Claudia Kolker has a special in the Houston Chronicle - In Moscow, a mandate to be merry: Mayor decrees businesses must decorate for holidays or pay a fine:
MOSCOW -- There's no doubt about it: Twinkly lights definitely dress up a hammer and sickle.But there's always a gloomy Gus:
As Muscovites get ready for New Year's, the biggest holiday here, their elegant but hardly whimsical city seems giddy with seasonal cheer. At the Ukraina Hotel, holiday lights tumble over giant Soviet-era sculptures. On a neighboring high-rise, a spray of lights illuminates the streets below. And downtown, Dior boutiques and bread kiosks sparkle and glint -- or at least spell out "2003" in fuzzy green garlands.
In Moscow, such holiday cheer is the law.
Earlier this winter, Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov ordered all stores and cafes in this city of 8 million to decorate for the holidays by Dec. 1. Inspectors who enforce the order say punishment for holiday dissidents is simply a fine and that no one has been penalized yet.
Many store owners, though, say they have heard that omitting the lights will get their business shut down. The idea, if not the method, is to make Moscow more Western, Muscovites say.
At the deserted Lora bar, not far from the Kremlin, 22-year-old Anatoly Maktinowyz grumpily rattles a cocktail shaker. A diamond-shaped ornament blinks feebly behind him on the wall.What a grump! Myself, I was envious - "Outside a shoe store, a 6-foot mechanical Santa gyrates to the strains of Yellow Rose of Texas."
"Why should decorating be a law?" Maktinowyz says. "It's a remnant of communism. There are a lot of people who are glad to have such a law. It reminds them of old times."
Maktinowyz, who is half German and half Russian, says his employers resent having to decorate their bar. If you look around Moscow, Maktinowyz says, a lone light in a window or a sickly fake tree reflect others' ill-will toward the mandated cheer.
"Like us at this bar, look, we just put up one decoration," Maktinowyz says. "Russians hate to be suppressed. So we put the absolute minimum decoration up. And we say, `OK -- I'm following orders.' "
