Weimar Moscow: Life Is a Cabaret, Comrade! : Russia: With its decadent aura, Yeltsin’s capital seems to mirror Germany before Hilter came to power. Zhirinovsky makes it seem closer still.

Consider Weimar Germany. Consider what happens to a big country that loses a big war, and has a hard time getting back on its feet. What hap pens when a country whose state hood and borders erode; whose im age of itself is destroyed, and whose currency and economy become valueless overnight. What happened in Weimar Germany was a period of decadence and exaggerated separation of rich and poor--which led eventually to the rise of a furious Volkspartei-- or people’s party. What happened after the rise of that party, we all know.

This scenario sounds much like what has been happening in Russia in the two years since Boris N. Yeltsin gave capitalism permission to tromp unchecked through the former Soviet Union. Many Western observers have noted that Russia, at least its biggest cities, had come to resemble the set of “Cabaret” a la russe.

For two years, the rule has been anything goes in market-economy Russia. Foreigners have flocked there seeking profit and adventure; a gangster class has arisen and is thriving, feeding off Moscow’s new vices and suckers; cabarets, nightclubs, dance clubs and restaurants have opened every month, and so have foreign luxury shops--whose goods can only be bought by foreigners, criminals and the lucky. Casinos float on riverboats on the Moscow River; soignee young Russian prostitutes strut on street-corners, determined to cash in on their youthful glamour before two decades of cabbage and potatoes exert their dread influence.

In the background, behind this tawdry, exciting Potemkin Village, are the real people--earning $12 monthly pensions, hunting 56-cent loaves of bread and $2 sausage. For two years they have looked in the shop windows at the fancy clothes and cars they could never afford, but now can see; have called the local militsiya to complain when the dance clubs play their music too loud, too late, every weekend.

The recent elections in Moscow--where 20% of Russians who voted put their confidence in a neo-fascist group called the Liberal Democratic Party--showed that the comparisons between Weimar Germany and Weimar Moscow were more than cosmetic; they were cosmic. The voters championed a man named Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky, a rabid populist whose platform calls for invading Turkey and capturing a warm-water port, expelling non-Russians from the ex-Soyuz, banishing the fledgling American influences that have appeared in Russia over the past year and, generally, putting a kuritsa in every leaking pot.

The rise of men like Zhirinovsky, in countries suffering from economic instability and loss of world esteem, has happened more than once in this century--not only in Weimar Germany--and it always spells trouble.

October’s political crisis was a perfect oracle for Weimar Moscow, and an omen of December’s election. Looking back at October, December seems less surprising. On that first Saturday in October, barricades burned on Moscow’s Ring Road, and the streets filled with thousands of anti-Yeltsin protesters and riot police armed with metal shields.

But most Westerners do not know that, while the barricades burned, three-man bands were playing accordion and tuba and trumpet in the adjacent pedestrian underpasses, as they had for months. Passers-by walked through the underpasses blandly, the music oom-pah-pahing and echoing grandly after them as they headed for the Arbat.

Once above ground, the shoppers milled about, pressing themselves against walls, roaming between the barricades, watching the demonstrators and police and sniffing the acrid black smoke that came from burning tires. They cut through the angry crowds of demonstrators, doggedly trying to cross the road, or interrupted quarreling men to ask where one of them had managed to buy the loaf of bread visible under his sweatered elbow. Their sang-froid was commendable, their priorities sensible--circuses are plentiful in Moscow these days, but bread is scarce.

The same time that Molotov cocktails were exploding on Oct. 2, foreigners and Russians with money were stampeding the dance clubs 011 and Two by Two, and frolicking in Rosie’s pub and the Arbat Blues Club. Sally Bowles lived on.

At the Irish House Pub, well-off young Russians smoked and downed Bass ale at a plastic patio table. The next table over, a group of streaming-drunk, snaggle-toothed Irishmen applauded one of their mates, who was singing an improvised chantey that went, “Oh the Russians wail and cry, and the bread lines gettin’ longer, and the only thing to do is to have the ale made stronger.”

Meanwhile, at the ultra-posh Penta Hotel, the Moscow Times, the city’s premier English-language daily, was kicking off its one-year anniversary gala. Hundreds of guests were pulling up in their gypsy cabs, walking through the gleaming doors in their velvet and satin, dinner jackets and suits. Once inside, they glided past tables overflowing with savories, fruits, pastries and steaming chafing dishes. A jazz band played, and a blues band, and a rock band. Painted faces smiled, laughed and gossiped.

In a conference room, guests played roulette and blackjack. Champagne, wine, gin, scotch and even coffee (hardest to get) flowed liberally. American reporters at the Penta were not talking about the burning barricades a mile away, but when the subject came up, they dismissed the thought that real rebellion could be at hand. “This is meaningless,” they said, “Most of the people are just sitting at home; they aren’t out on the streets. Nothing will happen.” One respected reporter chimed in, “Some people say we are fiddling while Moscow is burning,” and snorted in amusement.

Twenty-four hours later, two foreign reporters and scores of Muscovites were dead, hundreds more were wounded and tanks were rolling toward Moscow to attack protesters who had first stormed the White House, Russia’s Parliament, then the television station.

Now, two months later, Zhirinovsky’s vote of support has put the anger of the Russian people on paper. The colossal hangover has begun.

Every now and then a particular place, at a particular moment, becomes a window in time--a moment that, in retrospect, takes on the mantle of “era.” In Russia’s capital city, in these few years since the demise of Mikhail S. Gorbachev and communism and the accession of Yeltsin and the market economy, that moment has come--accompanied by brass bands and decadence.

It is an era in which middle-class people have to take in boarders; when professors, doctors and lawyers give up their training and wait tables for McDonalds, try their hand at the black market, dabble in chancy get-rich-quick schemes operated by foreign carpetbaggers and in general, do what they can to keep their heads above water.

It is an era when most people are poorer than they have been in recent memory, and when a very small number of people are suddenly richer; when the forces of security disintegrate and a new sort of law keeper--bandits and armed guards--arises. It is an era in which angry, irrational people, whom the Russians themselves identify as “fascists,” make trouble and cry for “order.”

It is hard to process information when so much is changing, when every day brings new rules, new freedoms and new losses. The Russians themselves--the ones who continue walking to work with their briefcases, hoping that history will not involve them--do not know what to make of it.

Weimar Moscow is not all bad. Contrasts are never boring. An old Russian saying has it that, without vinegar, honey would not taste so sweet. And those who love Russia have always appreciated it for that--its adversity make its rewards seem greater.

But lately, too many of the rewards, too much of the honey, has been put in the hands of the few; the majority has only the vinegar. When you live among the young and the lucky in Moscow today--the foreigners who live here, and the ones just here on business, the Russians who work with them, and the Russians who play with them--it can seem that Yeltsin’s trials and Russia’s economic hardships are transitory and irrelevant, that Zhirinovsky’s new popularity is a fluke.

And this is certainly a romantic way to look at it. How could anything so exciting, and so full of possibility, end badly? Maybe that is how it seemed to Christopher Isherwood in Berlin in the ‘30s as well, when he was writing about the real Weimar era.

The chapter of Moscow’s Weimar period has not been written yet. In all likelihood, it will finish differently and less dramatically than Germany’s did, under Adolf Hitler. But Weimar is not a bad lesson to keep in the back of one’s mind as we observe Russia’s wobbly course.

It is to be hoped that the Russian government can keep bread on the shelves, and hold the allegiance of the people. It is to be hoped that Yeltsin will prove capable of displaying not only power, but reason. It is to be hoped that the Zhirinovskys will not drown out the Yavlinskys. And it is to be hoped that the Western nations who have crashed this party will not just raise a champagne toast and depart as the crowd turns ugly, but stick around for the clean-up, help pay the bills and perhaps act as chaperon.