Second, cultural heritage. This area is a particularly sorry aspect of Moscow's current transformation. But his is a rare brave voice still to be heard. The pressures of commercialism and plain ignorance of the difference between restoration and reconstruction mean that old buildings are stripped to their bare facades, roofs are pierced with glass skylights and remade with Paris-style mansards and that traditional Russian courtyards are built over for maximum profitability, given the outrageous price of Moscow real estate. Illusions, fast paint jobs and Potemkin walls will multiply in the months ahead as the capital prepares to celebrate its 850th anniversary next year.
Religious revival is the third area in which form triumphs over substance, ritual over faith.
Only recently freed from 70 years of state hostility which nearly drove it to extinction, the Russian Orthodox Church seems more interested now in satisfying its urges for acquisition and adornment than in providing the moral leadership the country craves. A deputy director of the governmental Commission for Humanitarian and Technical Relief recently published a letter to the Moscow News stating that the commission had given the church a vast quantity of cigarettes which the church then sold and kept the proceeds of. Gleb Yakunin, a former member of the Russian parliament and a former priest, was not alone in questioning whether such trafficking was proper. The manipulation of religion by politicians is also to blame for the sapping of the church's moral authority. Mayor Luzhkov disclosed in an interview last January that he was not a believer.