Ten years ago almost to the day, I came to live in Moscow. The red flag of the Soviet Union flew over the Kremlin where Mr Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev and Mrs Raisa Maximovna Gorbacheva were ensconced as President and first lady of the USSR and there was no hot water in my apartment.
Moscow was a quiet city then. At night, the workers went to bed early to sleep soundly knowing their jobs would be there in the morning. Fifteen old kopecks on the Metro brought a traveller anywhere on the comprehensive metro system on which there was a train every forty seconds at peak times. The service is now still as good but the price is more than 30,000 times higher.
There were, of course, some disadvantages. Not everything was available. People queued but that was a welcome sight. A queue meant there was something to buy, no queue meant the shop was empty. Long queues of men meant vodka had become available. Long queues of women meant chocolate was on sale.
The bread queues were of little importance. The Russians like the French, bought freshly-baked bread twice daily. They queued because the bread was ready from the ovens. Everyone arrived at the same time and it was a question of congestion rather than shortage. A major landmark in the progress towards a western-style economy was the appearance of bananas in the shops in 1992.
In those days, a topic among westerners in Moscow was the bizarre fashion by which names in the western script where transliterated phonetically into the Cyrillic. In the Latin alphabet I was Seamus Martin of The Irish Times but by the time officialdom had transliterated this I had become Sheimas Martin of the Airish Taims.
American fast food outlets such as Pitstsa Khat and Mekdonelds, home of the Big Mek, had already arrived from the west and so too had and emporium known as the Shemrok Irlandski Pab where Ginnis, Kharp, Peddi and Dzhemeson were available to those in possession of UE (Uslovnaya Edinitsa-Conventional Unit) a euphemism for the US dollar.
Russian economists propounded the ideas of Britain's Prime Minister Misiz Techer known as the Airon Ledi and a new class of people known, whether male or female, as Biznesmeni came on the scene.
Many things have changed since then. The other day as I walked through the lanes of preRevolutionary houses between Tverskaya (once Gorky Street) and Novy Arbat (Prospekt Kalinina) an advertisement caught my eye. The poster was for a restaurant called Kumir which means idol. Underneath the name, the words "Restoran Mishelya Truagro" were emblazoned.
Harking back to the old days, I involved myself in the guessing-game as to what the Cyrillic message meant in our familiar Latin script or the Clo Romhanach as it is known in the sweet and kingly tongue of the Gael.
Restoran posed no problem. Mishelya was, I remembered, the genitive of the French christian name Michel. But what of "Truagro"? In a sudden flash of understanding I realised that Mr Michel Troisgros of the Michelin three-star family of super-chefs had opened shop in Moscow. I went in and, having hinted that I might be inclined to bring a large party to dinner, was shown the menu and met the executive chef, Mr Guillaume Joly, who runs the show in between Michel's visits from France.
The prices were lower than in similar establishments in Ireland although the fish and much of the meat and vegetables are flown in from France. The restaurant also offers half portions at slightly more than half the price of the full dish.
Not far away on Tverskaya there are two Marriott Hotels and a Sheraton and a small shopping mall called Galereya Aktyor in which there are outlets for Cartier of Paris and Tiffany's of New York. Out near the airport, not far from the giant red tank traps that mark the spot where the Germans were stopped in the war, is a huge Ikea furniture store which has proved so popular that four more are planned.
The Turks have opened two vast Hypermarkets called Ramstore in which consumers can buy anything from milk to cars and on the seedier side Moscow has become perhaps the Night Club capital of the world and the place is coming down with Casinos including one called Merilin (after Merilin Manro).
Yet a taste of the old Moscow remains. Most Russians who cannot afford any of these luxuries shop in open-air markets staffed by Azeris. The red stars remain in place on the Kremlin's towers, near Gorky Park there is a place where the old statues of Stalin, Lenin, Dzerzhinsky and Sverdlov stand together as though a marble-and-bronze Bolshevik politburo meeting were in session.
And, yes, the hot water is still switched off usually when the scorching Moscow summer is at its hottest.
