From the S&S archives:
Inside Moscow, where the improbable is commonplace

CLEARING CUSTOMS at Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport proved easy. Exchanging dollars for rubles, the official currency, was not..

A permanent sign at the change booth proclaimed 24-hour service. A smaller handwritten sign announced, "No rubles." The dour cashier confirmed both signs.

"Yes, we're open 24 hours and we have no rubles," she said with finality.

"It's another mystery of Russia," said Maria, our translator. She would repeat those words more than once as The Stars and Stripes criss-crossed Moscow for 10 days, visiting soup kitchens, hospitals, grocery stores, outdoor markets, newspaper offices and private homes.

"It's another mystery of Russia" sums up the somber paradoxes and perplexing ironies that make up modern Russian society. Visitors to this city of 10 million are left with a dizzying array of contradictory images.

The battered Volga taxi fishtails along the grey, snow-crusted street. Russia is freer than ever, yet "prison music" drifts from the car radio. A lonely voice and a. lone guitar. Like a man in a prison cell. The music reflects the driver's mood as he takes a slow drag on his Cosmos cigarette. He looks out the window of his cab, his face as gloomy as a face in the gulag.

***

"The middle class has been destroyed" says Alexander Podakin, a journalist at Moscow News. "A typist might make 3,000 rubles a month, a highly qualified engineer 1,000 rubles. Months ago, a doctor was in the top middle class. Today, he's a beggar in the streets with an income that can buy only a few kilograms of cheese."

***

Tatiana Andrevskaya knits shawls at night. By day, she's a nurse in Orenburg in the Ural Mountains. Once a month, she makes the three-hour flight to Moscow, staying with her sister. The shawls she and her mother make earn her 10,000 rubles a month at the big Moscow flea market. As a nurse, she makes 500 rubles a month.

The Armenian restaurant is almost empty. A waiter tells the new arrivals, "All tables are reserved. So if you want to eat, you'll have to pay more.

"Thirty dollars per person," he whispers, adding, "but we can negotiate."

Next door, a restaurant frequented by Muscovites serves good beef in a gravy and plum sauce, smoked salmon and a half of a boiled egg with caviar and hot rolls for 85 rubles ($1.25) each. No waiting.

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The Russian women stand in line wearing shiny fur coats that would cost thousands of dollars in America. They wait alongside ragged peasant women to buy a carton of milk or a loaf of bread.

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A pack of Marlboro cigarettes cost 120 rubles. In the same store, Winstons go for 45 rubles.

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Off Red Square is a glitzy perfume shop that accepts only Western currency. Russians don't bother going inside. They don't need to. Just outside the doors, Russian women do a brisk business selling cosmetics for rubles.

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Soviet military spending may have been drastically slashed, but two photographers from Red Star, the official military newspaper, cover a street demonstration with $6,000 worth of Japanese camera equipment around their necks.

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Moscow survived Napoleon's 39-day occupation in 1812 when two-thirds of the city was burned. Near Red Square, an angry old woman wonders aloud if the capital city will survive Gorbachev and Yeltsin.

"They are criminals and fascists," she shouts into the wind. "They deceived our people, they betrayed the party that elected them. This is Moscow and this is terrible. Everything is expensive in the stores. I do not see any way out."