news.sky.com/story/moscow-looks-the-same-but-is-utterly-transformed-12567609
Russia: Moscow looks the same but is utterly transformed
Sanctions and an Orwellian fear of speaking out have ripped up the future Russians could have had
"It has the smell of the 90s, I can feel it," says a friend. "Shops are boarded up, I see more old people, more beggars out. I'm afraid I can get arrested at any moment."
Russia is at risk of an imminent default on its debt. At the very least it may pay it off in rubles, which is tantamount to a default.
Everyone here over a certain age remembers the catastrophic devaluation of the ruble in the 1990s, the moment when it dropped from six to the dollar to 24 overnight, and the debt default of 1998.
In the 1990s though, the fear came from the mayhem of gangster capitalism and the kind of fast criminality derived from poverty and from getting rich quick.
And
Now it is the police who people are scared of and the pervasive, Orwellian fear of speaking out against the official line. Perhaps as the sanctions tear through the Russian economy, the lawless thievery of the 1990s will come back, too.
And
Moscow has emptied of the relatively freshly minted, post-Soviet middle-class who'd come of age in the 1990s, who'd made some money, bought houses and cars and a lifestyle of Novikov restaurants, chillrave and craft beers in the two decades of Putinism since.
It was an unwritten social contract which demanded political acquiescence in return for adequate living standards and many Russians, understandably given their parents' Soviet past, were prepared to go along with it.
And
In a packed craft beer joint in Moscow, as Mariupol went through its 16th day of siege, a group of young drinkers call us over. They're happy to hear foreign voices still in town. Their first question is about the sanctions.
They're dejected about the future, they feel they don't deserve it - and they don't. I ask about Ukraine. "We had to do it", one says with a look of forlorn resignation in fluent English. "Zelenskyy was building nuclear weapons, there was no other choice."