In Europe

and eating sausage. They were doing their best to bury an old grudge. Sasha had set up a travel agency, and Misha had revived Televizor. The band was going well, but all his old fans had disappeared. ‘Half of them have turned to drink,’ Misha said, ‘and the other half went into business for themselves. Within two years they forgot what music was about.’
    Later that evening we went to Sasha's flat to celebrate a friendship restored. There was plenty of food and drink, but soon Misha nodded off with his head on the table. We went on drinking and singing, and he lay on the sofa and could not be roused. The next day we met him at a crowded metro station; he'd said he wanted to show us some lyrics, some of his newest work. He pushed a crumpled sheet of paper into our hands, turned on his heels and was off. We read:
    I don't like having guests in my head
they don't give a fuck about me
they come to gobble up my secrets
to drink my soul
to breathe my air
they wear friends’ faces
and I, hospitable lackey that I am,
I smile.
    Today, on 24 November, 1999, it's eighteen degrees below zero, the cars in Moscow sport icy moustaches, but the Volgas and Ladas steam along as though nothing has changed. The newspaper runs a picture of pensioner Nikolai Skasylov, bundled up warmly, fishing in a hole in the frozen Moskva. ‘One fish lasts us three days,’ he says. ‘Not bad!’
    Russia is doing well these days. The flirtation with the West is over, the price of oil is back to thirty-five dollars a barrel, the IMF has nothing more to complain about. In Moscow, for reasons unknown, an apartment building with a hundred people in it has been bombed, President Yeltsin has fingered his successor (fresh-faced former KGB agent Vladimir Putin), investigations into corruption within the presidential entourage have been suspended, the reports from the Chechen front are bringing patriotic Russian blood to a boil. No one in the cafés has any desire to speak English any more: go learn Russian, stranger. Doors are being closed, borders drawn, just like that, without the help of a single politician.
    The McDonald's in Pushkin Square is packed all day with schoolgirls, businessmen, old ladies, housewives and children celebrating their birthdays. No one here is extremely rich or extremely poor, this is the new Moscow middle class par excellence. For a hamburger and a soft drinkthey calmly count out half a week's wage. The department stores are full of television sets, video cameras, refrigerators and washing machines. The vacuum cleaners are just as expensive as they are in the Netherlands, and they are going fast. At the delicatessens, the gilded pillars and richly decorated ceilings give the impression that nothing has really changed since the days of Czar Nicholas II. The tone of the language spoken here has made a drastic shift. ‘Democrat’ has become a swear word, ‘privatisation’ is synonymous with ‘robbery’, ‘free market’ with ‘chaos’, ‘businessman’ with ‘mafioso’, ‘the West’ with ‘humiliation’.
    In the Revolution Square metro station, a young violinist is playing something which I believe is by Scarlatti. He is barely twenty, he has a wispy beard and obviously a great deal of talent. His nose is red from the cold, and on a morning like this, he says, he earns one dollar. A little further along, a group of older people, most of them women, have queued up. They have their money in one hand and an application form of some kind in the other. In a heated cubbyhole between two swinging doors, a man and woman have set up a little office: they are trading in impressively printed and stamped bonds, reminiscent of the old Russian Railways coupons, documents laden with hope and security.
    But I am on my way to see Anatoli Artsybarski, former commander of the
Mir
space station. Cosmonauts in the Soviet Union once enjoyed a much greater status than even war heroes or movie stars, and in 1991 Artsybarski was a demigod. He receives me in a suffocatingly warm little office behind a church; his three secretaries are busy filing their nails, Artsybarksi has a Delft-blue astronaut on his desk. These days the former cosmonaut's mission is to save the crippled
Mir
which is still hanging in orbit, for the greater honour and glory of the Russian fatherland.
    While Artsybarski was circling the earth, the Soviet Union was crumbling into the abyss. Gorbachev was fighting with all his might to keep his Communist Party – in