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Going to work was the same everywhere, and the changeover
from Marxism-Leninism to Chaos-Capitalism hadn’t changed
matters much— wel , maybe things were now a little worse.
Moscow, a city of wide streets, was harder to drive in now that
nearly anyone could have a car, and the center lane down the
wide boulevards was no longer tended by militiamen for the
Politburo and used by Central Committee men who considered
it a personal right of way, like Czarist princes in their troika
sleds. Now it was a left-turn lane for anyone with a Zil or other
private car. In the case of Sergey Nikolay’ch Golovko, the car
was a white Mercedes 600, the big one with the S-class body
and twelve cylinders of German power under the hood. There
weren’t many of them in Moscow, and truly his was an
extravagance that ought to have embarrassed him… but didn’t.
Maybe there were no more nomenklatura in this city, but rank
did have its privileges, and he was chairman of the SVR. His
apartment was also large, on the top floor of a high-rise building
on Kutusovskiy Prospekt, a structure relatively new and wel –
on Kutusovskiy Prospekt, a structure relatively new and wel –
made, down to the German appliances which were a long-
standing luxury accorded senior government officials.
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