On the recent anniversary of his death, they waited hours to file past the body in its granite tomb. Fittingly, it is Lenin who provides the most apt metaphor for just how grim things have become. For the better part of the century, embalmers have kept him looking as he was in life, but the state can no longer afford their exclusive services. They are lucky. Death is one business that flourishes in the catastrophe that has overtaken Russia.
Elderly pensioners dying of starvation no longer make news.
Life expectancy for adult men has fallen from 64 in 1990 to 59 in 1998. And the question for the country now is whether it can survive at all as a coherent state, still less as a civilized society. Forty percent of Russia's children are chronically ill. Tuberculosis has struck down 100,000 people, and some 2 million may well be exposed. And that's just the beginning.