Capitalism Runs Amok in Russia

Lately, I’ve been watching a lot of historical documentaries on TV, such as Oliver Stone’s “Untold History of the United States” on Showtime.

Stone and some other documentarians have pulled the curtain aside to show us the folly of our cold war thinking. They claim four and a half decades of presidents, from Truman to Reagan, based their foreign policies on the belief that the Soviet Union was way ahead of us in nuclear warhead capacity.

The fact, apparently, is that the Russians never were ahead of us. They were trailing us, and they feared that desperately.

Many Soviet heads of state blustered and posed so we wouldn’t know their dirty little secret, until Mikhail Gorbachev acknowledged his country’s economy would never grow until it stopped devoting so much of its budget to defense. The rest is history – and, in fact, is history.

It seems that, 25 years after Mr. Gorbachev tore down that wall, Russia is still playing catch-up. Only now, it isn’t atomic weaponry – unless it’s the digital atomic weaponry sold in the toy departments of its retail establishments.

Picture a Saturday afternoon in the U.S., circa 1983: malls filled with families, stores buzzing with activity, every available door occupied, cash registers ca-chinging.

Now evoke that same picture 30 years later – largely the same, except it isn’t occurring in Paramus, N.J., it’s happening in Moscow. (Also, cash registers now ca-ching silently.)

Moscow has 82 malls encompassing 34 million square feet of retail, more mall space that any other city in Europe.

In 2010, a 4.15 million-square-foot center called Vegas, built on an old cucumber field on the edge of Moscow, became the largest in Russia (larger than Mall of America if you take away the Minneapolis behemoth’s amusement park venue).

And, by the way, isn’t “Vegas” a revealing name for a Russian establishment? What would Lenin think?
But in the records-are-made-to-be-broken category, Vegas will be the leader only until Avia Park, now going up in northwest Moscow, is completed, with 5 million square feet of interior space.

I recently read that Russians spend 60 percent of their pretax income on retail purchases (including food), the most in the world. But lest you think all that spending activity centers around Russian versions of Cinnabon and Claire’s, today’s Moscow has the highest proportion of billionaire residents in the world. So forget your images of babushkas and heavy woolen ear muffs, bread lines and non-glamorous, lookalike Volga cars. Think Rolex, Bentley, Gucci, Ferragamo.

During the Cold War, Russians condemned our “decadent capitalism.” It looks like that decadence has now invaded Russia and infiltrated Moscow. And a great winter storm won’t stop capitalism as it did Napoleon and Hitler.

Rather, it appears, it will just lead to more sales of Hermes scarves, Portolano gloves and $8000 Gorsuch fur-lined coats. Bundle up, Comrade, life is good. Na zdorovie.