Tale of two Moscows

Moscow: islands of wealth and progress

By Mark Brayne In Moscow

Moscow in the summer is wonderful. Baking dust and heat, and the intense, shady green and blue of birch forests and sparkling rivers encircling the city.

The old Moscow I knew was set in a Soviet context of food shortages and labour camps

The world's best ice cream and the cool of the world's best metro system. Moscow State University, up on the hill, its majestic spire shimmering in the haze.

A mystical summer moon hanging low over the red walls of the Kremlin. This is the Moscow I knew in the 1970s, where as a student and then as a novice reporter I would sit deep into the night with friends around kitchen tables, talking of art, love and the meaning of life.

Where, with my friend Alyosha, I would go mushroom-hunting in summer and cross-country skiing in winter, spending hours in public bathhouses sharing salted fish and beer.

But the old Moscow I knew was set in a Soviet context of food shortages and labour camps, of stifling official control, of nuclear armed madness and political stagnation.

Russian beer is almost as good as Czech beer

It was a Russia of great richness, but locked away behind closed doors; a Russia somehow in hibernation.

Returning to Moscow for the first time after a decade of post-Communist change, I did indeed, as I'd been warned, find a country dramatically altered.

But I didn't find a new Russia, rather a much older Russia, one that's picked up where she left off when the Communists came to power nearly a century ago.

The transition is messy and difficult.

Made in Russia

Moscow is an island of wealth and progress in a much larger Russian setting of continued relative poverty. But far more profoundly and rapidly than I ever thought would be possible, Russia's traditions of courteousness and craftsmanship, of enthusiasm, quality and pride, are bubbling back to the surface, true to Russia's essence, through three disconnected generations.

A few small signs of that. Vodka in Soviet Russia was always good, but the beer was at best mediocre. The roads were terrible, canteen food and service unspeakable and building standards appalling.

Today in Moscow, good food is served with a smile.

I left Moscow with the strong impression of a nation that's begun to look forward

Russian beer is everywhere, cheap and of breathtaking, almost Czech, quality. Many of the main roads are excellent, and a new BBC office now being fitted out was conceived, designed, and built by Russians. And every bit as good as a building in the West.

What's unexpected too, comparing Moscow with a decade's Western-led change in Central Europe, is how pop music on the radio is almost all Russian. And very good it is. The days are gone when Russians looked to the West for everything of quality - today, they're beginning to make it themselves.

Old haunts

There's much that confusingly brackets the new and the old. Up on the hill at Moscow University, I wanted, on a Saturday, to visit my old student room from the 70s, up in Zone V overlooking the Chinese embassy.

The security guard was unyielding - no written permission, no entrance.

I stood patiently at the gate and we began to chat. About the old days. About the Beatles. About football. About today's undisciplined youth. After half an hour, the guard relented, warmly shook my hand, introduced himself as Ruslan, and we embarked together on a long and enthusiastically-guided tour of the building. Not at all the way it used to be.

Wealthy Russians now enjoy designer brand shopping

And then, on the Electrichka, the suburban train, out beyond the old 40-kilometre limit to which all foreigners in Moscow were once restricted, out past the station named Pravda, Truth, where I used to go skiing, and on to Abramtsevo, the little village in the forests where I first spent a student summer learning Russian.

Apparent changes

The trains were the same, the dilapidation of the countryside, the amazing low price of a ticket. But on the train, well-dressed Russians out for the weekend, and an endless succession of private salesmen and women, hawking everything from balloons and batteries to chocolates, music cassettes and ladies' underwear.

Moscow is a city of new surprises.

No-one turns a hair when late on a hot summer's night near the old KGB headquarters, a beautiful young woman trots elegantly past on a horse. Money in Moscow is on the move, and everywhere, people are buying, selling, singing, advertising.

I left Moscow with the strong impression of a nation that's begun to look forward, rather than backwards as it was taught under Communism.

And yet, there's such tragedy in Russia. Take Lydia, the mother of my old friend Alyosha. She lost her husband to Communism - he died nearly 40 years ago, his health destroyed by half-a-life in Stalin's labour camps.

Alyosha himself also died young, before Communism fell, a victim of alcohol. Lydia is now nearly 80 and has just had her second stroke.

I love Moscow, but my heart bleeds for the many Russians for whom change has come, really, too late.