Chatounovsky said the Millionaire Fair was offering a chance to shop for helicopters, private planes, race horses, Mediterranean villas and custom-built yachts to new oligarchs such as Roman Abramovich. He's the Russian oil and gas billionaire who bankrolled the most expensive sale ever for a living artist, when he paid $120 million for four paintings by Lucian Freud at a Sotheby's auction last month in New York.
The overindulged children of such families, she said, are referred to in Moscow as "bratskis."
From Bolsheviks to bratskis! History, alas, does repeat itself. Such were my thoughts as I waited in line the next morning in Red Square, inching forward toward a squat, granite bunker otherwise known as Lenin's tomb.
Red Square, of course, is at Moscow's center, both literally and metaphorically. Its colorful name, I learned, is not shorthand for communism; rather, in Russian, Krasnaya ploshchad (red square) derives from krasniy, which means "beautiful." And the square is exactly that - beautiful - and because of a slight sloping away from its center in all directions, when standing in it, you feel like you are cresting the world's curve.
If like me, you've wanted to see Lenin's corpse for decades, rest assured his tomb lives up to expectations - it's both spooky and exquisitely high camp.
You descend a ziggurat of dark marble stairs with a scowling guard at every landing, only to come to the crypt, where Lenin's embalmed body lies inside a glass coffin, bathed in such profusion of flattering pink light that he looks prettier than Doris Day did in her softly focused last movies.
Afterward, I wandered through the Kremlin, which is not just a governmental edifice as I'd imagined, but a city within a city that contains cathedrals, monasteries, museums, palaces, bells and cannons. If you are in a hurry, head straight to the Armory Palace, which was fully restored in 2006 to celebrate its 200th anniversary.
Here, there are rooms full of ceremonial costumes, crowns, thrones and carriages used by Russia's rulers from Medieval times to the present. There are also remarkable examples of the Russian Orthodox Church's wealth and power, including holy icons so encrusted with gold, pearls and precious stones that some weigh upward of 50 pounds. Gazing at these, as well as the Faberge eggs so beloved of Czar Nicholas II, puts the excesses of the Millionaire's Fair in historical context.
