Moscow Times Columnist Richard Lourie documents the rise of the neo-Soviet Union in a piece entitled "A Whole New World":

There were some lovely days early in April but then Moscow's weather turned foul. The sky was overcast, oppressive. A cold rain enlarged Russia's eternal puddles. As a result cars were splattered in mud almost up to their door handles. Somehow, all the good cars seemed to have disappeared to dachas and garages, leaving the streets to boxy Ladas on which cracked windshields come standard. Suddenly Moscow looked Soviet again.

Or at least neo-Soviet.

On my first visit to Moscow since last spring, I was surprised by a new residential building near the Sokol metro station, said to be the tallest in Europe if the spire is counted, that was designed in the style of the seven Stalinist skyscrapers that tower over central Moscow. Many people, myself included, thought that the end of the Soviet Union would result in a flowering of culture. Except for a few blips -- Brushkin, Pelevin -- nothing much happened. What the Soviet lid turned out to be holding down was not art but greed and ethnic hatred. The aesthetic void is being filled by a neo-Soviet retro chic; the hammer and sickle is still used by Aeroflot, ideology becomes logo.

But aesthetics don't exist in a void. They also imply and influence values, beliefs, actions. So, it's no surprise to see neo-Sovietism surface on state television. On the evening news, I heard the announcer report that President Vladimir Putin had delivered a "brilliant" speech. That stopped me in my tracks. An announcer has no more right to call the president's speech "brilliant" than "moronic."

And so, out of nothing nobler than sheer irritation I decided to attend a freedom of speech rally on Pushkin Square on Sunday, April 16, timed to coincide with the fifth anniversary of Gazprom's takeover of NTV. Some 1,500 people participated, mostly middle-aged mid-level intelligentsia with a sprinkling of youths. The chant "Today censorship, tomorrow dictatorship" sounded both more poetic and ominous in Russian, but the crowd did not recite it with any great passion.

The cry "Free Khodorkovsky!" was, however, seconded with gusto and applause. It was bizarre: The intelligentsia gathering again on Pushkin Square calling out for freedom, not for a dissident poet or a refusenik Jew, but for a billionaire oil magnate in the "gulag." Progress a la russe.

Directly across from Cartier on Ulitsa Petrovka is the Museum of the Gulag. The entryway is surrounded by barbed wire, flanked by a guard tower. On the front of the building are 12 portraits of famous victims of the terror and the camps. Inside, one floor contains a powerful full-scale reproduction of a barracks with prisoners huddled around a stove. A claustrophobic punishment cell is next door. But somehow what impressed me most was an old photograph of the piers at the Solovetsky islands where the first camps were set up in the early 1920s. Prisoners arriving by boat would be greeted by the words: "With an iron hand we will drive humanity toward happiness." Outside, in Cartier the iron hand has been replaced by the invisible hand and it too is failing.

Strolling in the drizzle I notice that all the cars have their windshield wipers right where they belong -- on the windshield. In Soviet times a driver would automatically remove his windshield wipers after parking and lock them in the glove compartment. Spare parts were so scarce that a pair of wipers left on the windshield would be on the black market in a matter of minutes.

In the new booming Moscow nobody would be bothered with such trifles. Now the whole car is stolen -- for resale elsewhere, for all its parts. Carjacking occurs and even "carnapping." Your car is stolen and a few hours later you receive a call offering you the chance to ransom your vehicle back. No, it's a whole new era and the spirit of enterprise is abroad in the land!

Richard Lourie is the author of "The Autobiography of Joseph Stalin" and "Sakharov: A Biography."