Eight Time Zones from Princeton, New Jersey

Yesterday, when my director of studies took me to get the SIM card for my cell phone, the saleslady gave me a little strip of orange-and-black-striped cloth. Being eight time zones away from Princeton, I found this a bit odd, and asked my DOS what the story was with the colors.

She explained that, on Victory Day, people put these strips of cloth on their clothes and bags, and that orange and black were some sort of military colors. I guessed they might be the colors of the brigade, batallion, or whatever that defended Moscow when the Germans attempted to capture it. She couldn't be more specific, for lack of the right English vocabulary. Her English is flawless, but I imagine that complicated words for military things don't figure much in her life and so she hasn't had any need to learn them.

I think it says a lot about the state of Russia that I was handed this orange-and-black cloth in a cell phone store. Intellectually, I know I shouldn't judge too much about the condition of Russia from what I see in Moscow; something like 80 percent of the country's wealth is centered in the capital, and conditions are doubtless far more modern here than elsewhere. But from what I have seen so far, it would be impossible to guess that a mere 20 years ago, this was a place where people stood in line for potatoes. Or that ten years ago, it was a place where thousands of people were losing their life savings in an intense financial crisis.

On the streets of Moscow, communism appears to be dead. Completely dead. 100 percent dead. Deader than the corpse in Lenin's tomb (which skeptics say is mostly plastic these days). Leningradskiy Prospect, the main thoroughfare into town from Sheremetyevo Airport, is lined not with slogans about Five Year plans but with Audi dealerships and advertisements for luxury clothing brands. If it were not for all the Cyrillic signage, Novoslobodskaya Street, where my school's headquarters are located, could be a street in any European capital.

Fast food outlets and Western-style restaurants abound. Just along Novoslobodskaya, I can find McDonald's, Yolki Polki (a Russian fast food outlet), and of course, TGI Friday's--not to mention the internet cafe where I am writing this, which is indistinguishable from any internet cafe in Taiwan or New York. English business terms are filtering into the language in which Five Year Plans were once written--the most egregious being beezneez lanch (business lunch).

It's hard to know what all this means. Putin's puppet may be the new leader of Russia, and the country may be sliding back into unfreedom.

But whatever form this unfreedom takes, it won't involve standing in line for potatoes.