The "westernisation" of Russia is proceeding fast. Here are three observations from a short visit.The country has 90 million mobiles, enough for almost two-thirds of the population, while in Moscow there are more phones than residents. For every struggling babushka who barely knows what a mobile is, there is a yuppie businesswoman with two or three designer versions.
At a hotel construction site a hundred yards from the Kremlin, scores of brown-skinned Tajiks, Uzbeks and Azeris wait for buses to dump them back at their dormitories. Moscow has 3 million unregistered foreign workers, according to the federal migration service, and all the problems of ruthless gangmasters which go with that.
At tube station kiosks every kind of soft-porn magazine is on offer. An amazing number of passengers still read books in the ancient but ultra-punctual trains, and Moscow's travelling public remains the most literate in the world.
But celebrity gossip is gaining ground. The tabloid that a woman opposite me was reading revealed that "Mikhail Gorbachev's granddaughter has found new love". Was the star of the 1980s so old already, I paused to think. In any case, the leader's family used to be a taboo subject. Now Russians know that the ex-president's granddaughter married a super-rich businessman last year (just one item at the society wedding, the flowers, cost ?6,000). The couple split up months later.
Yet behind the glitz Russia's counter-revolution has not stopped taking a heavy social toll. After the privatisation of industry and the transfer of most oil and natural resources to Yeltsin's cronies in the 1990s, a new stage is under way - the total commercialisation of the welfare state.
Many state assets, from kindergartens to trade-union holiday homes, were closed and sold off a decade ago. In recent years local authorities have been charging people a growing share of the cost of the hot water, heating and electricity that their centrally supplied flats use.
This week a law came into effect that requires councils to charge people 100%. If services were adequate people might be less upset. But through incompetence, or a shortage of cash from the central budget, or because it gets creamed off on the way, local authorities cut spending. In many cities winter heating and electricity work only a few hours a day.
The charging scheme is part of a "cost recovery" programme recommended by the World Bank and already in force in numerous developing countries. The bank pays part of the salaries of research staff in several Russian ministries so its ideas penetrate easily.
Cost recovery is spreading to health and education. Prescriptions, blood tests and other minor procedures increasingly have to be paid for. State universities are charging fees. Most will no longer be funded from the federal budget. Regional authorities will have to take over, and in Russia's poorer areas this means closing faculties and downgrading universities to become technical colleges, concentrating on business studies and accounting - a move that President Putin has said he wants.
The newspaper Izvestia's commentator Viktoria Voloshina wondered this week whether the new cost burden would lead to demonstrations. Thousands of pensioners took to the streets last January after the government took free transport away from elderly and disabled people and war veterans, and gave a one-off cash payment instead.
While most of those protesters were poor, the new reforms will hit the emerging middle class. "Thirty- and 40-year-olds striving hard to get out of the ranks of low-income earners may start demonstrating too," wrote Voloshina. "Their salary increases cannot keep pace with these rising charges, which push them back into poverty."
So the spectre of an "orange revolution" on the Ukrainian model regularly crops up in talks with Russian analysts. But there are big differences. The Kiev protesters' demands were primarily political - clean elections and a switch in government strategy, away from Russia towards "Europe". If there was an economic dimension, it was mainly a visionary hope, like a Polynesian cargo cult, that entry to the EU would bring overnight prosperity.
The Russian context is different. EU entry is not an option, at least for decades, and Russians cannot be against Russia. Their protests are primarily economic. "Reform" has bitten deeper than it has yet done in Ukraine, and demonstrators are protesting at the way western capitalism has come about. They want more social justice and a reversal of the huge surge in inequality.
Some protest techniques seen in Kiev are there in Russia too. Opposition websites are flourishing. In two crowded rooms of a ramshackle building in central Moscow I found the headquarters of the independent trade union federation as well as an anti-globalisation movement, and a meeting of activists preparing to set up a Left Front to try to unite anti-government parties and youth groups. In the past they would have struggled to contact sympathisers in Russia's far-flung regions. Now they have the web and the mobile phone, both uncontrolled.
In a country with far more natural wealth than Ukraine, many Russians are angry at seeing their resources frittered away. Putin's visit to Germany this week, where he signed a pipeline deal to bring gas that will eventually reach Britain, has spotlighted Russia's energy bonanza.
A year ago it looked as though world oil prices might slip, but this seems increasingly unlikely. Russia's budget has been in surplus for six years and will stay that way. While some Russian academics debate the issue of oil as a "curse" that delays the economy's diversification, the government wonders how much revenue to maintain in a stabilisation fund, and how far to risk inflation by spending it.
This week, in a move that suggests he is worried by the impact of the cost-recovery reforms, Putin announced higher wages for teachers, doctors and nurses, and extra spending on ambulance services. Sitting on a huge budget surplus, he can easily hand out money reactively. But he seems not to have an economic strategy. One minute he looks like a radical neoliberal; the next he comes up with a rush of social spending.
Russia's political system is still far from being "western". The lack of proper political parties, the recentralisation of power in the Kremlin under Putin, and massive state control over the media, make democratisation difficult. But authoritarianism is not Russians' main worry.
What depresses them is the way economic liberalisation has given new scope to old Russian faults - corruption at all levels of the bureaucracy, selectivity in dispensing punishment, and vast selfishness by the tiny minority who constitute the economic elite. The west shares the blame.
The Guardian