And there aren’t any Russian products in the stores, either, other than vodka, fish eggs, and a few tourist tchotchkes. There is a simple reason for this. The Russian stuff is no good. Even the smallest, simplest items stink. The way you use a Russian match is: After you strike it, you put it back in the matchbox. It’s as likely to work as any of the other matches in there. In the old days the soda pop tasted like soap, the soap lathered like toilet paper, the toilet paper could be used to sand furniture, the furniture was as comfortable as a pile of canned goods, the canned goods had the flavor of a Solzhenitsyn novel, and a Solzhenitsyn novel got you arrested if you owned one. Now the Russians have discovered brand names. Easy to sneer at this. But there’s a reason why, when we go to Florida, we don’t drink Ocala-Cola. Think what American shopping preferences would be if Sears were suddenly filled with wonderful products from the future—typewriters that could write things by themselves, safe cars that could go twice as fast as our own, shoes that made us sexually irresistible. The Russians are getting all these things. Especially the shoes. Shoes are to Moscow what T-shirts are to Jimmy Buffet concerts. Shoes rule the store displays, particularly women’s shoes—pumps, mules, sandals, boots—all of them with the highest possible heels, even the clogs and espadrilles. High heels and nude hose define the Moscow look and are worn with thigh-flaunting skirts so that even policewomen and female army officers are tottering around, knees in the breeze. The ensemble is not always chosen on the best of fashion advice. Often the effect is sausage on a stick. But what the hell. This is a country where in 1988, when I was covering the Reagan- Gorbachev summit, I saw a near riot in the shoe section of the GUM department store. Scores of women were pushing and shouting for the opportunity to buy Bulgarian sneakers. Now, GUM is a mall, fully American, except for seventy-four years of Soviet maintenance on the greenhouse roof, which leaks, and containing more than a hundred private stores. They sell everything from high heels to nude hose. Plus you can shop 24/7 in Moscow at thousands of Plexiglas and plywood kiosks that have been built Tirana-fashion in parks, under bridges, on railroad and subway platforms, and along every footpath wide enough to walk a dog. A full half of these market the instant miniparty with wares consisting of Marlboros, hooch, and pirated audio-cassettes.
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