Years of economic turmoil have had a serious impact on the lives of ordinary Russians. In the wake of Russia's economic crisis in August 1998, Moscow Correspondent Allan Little reported on how they have coped:

I did not realise it in that instant, but when I caught her eye she was just going into the first phase of a profound emotional trauma, this quiet, patient middle-aged lady at whom I was pointing a television camera and asking for her views on the latest twist in Russia's agonising descent into economic collapse. And in the few minutes that followed she visibly fell apart, weeping, inconsolable, unable finally even to speak.

She and her husband had been queuing since 0800 in the morning - it was now about 1530 in the afternoon - at a bank kiosk near Red Square.

The rouble has lost more than two thirds of its value

All day they had persevered, watching with each hour that passed the value of the roubles they were waiting to withdraw drop further and further against the dollar on the electronic price board by the kiosk window.

And when finally their turn came, suddenly and cruelly the attendant behind the bullet-proof glass slammed the hatch shut in their tired anxious faces, declaring that the kiosk had run out of cash and was ceasing trading for the day.

That was when I caught her eye. Her husband spoke because she could not.

They had worked for 20 years at a military base in the frozen north of Russia, and saved all that they had earned and had returned to Moscow at the end of the 1980s.

In the hyper-inflation that attended the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 they had lost everything.

"If you are honest in Russia the chances are that your family will go hungry"

They had picked themselves up and started again, saving enough in the 90s to put them back on their feet and allow them to think, cautiously, about retiring.

And now they could see it all beginning to happen again.

And there was one theme he kept returning to again and again: we are honest people, he kept saying, we have worked honestly and earned honest money and this is our reward.

Russia's crisis is not only economic and political, it is moral. The whole country can see that honesty, adherence to civic virtues brings no reward.

If you are honest in Russia the chances are that your family will go hungry this winter or your children will not be educated. And there is not just economic hardship in this, there is humiliation, too.

The dishonest, on the other hand, thrive here.

Many Russians wonder why the West still supports Boris Yeltsin

President Clinton came here and was embraced in a great bear-hug by President Yeltsin. Beside Boris Yeltsin's, President Clinton's woes and his misdemeanours seem trifling.

It is mystifying to many Russians that the West still supports Boris Yeltsin, seeing him as a brave and progressive liberal reformer, taking on the twin evils of reactionary communism and criminal mafia business tycoons.

That is not how it is seen here.

Mr Yeltsin's popularity is now so low that Russia's main public opinion polling organisation has stopped trying to measure it. It has fallen off the scale.

He is associated not with democracy and the free market, but with the creation of bandit capitalism in which dishonesty and graft pay dividends and the ordinary good people of Russia stand in line at bank queues and watch all they have spent their lives building up disappearing before their eyes.

That is the Yeltsin legacy.

Russia: A flea market economy

Presidents Clinton and Yeltsin seemed to be talking about a different world when they repeated their shared determination to pursue the free market.

Free market? What free market? There is no effective free market in Russia. It has been hijacked and hijacked by President Yeltsin's own allies and supporters. The billionaire tycoons known in Russia as the Oligarchs do not want a free market, that is why they backed his campaign in 1996 and put him back in the Kremlin.

That is why they used their influence to destroy that group of young reformers who dominated Sergei Kiriyenko's government.

They want a government that will protect their monopolistic business ventures from the chill winds of free and fair and regulated competition.

The result is an economic system that reminds me more and more of the most corrupt regimes in Africa.

The exploitation of immense natural resources by a tiny elite who plunder the country's wealth and salt their massive fortunes away in foreign bank accounts while the country's economic infrastructure withers and dies and the mass of the people sink into misery.

Expensive cars are abundant in Russia

Last year Russia imported more luxury cars than any other country. In 1972 the country that imported more limousines than any other was Zaire.

I sometimes feel I am watching the Africanisation of Russia. Travelling around this country is like travelling around Africa.

You can see that there was once a great empire here, flawed of course, ultimately, fatally flawed and cruel as in Africa, but coherent and capable of unlocking great wealth and it no longer works. Only the shell of it remains.