From a story on politico.eu by Vijai Maheshwari headlined “The fall of Moscow”:

Vijai Maheshwari was until this week a writer and entrepreneur based in Moscow.

When I was an aspiring writer in the humiliated Moscow of the 1990s, I remember admiring Russians for what many writers before me had described as their seemingly infinite capacity for suffering. To my young mind, their poetic, vodka-fueled melancholia seemed much more soulful than smiley American optimism. But Moscow has changed a lot since then. It has become more like America, as a new middle class enjoys the city’s recent transformation into a smart and sophisticated European metropolis.