The energy and drive that tear Russians away from their bleak communist past are obvious everywhere in cities like St. Petersburg and Moscow -- once drab and dreary cities transformed, in places, into fast-paced, neon-bright magnets for foreign capital. But the engine of Russian change seems as intent as ever to ignore the little people; the country of tsars, Stalin, and mafiya toughs has no time or patience for its peasant base and certainly won't slow down to make room on the troika for all. This is a selfish place, made ever more so by decades of communistic deprivation.

I made my first trip to what was then the Soviet Union in 1983 (Yuri Andropov was the "reform minded" general secretary of the USSR at the time), when blue jeans were traded as major currency and a Soviet citizen found holding $50 in US cash could land in prison for five years. Friendships with Americans were made quietly and surreptitiously, and "night life" consisted of vodka bought from stone-faced storekeepers and drunk on a deserted riverbank by Russians who couldn't afford to be seen in public with foreigners.

Of the old ways, today only the plentiful vodka remains. (A comparably sized bottle of Evian water is actually more expensive on the streets of St. Petersburg than some brands of vodka, which sell for under $3 a bottle.) Everything is available in Russia now, for a price. Nightclubs and bars have popped up all over city centers, as have the requisite metal detectors to keep gun-toting patrons from blasting away at each other, as they have done with Godfatheresque regularity since the early 1990s. American cash flows everywhere, mostly in the brand-new $100 bills that I had read about but never seen first-hand in the States. Drunken women hang on fat sugar daddies like something out of an old Edward G. Robinson gangster movie about life in the 1930s, and obsequious waiters ask, in English, "What more would the gentleman like?"

The nightclub is a world of only a few super-elite Russians, however. Everyday people are scrambling to pay for basic needs in a country that has seen the ruble fall in value by over 1,000 percent in six years, a country where no one in the army has been paid for the past seven months. Unemployment is rampant and many industrial cities have seen 80-85 percent of their factories close down. This is not a land of euphemistic "downsizing;" this is an economic debacle as terrible and as transforming as the Great Depression of the 1930s. While Russian Eurobonds sell at inflated prices on the world market and the tiny, nascent stock exchange explodes in value, most Russian citizens do not even have bank accounts.