My friend Sasha, or to give him his full name, Alexander Platkovski, is the Beijing correspondent for the famous Russian newspaper, Izvestia. He is one of the most senior and best-informed foreign journalists in China.
He and his wife Natasha have been watching with some alarm developments at home in Moscow. And with good reason. Starved of advertising because of the economic collapse, Izvestia for the first time in its history is closing down its foreign bureaux.
Sasha has received no office expenses since April and he has not been paid his salary for two months. His newspaper has told him to hang on in Beijing until better days, and become "self-financing", that is take some other job in the meantime. The couple will probably now have to give up their beloved apartment. Many of their Beijing-based colleagues from Moscow are in a similar predicament.
Not far from where they live in the eastern part of Beijing, there is other evidence of how the Russian crisis is adversely affecting other people in China. A flourishing market has grown up around Ritan Park, where traders from Russia and the former Soviet republics come every year to buy furs, sportswear, wigs, sweaters, hats, gloves, shoes and leather goods. For five years they have been arriving in increasing numbers, packed into charter planes on which they return with bales of clothing to sell in shops and kiosks back home. They come several times a year and on average spend $1,500 a trip. To cater for them, Russian cafes with names like Raiski Sad (Paradise Garden) and Traktir (Roadhouse) have opened, along with barber shops, massage parlours and manicurists with neon Cyrillic signs and Russian-speaking Chinese staff.
This "Little Russia" has developed a raucous, cheery, life of its own. Russians, with their body clocks still on Moscow time, like to make merry from midnight to 4 a.m. in establishments such as the Traktir, emerging to do business late the following morning. It became commonplace to see a couple of blonde Slavic women on the back of a laden pedi-cart being pedalled to a shipping office, or a group of Transcaucasian men with heavy moustaches sipping cognac outside the Moskva bar.
At the heart of the district, the 151-room Ritan Hotel has become a home from home for the wealthier Russian visitors. They would do a lot of their buying in nearby buildings, noisily crowding into dimly-lit corridors where Chinese sellers display their wares in small offices.
Countless local manufacturers, middlemen, office staff, cargo shippers, restaurant owners, hawkers, pedi-cyclists, prostitutes and beggars have come to rely on the visitors from north of the border for their living.
But in the past two months the Russians have stopped coming. The $3 billion-a-year Russian rag trade in Beijing and other Chinese cities has all but collapsed, first with the August 17th devaluation of the rouble, then because Russians could not change their roubles for dollars, the basic trading currency between the two sides. Almost no charter planes are flying in from Moscow, Novosibirsk or Krasnoyarsk these days.
It's the same everywhere in north China. The number of Russian tourists and vehicles entering China through the border town of Manzhouli in Inner Mongolia has fallen by 30 per cent since August 17th, according to the Xinhua news agency.
"We have just one or two Russians at a time staying here these days," moaned Bian, the Chinese receptionist at the Ritan Hotel, where the only sound in the empty marble-floored lobby came from water trickling down a granite-backed waterfall.
A stout woman called Luba from Kirgizstan paused as she emerged from the lift to say that she could still get dollars in the former Soviet republic but the exchange rate kept going up and up, and she now noticed that the goods on sale in Beijing were old stock.
A lot of Russians who placed orders and paid for goods can't even get the money to come back and ship them home because of the collapse of the rouble, she confided, before bustling off to do some business.
Most of the little trading offices by the hotel have closed. On Saturday, when I ventured into one agency, hung with fur-collared coats, two of the four assistants were asleep.
"We haven't sold a consignment all week," complained the boss, a petite Chinese woman in a blue suit who has adopted the Russian name of Katyusha. "Things have been very bad since July. Only an occasional Russian comes by, though we still get buyers from the other republics."
On Yabao Road nearby a merry Russian-looking man swigging beer from a bottle, turned out to be a Ukrainian called Pyotr. "I come here eight or 10 times a year and normally the street is full of Russians; you would fall over them," he said. "Now there are none."
He predicted cheerfully that Ukraine would also go down the tubes soon; the Ukrainian currency had already slipped by 50 per cent in a month. In the meantime, Pyotr is stocking up on everything from sneakers to hats (he pointed his finger from his feet to his head) because he couldn't purchase such items in Ukraine for his retail business.
Many Chinese face ruin if the Russians don't come back, and are slashing their prices to keep in business, much to the delight of the Ukrainians, Azerbaijanis, Armenians, Kirghizi, Romanians and Moldovans who are still arriving to trade.
"They will come back, we are sure," Katyusha said plaintively, "won't they?"
Sasha too predicted that Russian trade would pick up again, for the simple reason that Russia has no other source of cheap clothing. But he himself, and Natasha, have to wait until the Russian economy revives and the newspaper advertising comes in again, before it will be business as usual as an Izvestia foreign correspondent. And that could be a long time indeed.