The estate agents in Moscow call them "monsters." As in, "yes I've got a couple of monsters on offer - the one with the indoor swimming pool will cost you $2m. The one with the helicopter pad is three-and-a-half."

Since the collapse of communism, Russia may have become a democracy but it is rapidly gained a reputation for practising the worst excesses of capitalism.

If you fly into Moscow on a clear day, you will see the "monsters" in the woods just outside town. Vast, palatial buildings, surrounded by brick walls and iron gates. Row upon row of them. Russia's very own Beverly Hills.

Officially, of course, they are not called monsters. They are called Cottedgi - "cottages".

The suburbs - soviet style

All the big roads out of the capital are lined with billboards advertising them. Just north of the city, there is even a shop selling enormous ocean-going motor cruisers. Presumably no cottage should be without one.

You may have thought that Russia was a poor country. And in many ways it is. But for several years now, there has been a building frenzy going on in the fields around Moscow, and there is no sign of it stopping.

I have no idea where all the money comes from. Some of it is no doubt legal. Plenty of it probably isn't.

What is clear is that when Russians do get hold of some cash, they do not trust the banks with it, and they do not rush to tell the taxman either. What they do do, is head for the countryside and build.

The beez-ness

I went to look around a monster the other day. Or rather several monsters.

They were huddled together in a special compound in the middle of a birch forest. Three armed guards in flak jackets stood at the gate.

Fall of communism brought in pursuit of the dollar

Some of the buildings had little towers on them, like medieval castles. Most were still being finished.

There was a giant hole in the ground behind one 10-bedroom mansion which, apparently, was where the underground swimming pool would go.

As for the owners, well, I was told that Russia's ballroom dance champion had bought one house. The rest belonged to businessmen.

In Russian, that word, pronounced "beez-niss-men," tends to be a bit of a conversation stopper.

Secrecy is the rule here. If you ask someone what they do and they say "beez-ness" - what they generally mean is "none of your beez-ness."

In one mansion, I met a former government minister's brother who said he spent a lot of time in Switzerland and the Philippines these days doing something or other. There was a younger man next door with a family and a jeep the size of a tank in his front drive.

Building boom

These people are the Novy Ruski - the nouveau riche. Most of them spent the early and mid-1990s fighting to carve out their business empires in the big, violent cities.

Now they are moving out to the countryside to settle down - to become Russia's new landed gentry.

The result is something that Russia has never really had before - suburbia.

There were no suburbs in the Soviet Union, not proper ones anyway. People either lived in cramped apartment blocks in the city, or they lived in a village.

With pensions averaging $15, many of the aged are forced to beg

Millions of people also had their country dachas, or cottages. But most of them were little more than a vegetable patch and a garden shed - too flimsy to stay in all year round.

Today's building boom is beginning to blur the distinction between town and country, particularly around Moscow.

Alongside the monsters and the cottedgi, are new cafes, restaurants, shops and businesses. London has its stockbroker belt. This is the beez-ness belt.

Inevitably, this transformation isn't everyone's cup of tea. In many villages, fabulously rich and miserably poor now live a little too close for comfort.

I spent an afternoon earlier this summer sitting in the back garden of a ramshackle wooden cottage with three elderly women, drinking tea, swotting flies and watching a monster rise slowly from the bottom of the cabbage patch.

"They're beez-ness-men, of course," said Olga Vladimirivna, a 69-year old pensioner with a tanned wrinkled face and big strong hands.