IN RED SQUARE

Wednesday, June 27, 2007
I'm drinking free champagne and consuming skewered fresh fruit and petits fours at the opening of a new Kiehl’s boutique in the GUM department store on Red Square. My Hollywood Reporter business card got us past the PR girl with the clipboard, though my name was somehow not on the list. Odd to be in Moscow at the opening of Kiehl’s, a funky old family-owned shop where I used to buy shaving cream when I lived on the Lower East Side. Now it’s a global brand.

I’m hanging with Timour from Kirgyztan, who used to be a yuppie working for DHL and now works for Sasha’s music management company, Greenwave, when he isn’t playing guitar with various rock bands. He’s been tasked with showing me the tourist sites and now he’s on his third glass of champagne.

So here I am, in this place that I’ve seen on TV newscasts since Kruschev’s time, where he and his successors stood sternly on Lenin’s tomb and reviewed the marching armies and megaton weaponry said to be pointed our way. It’s hard to believe that now, given the general shabbiness and utter dysfunction of Moscow’s infrastructure – please, Timour, don’t make me ride that horrible subway again! Yet the sheer power of Moscow’s vast central plaza, flanked by the Kremlin one side and the multi-colored onion-bulb spires of St. Basil’s at one end, is undeniable.

The real power, however, now sits across from the Kremlin in the GUM department store with its Chanel and Dior boutiques, and its sleek women on the arms of newly minted billionaires gliding through the marbled passageways. Another glass of champagne, please… and here’s to Kapitalism!