There had been many of those, since the fall of the Union. The Soviets had possessed, at least, a sense of decorum—a certain restraint. Oh, the members of the Politburo had had their sprawling dachas on the Black Sea, their Italian mistresses and their fine cars, but in public, in Moscow where the world was watching they had favored cheap suits and proletarian tastes in food, and if they smoked Cuban cigars, they did so behind closed doors. Nowadays, of course, the world was turned upside down. The power elite of Moscow—the oil executives, the top-end gangsters, the political machinists—lived their lives in the newspapers, on the gossip sites, and their duty was to show their fellow Russians just what wonders and new pleasures capitalism had wrought. Excess had become patriotic, decadence a virtue. So when one arrived at the door of this particular party in the suburbs of Moscow, one was handed a little spoon carved from bone. Inside the house where camera flashes exploded nonstop, half-naked models walked from room to room with bowls of beluga caviar nestled between their breasts, and they would coo and laugh as fat men dug into their bounty for a taste.
