was shadowy. The Kremlin was dim. The Moskua River was an opaque trough beneath dismal bridges. The USSR was very dark, considering it was still - daytime. I came back to Russia in 1996 to find Moscow crowned in an arc of lights— Camel Lights. This being spelled out in tall letters atop a downtown high-rise. And the city below sparkled with ads for Sony, Coke, Levi’s, Visa, Pizza Hut, Sprint, and Nike. Freedom had come to Moscow. Well, one freedom anyway. Many human rights had been taken from the citizens of the old Soviet Union, and the first human right they got back seemed to be the Right to Outdoor Advertising. Maybe this was a minor liberty, but I don’t know. Without advertising, human desires and intentions are invisible. What can people have? What do people want? Where are people going? They could be lining up to see Titanic. Or they could be lining up to tell on you. What succeeds with this public? What fails? A government could say the most popular flavor of ice cream is asparagus. How would you know? And what are all those buildings for? What’s going on in them? (The answer to that question in 1982— in a country without profit or loss, with little to sell and less to buy—was “nothing.”) Now everything is going on in Moscow. Crowds load the sidewalks, moving briskly. The masses are actually massed. The masses are finally progressive. Except every member of the masses is progressing in a different direction. And he’d better be careful getting there. The pedestrian crosswalk is not yet an idea in Russia. Cars, trucks, and city buses approach intersections with the same speed and inclination to swerve as avalanches. Nor is this traffic the tinny, puttering, tacked-together output of the Soviet industrial pre-Cambrian age. You could have stood in front of that stuff and watched it fall apart as it hit you. But now there are Volvo semis and Mercedes sedans and solid little Opel coupes barreling down . . . crash . . . into one of a hundred gaping holes in the street, products of a flurry of construction that envelops Moscow in a glorious aureole of mud, dust, bulldozer exhaust, and jackhammer noises. The place is hopping, happening, swinging, smoking. Factually smoking. You can fire a butt anywhere in Moscow, and nobody fakes a cough or pulls a C. Everett Koop mug on you. These people are busy. They have lives. And this vast liveliness does something unlikely to Moscow: It makes the city almost beautiful. The Communists wanted to turn Moscow into a showplace and couldn’t get it
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