The space museum is closed. Not just closed, but in ruin, and abandon. Russia is a leader in the commercialization of its space infrastructure, as well as everything else it has, but in the meantime it forgot to keep an eye on what brought it where it is, in the positive, and the negative.

Inside this market all types of software can be found on conveniently assembled CDs or DVDs. A typical price for a CD is 100 rubles ( about 4 dollars, or 3 euro), independently of the content. You can find the latest releases of Microsoft Windows Vista, Microsoft Office 2007, alongside with any other product you might want.

I am told these sell for five thousand dollars per square meter. No local with a normal job can afford them of course. Even if a lot of the local salaries come from unofficial sources. The real estate market with come back to earth, but it will be a few years before this bubble will burst. The oil prices are also sustaining it, and those are unlikely to come down soon.

The lingering signs of the communist era express the physical difficulty of parting with the past: be it monuments that praise principles not shared anymore, crumbling public housing, now sold at astronomical prices which make Moscow one of the most expensive cities in the world to the foreigners, or the hopelessness of once world-leading institutions, resorting to more or less viable commercial enterprises.

I am leaving for Moscow tomorrow and will be there for the first time, spending a week mainly for business, but as usual with the hope of having some time to look around as well. Having been raised in Hungary in the ’70s, where the Russians were looked upon as loathed and unwelcomed overlords, I have this ambivalent feeling that comes from the childhood memories, mixed with the admiration for the art and the culture that Russia for me embodies. And of course there are all the bad jokes about polonium…