftly shrugged off.
Newspapers overflow with advertisements for new shops, products and services. The "Golden Pages," the first commercial phone directory, has appeared in mailboxes all over Moscow. Sidewalk vendors turned Moscow into an enormous flea market until officials limited commerce to designated areas.
In this land where once government was the only provider, private enterprise bubbles along with fierce, if lawless, energy. Consider how video has spawned a competitive industry.
Thousands of Moscow kiosks offer stacks of videocassettes, perhaps 90 percent of them American films. New U.S. films can be bought on pirated Russian cassettes before they are available at home. A copy of "Jurassic Park" appeared within days of the film's release to U.S. theaters -- complete with shadows of viewers' heads and arms, since it was filmed from the screen of a New York premiere by a Russian agent with a mini-cam.
Horatio Alger tales abound. An acquaintance quit his job as a lowly driver in 1992 to start a business importing nonperishable foods from Italy. He grossed $3 million in 1993 and imported $1 million worth of food in the first two months of this year.
He faces obstacles that might daunt a market-savvy American. He borrows dollars at 20 percent a month. He negotiates a slalom course of bribe-taking bureaucrats. He dreads the first of each month, he says, when government hands down new taxes, new duties, new paperwork.
"I have half a million dollars worth of goods in transit, and they just announced a new, 20 percent duty. I can't tell if it applies to these goods; and if it does, I owe $90,000 I don't have," he said. He has a workaholic intensity unknown in the Soviet era, excusing himself early from a dinner party to go back to work.
Russia is on the ragged frontier of capitalism, where risks and rewards come on a Siberian scale. Multinational conglomerates have arrived in force to wrestle for market share with billboards for Lucky Strike and Uncle Ben's.
An American computer jock at the airport said he'd flown in to brief Russian businessmen on how to link laptop computers to the burgeoning cellular phone networks. Some of the businessmen, he noted with naive surprise, retained government posts in which they regulated their own business ventures. "People go to prison for that in America," he said.
Late one night, the computer guy said, a Russian took him aside to propose a complex business scheme involving billions of rubles, huge quantities of diamonds, offshore corporations and the promise of untold wealth. He couldn't follow it and politely declined.
But the business boom has given birth to a sizable new plutocracy of ruble billionaires and dollar millionaires. A middle-aged Moscow couple we know, always well-to-do by Soviet standards, returned agog from a week's tourist excursion to Paris, one of many such holiday packages now advertised in the newspapers.
"For the first time in our lives," the woman said, "we felt impoverished" -- by comparison not with the Parisians, but with their Russian fellow travelers.
"They were changing $1,000 a day, eating in the most expensive restaurants in Paris every night, shopping all day long," she says. Moreover, their companions seemed more-or-less honest business people, not mafiozniki -- "though these days, who can tell?"
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Not long ago, most Russians were in the economic middle. To be poor meant sharing a kitchen and bathroom with the neighbors; to be rich meant having three or four rooms in your apartment instead of one or two. The privileges of Communist Party officials that so outraged ordinary citizens were the routine fruits of middle-class life in the West: a car; a chance to buy food without hours-long lines; a bedroom for each family member.
Overnight the gulf between rich and poor has come to rival, perhaps surpass, that in the United States. The $120,000 Mercedes that cruise among Moscow's potholes and the $300,000 brick mansions rising in chic suburbs are bought with cash.
Meanwhile, workers at rusting factories that are doomed by Russia's reconnection with the world economy go months without being paid. Impoverished grandmothers supplement their pensions by buying bread at, say, 200 rubles (about 13 cents) a loaf and selling it for 400 rubles at Metro stations to people unwilling to waste precious minutes in the bakery.
As the economic middle erodes, so does the political middle. One evening the "national patriots," as the strange bedfellows of the Communist and Slavophile opposition are known, held a rally near the Kremlin, outside what until recently was the Lenin Museum.
A motley crowd of about 1,000 milled in the cold, as spotlit orators shouted into a fuzzy PA system and Soviet flags waved in the breeze. Half a dozen drunken teen-agers determined we were Americans and pushed close, cursing the United States and muttering threats.
A bemedaled old woman declared herself a "frontovik," veteran of the front in World War II, and urged us to return to "your America." A more cheerful young man introduced himself as a "national socialist," allowing that, were he to come to power, he would expel Jews and Gypsies. Listeners objected to his liberalism: What about Armenians? Georgians? Uzbeks?
In isolation, such a spectacle might be dismissed as Russia's tawdry, tired equivalent of an American Ku Klux Klan meeting rather than the beginnings of a fascist movement with the potential to seize real power. But chauvinism and scapegoating such as that offered by the wild-eyed, silver-tongued Vladimir Zhirinovsky has a mad, broad appeal.
Wounded superpower pride has fired an unlikely collection of democratic politicians and once-liberal writers, who flirt with imperialism. Rock music, once a weapon of the democratic opposition to Communist rule, is now gravitating toward the fascist rebels; Mr. Zhirinovsky has attracted a coterie of heavy metal fans.
"We have a revolution every other day now," Boris had warned on the phone before our trip.
Sure enough, we were on hand to watch the Duma grant amnesty to the leaders of the August 1991 coup and the bloody, short-lived rebellion of last October.
We saw them on television, walking out of Lefortovo Prison, martyred, jaunty, heroic. The sight of Alexander Rutskoi in his general's uniform and big, gray beard sent a chill through many Muscovites. It seemed the ultimate expression of lawlessness: one can copy videos, take bribes, evade taxes or even attempt to overthrow the state, and no punishment is forthcoming.
In the West, such surreal moments are billed as the failure of democracy. In fact, the amnesty was a nerve-shattering result of democracy: a freshly elected parliament thumbing its nose in the face of President Yeltsin, with reporters feverishly documenting it all. The press remains diverse and feisty, and a new, independent television network is offering serious competition to state TV. Free media remain perhaps the greatest legacy of the Gorbachev era.
But the amnesty strengthened the general feeling of political foreboding, the sense that things will get considerably worse before they get better. Bosnia, Georgia and Tajikistan, among other post-Communist catastrophes, are a powerful antidote to optimism.
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If someone tells you what's going to happen in Russia over the next five years, check whether the prophet correctly predicted in 1986 that the Soviet empire would collapse in 1991. The spectrum of plausible futures includes violent disintegration and fascist dictatorship on one end, stabilizing democracy and economic progress on the other. Perhaps most likely, in a nation of great muddlers, is muddling through.
Our trip ended with a perfectly ambiguous symbol, glimpsed from the window of Boris' car as we sped to the airport. A man had parked his green Zhiguli at the base of a huge sign advertising a new bank. He had climbed a ladder. Now he was swinging a hammer, smashing the huge, plastic, Cyrillic letters in the word "Bank."
A dissatisfied customer? A new socialist revolutionary? Or an ad man clearing space for a new message?
We couldn't stop to find out, or we would have missed the plane to New York. It was loaded with refugees who have chosen not to wait around to find out the end of the story.
Scott Shane was The Sun's Moscow correspondent from 1988 to 1991. His book on the fall of the Soviet Union, "Dismantling Utopia," will be published in May.