IKEA has arrived in Moscow. So has a tight-lipped 47-year-old KGB staffer with clear blue eyes and authoritarian tendencies strong enough to bomb one of Russia's republics back into the middle ages.
The juxtaposition is not frivolous. For the past eight years, the great and the good, arriving by the planeload from the IMF, the World Bank, the London School of Economics and Harvard, spent more time counting the bottles of cabernet sauvignon on the shelves of Moscow's shops as an indicator of progress than they did thinking about what life was actually like at the end of a country dirt track.
After nearly a decade of failed reform, the average male life expectancy in Russia is higher than in Nigeria but lower than in the Philippines, and this for a country with 13 per cent of the world's oil and 36 per cent of its natural gas reserves. In the pursuit of the ideology of market reform, the realities of Russian life - the halving of GNP, the destruction of the industrial base, the loss of ordinary people's savings, the mass grab of property stolen under the name of privatisation - were all wished away.
In their place came theories. First it was the "trickle-down" theory, then the "necessary pain" one. After that the "good times are just around the corner" theory, and then - the crash. Now a man like Vladimir Putin has arrived to remind the IMF just how far Russia has slipped back into the Tsarist 19th century. The West in general and the champions of human rights in particular have little cause to complain about the crackdown Putin is planning.
For eight years they were looking in the wrong direction for the emergence of a strong man who would restamp Moscow's authority on its wayward regions and ethnic republics. In the civil emergency of October 1993 and the last presidential election in 1996, the enemy were the Communists. If they won, "reform" would have lost. The leading figures of the Russian human rights movement, personally honest and physically courageous people, were duped. In October 1993, Ms Yelena Bonner, Andrei Sakharov's widow, mounted a truck outside the Kremlin to justify the stand her friend, President Yeltsin, was making, which led to tanks opening fire on a parliament that had got a little too independent for the Kremlin's liking. Two months later, Russia had a constitution which emasculated parliament and inflated the presidential apparatus to proportions greater than the hated Communist Party central committee.
These are the powers Mr Putin inherits. Today, Ms Bonner calls him Stalin.
The "Stalinist" Mr Putin did not emerge from the docile ranks of Mr Gennady Zyuganov's Russian Communist party. The brigades of woolly-hatted demon strators waving red flags and portraits of Stalin were led by lambs, not tigers. Meanwhile, Russia's next authoritarian ruler was quietly being born in the ranks of the "reformers". Mr Putin's first boss was Mr Anatoly Sobchak, the mayor of St Petersburg who at one point fled abroad amid claims of corruption. His next was Pavel Borodin, the quartermaster of the Kremlin, now eagerly wanted for questioning by Swiss prosecutors investigating a multi-million money-laundering scam. It was Mr Yeltsin's close family circle who drew the President's attention to the existence of the quietly efficient ex-KGB man from St Petersburg.
Today, the great and the good are blaming each other for having "lost Russia". Some say the theories were right, it was just that the money was not there to back it. Others say the policy should have been to support principles rather than people, institutions rather than events. But lost Russia they have. When Mr Yeltsin was first elected President of Russia, and then when the Soviet Union imploded, the streets of Moscow were filled with pro-Western euphoria. Russia threw open not just its front windows, but its doors, backyard and granary to the West. Today, the West is seen, even by intellectuals, as venal, self-serving and hypocritical.
Re-engaging Russia would need a major U-turn in Western policy. It would involve a conscious attempt to buy Russian technology, rather than treat it as a third world source of raw materials. NATO would have to stop expanding and Russia would have to be treated as a serious player on the international stage. None of this is likely.
David Hearst was formerly based in Moscow for the Guardian