MCS: Well, the, you know, it’s—I went there expecting to see a collapse, but it’s different. It’s very—you know, it’s a little bit like going, I went up to the Oakland Hills after the fire there. And you think you’re prepared for it, but you’re not, because you walk around Oakland and you see nothing but chimneys, and where there were cars there are puddles of aluminum. Hardened aluminum. And now, to walk around Moscow, you are walking around the remains—the ruins—of Communist rule. Of Soviet rule. And of course it was a sham, of course it was a façade, but when it came down it really made a mess. And this mess, it wasn’t quite a mess at the point right before the coup when I’m writing, but it was all falling. It was mid-descent, mid-collapse, at the time Red Square is set. So I went expecting that, and I went expecting a more prominent role, a more visible role for the gangs, but I really didn’t anticipate, uh, the … not even brazen. It goes beyond brazen. The simple fact of the gangs on the street, of the taxicabs that won’t pick up anyone without cigarettes, vodka, or foreign currency, of the women who knock on your door in the middle of the night. At the, at the—you go to a tourist bar and it’s full of racketeers. Russian racketeers. You go to the casinos and find the mafia there. You go into the streets and you find the black markets. Some of them, of course, a lot of the black markets are simply providing goods that are unavailable. That should be available for stores and are not. But a lot of—a number of the black markets are clearly selling stolen goods. And you’ll find—you go to the right street and the entire block lined with men selling stolen goods—and protected by the police.

DS: This is essentially the setting for Rudy’s demise. The explosion, enormous. The huge black market area where you can find almost anything.

MCS: Yeah.

DS: Meanwhile, you have a wonderful description on page 71 of, uh, Red Square and the almost empty GUM department store—

MCS: Yes.

DS: These are really interesting touches because here, where you can get almost any kind of good in a black market, you go into a department store and you can’t get anything.