LAT: From Moscow's city center to the airport: Road to Riches and Ruin

[DeepModem Mom]

The Road to Riches and Ruin
You'll find $800 pens and luxury cars, decrepit homes and desperate pensioners along a highway that epitomizes post-Soviet Russia.
By David Holley, Times Staff Writer
October 20, 2006


The Leningrad Highway, renamed Tverskaya Street in central Moscow, winds toward the State Historical Museum of Russia, center, and the Kremlin.
(Sergei L. Loiko / LAT)

MOSCOW — Tired travelers heading downtown after arriving at Sheremetyevo 1 airport probably don't pay much attention to the village-style wooden houses, set behind picket fences and painted in fading shades of green and blue, that line the busy highway.

One home on the down-at-the-heels stretch of road is where Viktor Zhivin, a 71-year-old retired road worker, was born and grew up. The roof has collapsed over one corner of the house, making half of it uninhabitable. There is no running water, no plumbing, no central heating or piped-in gas, and in winter Zhivin's family burns coal in a stove to fight the bitter cold....

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Capitalism has transformed Moscow over the last decade, but Zhivin and many others think they have been left breathing exhaust fumes. To make the bumper-to-bumper drive from the countryside near the airport to Moscow's city center is to take a 21-mile tour of the haves and have-nots, a highway as microcosm of the nation.

The route starts out at open fields and birch forests, passes poor rural homes more fitting for a dying mountain village than Europe's largest city, and ends with some of the most expensive shops in the world just a few hundred feet from the Kremlin....

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The gap between rich and poor recalls czarist times. More than two centuries ago, in his book "Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow," Alexander Radishchev used the highway as his backdrop for an attack on the ills of the imperial era. He fiercely criticized the privileges of the wealthy, serfdom, censorship and a lack of democracy....

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-highway20oct20,0,4070507.story?coll=la-home-headlines