In the course of a very brief conversation - it lasted fewer than 30 seconds - the price of the pint in Sally O'Brien's Irish Pub on Bolshaya Polyanka Street in Moscow went up from 64 to 76 roubles.
"Pour me a very quick one," I asked the bartender.
Current inflation in Russia is just like it was in 1992 when the consumer price index rose by 2,500 per cent in 12 months. I lived in Russia then and the little tricks learned at the time have become invaluable now. Dollars should be changed into roubles in small amounts at a time. You got 13.5 to the dollar on Thursday but experts confidently predict it will be at least 20 by Monday.
With the roubles you have, you should buy up as many things as you can. Old stocks are sold at old prices, new stocks reflect the lower value of the rouble and are consequently much more costly.
Goods that sell quickly, like the pint but more particularly basic perishable foodstuffs, are subject to dramatic price changes. In the past few days the rouble price of bread, eggs, some vegetables and, of course, vodka have more than doubled. At the other pole of the price range, caviar in my local store has remained at 216 roubles (30 dollars on Wednesday but only 15 dollars on Thursday and perhaps a sheer giveaway by Monday).
But Russians are taking all this in their stride. Words such as koshmar (nightmare) and uzhas (horror) are being applied to the situation but these are the words that a Russian male might use to describe a traffic jam or a female would cry out on discovering a run in her tights.
Muscovites, you see, have been through all this before. They lost their savings in the dying days of the Soviet Union when the Prime Minister, Valentin Pavlov, issued a decree that all notes of a higher denomination than 25 roubles would be declared invalid.
In the hyperinflation of 1992 they saw their savings ravaged. One elderly Russian friend of mine saw his hoard of roubles reduced virtually to nothing. In 1991 the rate was 12 roubles to the dollar. By the end of 1992, it was in the thousands.
Millions more lost their money in pyramid scams, most notably the MMM company run by Sergei Mavrodi who, for his sins, was elected to the Duma by a grateful public. In today's Moscow the victims of these previous financial disasters are viewing the scene with a mixture of cynicism, amusement and in many cases an "eat-drink-and-be-merry" attitude reminiscent of Berlin in the last days of the Weimar Republic.
The hordes of prostitutes have returned to Tverskaya, the former Gorky Street, having suffered a brief ban from their turf during the visit of President Clinton who was staying at the Marriott, which is so close to the action that many a Russian eyebrow was raised.
The style of "cruising" here is dramatically different than the procedure anywhere else. In dark lanes off Tverskaya such as Mamonovsky Pereulok a "new Russian" will arrive in his BMW or Mercedes. The girls will be lined up in a 20-strong platoon and the client will manoeuvre this limo to face the line and then turn on his headlights to inspect what's on offer.
The proliferation of night clubs and casinos continues to do a brisk business catering for all tastes. One "straight" club features caged and chained naked women while a leading gay pleasure palace has naked young men swimming around in a giant goldfish bowl.
For most Muscovites, however, these things are alien excesses indulged in by the so-called new Russians, those who have made fast and vast fortunes since communism died on the streets in August 1991. The average person has no time and most certainly no money for this type of thing. For many, cheap vodka helps the hours and the days pass more quickly.
Life expectancy for the Russian male has dropped to 54, a rate below that of many third-world countries. Vodka is the main killer of the underclass, the Makarov 9mm pistol the main killer of the violent newly rich.
Those newly rich who avoid the Makarov will by now have placed their savings, in dollars of course, in safe havens from Switzerland to the Cayman Islands. The emerging middle class has had no such luck. Those with savings in collapsed or collapsing Russian private banks have had their accounts transferred to the state-owned savings bank Sberbank in an attempt to bail them out.
The Moscow Times reported yesterday that depositors cannot expect to get any of their money out until mid-November at the earliest. What will their roubles be worth then? Those with special dollar accounts will hardly be any better off. They will get their dollars back in November in roubles at an exchange rate of 9.33. In effect the banks will forcibly appropriate the hard currency and throw paper at its former owners.
All this has, once again, made Russians turn to the safest of safe bets, commodities. In the giant Moskovsky Univermag, once a Soviet department store built to impress provincials arriving at the three nearby mainline railway stations, trade has been brisk. In the household appliances shop Lyuda Tyurina, a middle-aged sales assistant, said she had never been so busy.
"It's usually brisk at this time of year with people coming home from holidays and others doing home repairs. But it has never been as busy as this."
Down the hall a bit, an elderly woman was dumping her roubles in exchange for a dozen cans of hair spray. If this continues, and the Russian tradition holds that it will, the shops will soon be as empty as they were in Soviet times. But Russians have well-tried procedures to deal with that too and TV images of anger in a bank queue, repeated over and over in the west, convey an almost totally false image of the situation.
The most frequent reaction, especially from older people, is one of fatalism touched by proud memories of how the nation survived the second World War in which 26 million Russians died. Compared to that the current problems are a mere hiccup, as President Yeltsin might enunciate.
