Windows of non-existent stores are a portrait of the war in Moscow

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Since transitioning from a Soviet department store to a symbol of capitalist Russia in the 1990s, the GUM mall has always displayed gleaming Western brand windows facing the Kremlin on Red Square.

An inattentive visitor, strolling through the heart of Moscow, might even think that nothing has changed with the draconian regime of sanctions applied by the West to Vladimir Putin’s country after the Russian president invaded Ukraine eight months ago.

The windows of luxury icon establishments continue, such as the French Louis Vuitton or the Italian Gucci, companies that stopped operating in Russia like about a thousand others to avoid being punished by Western governments.

The confusion clears up with a quick GUM entry. Some of the stores even preserve some pieces in the showcase, but most are empty. And all, except for one or another brand that survives by having a Turkish investor as owner in Russia, have an advertisement on their door in Russian, English and Chinese.

“Dear Visitors! This store is temporarily closed due to technical problems. We apologize for temporary inconvenience,” the text reads. So the pantomime of a luxury mall continues — with tourists, mostly Russians and Chinese — strolling in bright, innocuous corridors. Queue, only at the ice cream stand.

The “temporary inconveniences” are more explicit in another temple of consumption, the underground mall Okhotni Riad, just off Red Square. There, there are only boards and duct tape where there used to be a myriad of Western shops.

At Aviapark, a mega shopping complex in the northeast region of the capital, the strong point is substitution: clothing stores have basically changed their signs and sell stocks, while production is replaced by local products. The same situation is slowly happening in the ubiquitous “produtki”, the convenience stores where every Russian does his daily shopping.

It is still possible to find Coca-Cola, as the last batch of the soda concentrate arrived in Russia in March, and production was not completed until August, but the shelves are dominated by local variants. They are imitations of Coke, Sprite and Fanta, for the most part. A 600 ml bottle costs an average of 32 rubles (R$ 2.60), while the originals cost 83 rubles (R$ 6.80).

These are small reminders that permeate daily life, as for the time being the western forecast of Russian economic catastrophe has not materialized: the contraction of GDP is expected to be 3%, not the 10% speculated at the beginning of the war, courtesy of the intensification of trade. of hydrocarbons with countries like China and India.

In the elegant Italian restaurant of Micha, a businessman from the Rostov region with relatives in neighboring Ukraine, there are other signs. “The sanctions after the annexation of Crimea in 2014 were already absorbed, and we started to buy cheese from here. Now, it is still possible to import Italian wine, but it costs up to five times more than before,” he said, asking for reservations about his surname. .

Food inflation, at 14.2% in September, is the flagship of the most noticeable hardships of conflict in the daily lives of those who do not have children in the war. According to Micha, the movement in his restaurant dropped 40% since February.

At the table with another Russian friend, he described to the Sheet what he considers a normalization of war in the daily life of the capital. “At first, nobody paid much attention, it seemed that it would pass soon. But the war has grown, everyone is horrified by this violence. I don’t argue who is right, I always voted for Putin, but acquaintances of mine have died on the other side,” he says. .

“State TV alternates moments when we are winning and others when the West challenges us and such. Putin always says that sanctions are tough, but that everything will work out. Sacha, the other eater who also doesn’t want to be identified.

Both, however, agree that the capital lives an illusion. In fact, the city looks even cleaner and more organized than it did in the first week of the war, when the Sheet was in Moscow, and the little LEDs hanging for scenic effect on central Nikolskaia Street since the 2018 World Cup are still there — absent is the party, perhaps permanently.

There is not the patriotic fanfare that one might expect: here and there, posters in the street praise the “Heroes of Russia”, soldiers killed in Ukraine. But they are rare. The banners with the Z symbolizing the campaign have disappeared.

The end of the mobilization of 300,000 reservists for the war last Friday (29) helped the Kremlin. There were protests in several cities, and Kazakhstan alone received 200,000 fugitive Russians.

“Everyone was afraid of being called up, and I don’t know if the risk was gone for good. But when they announced that the call was going to end, there was a general relaxation”, says political analyst Sacha, who is 48 years old and, having been Army officer, was eligible.

Regarding information for the middle class, less roboticized by the uniformity of state TV, channels of the social network Telegram are the way out — WhatsApp, less popular anyway, has restricted access.

Who can get VPN services, something more difficult because most companies only receive by international cards, includes the western vision in their reality. “It’s all propaganda here, but you guys in the West also just do the same,” says Sacha, an opponent of the war.

Tourist is also affected

Tourist life is complicated. First, there were 30 options for airlines that fly to the country — the most prolific is Turkish Airlines, with 1,300 monthly flights, more than triple the second-placed Uzbekistan Airlines. The rest follow residual routes, which made the price of the ticket rise more than three times on popular stretches, such as Dubai-Moscow.

Once on board, you have to get used to the detours of the war region and southern Russia, with closed airspace. From Dubai, for example, the flight gained an extra hour, taking almost six hours due to a detour that forces the plane to go around the Caspian Sea in Kazakhstan.

Airports are at half load. In one of the Moscow internationals, the Vnukovo, a fleet of 737 MAX aircraft from the company Pobeda is lying idle in the corner of the apron, and unpainted planes, brought in from warehouses to replace others without spare parts due to sanctions, appear in the terminal.

Arriving on a Sunday, as happened with the report, there is a prosaic problem: it is not possible to change money at the airport (in this case, the one in Vnukovo, one of the three international ones in Moscow). Exchange offices closed, and the only alternative, a bank branch, would only open on Monday.

No big deal if it was possible to use an international credit card, which is not due to sanctions. The opposite path is the same for Russians who manage to leave the country, like the couple Ivan and Natacha, who came from Dubai on the same flight as the Sheet. “We had to take dollars, lots of dollars,” laughed the young engineer.

They get serious when it comes to war, though. “It’s a tragedy. Our lives will never be the same again,” said Natacha, who works at an employment agency. Once on land, more trivial problems: it is not possible to order a taxi through Iandex, the local Uber, as it now only accepts contact by Russian phone numbers.

Gradually, the situation becomes somewhat Kafkaesque, resolved in the best Argentinean way: the direct exchange of dollars for rubles with a sympathetic employee of the airport hotel, duly disguised as a negotiation for a room.

“That’s how it was when I worked at Intourist,” the 60-something-year-old said, referring to the former Soviet state-owned hotel and tourism company. As in GUM’s windows, the hotel’s former international flag has not been removed, despite the chain having moved out of Russia, fueling the strange absence of war in Putin’s capital.

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