“What about… er… all the people he killed?” I put in, uninvited.

The Stalinist waved me off philosophically. “Cut a forest and splinters will fly.” It’s a popular expression among Stalin apologists. We left the two of them grunting in agreement with each other (and most other Russians) about the country’s worst-ever leader—Gorbachev!—and once more braved the boulevards.

“Your shlyopki (flip-flops)!” yelled an orange-haired hippo from a bench. “People spit—and worse!—on the streets! Want a leg amputated?”

“But Moscow these days seems so clean,” I cravenly bleated, overwhelmed by how quickly my leisurely, nostalgic stroll had unleashed a present-day nightmare.

“Clean??” came the answer. “When churki are doing the cleaning?”

Churki (logs) is a racial slur for Moscow’s nonwhite migrant workers from our former fraternal republics. Even on this gorgeous pre-Easter Saturday when the heart yearned to sing and Muscovites were buying Dom Perignon for Easter brunch, workers from erstwhile Soviet Central Asia were out in force, sweeping sidewalks, unloading trucks, handing out leaflets promoting sushi bargains. Brushstroke by diligent brushstroke they were painting the historic pastel-hued mansions and the nouveau-riche antihistoric replicas. Suddenly I understood why Moscow center had the eerie fake sheen of a movie set.

Migrant workers in Moscow number anywhere from two to five million, possibly as much as a quarter of the capital’s ballooning population. They’ve been flocking here since the midnineties, fleeing the post-Soviet Disasterstans. To be underpaid, abused by nationalists, harassed by police.

Beyond the hippo on her bench, a young Tajik street cleaner leaned on her broom. She gave a smile at my toes. “Finally a beautiful day,” she sighed. “Last week when it snowed, my shift started at four a.m.” Born in 1991, the year the Imperium ended, she had two babies back in Tajikistan. Her brothers were drug addicts. Her parents, she said, remembered Soviet rule as paradise.

“Moskva—zloy gorod,” she concluded. “Moscow—mean city.”

On Tsvetnoy, the last of the boulevards, finally it rose ahead, my sentimental journey’s destination—the Central Market. The charmed food fairyland of my childhood was now a viciously expensive new mall with edgy international brands, artily designed by a British architectural firm. “Very post-bling,” I’d been told.

Smiling stilettoed giraffes handed out outsize oranges by the entrance. “Visit our Farmer’s Market upstairs,” they cooed. Their gaze lightly brushed my toes and moved on.

Escalators ferried us aloft, past Commes des Garçons, Diesel, and Chloe, past puzzling conceptual art and hip displays of homegrown fashion genius.

The Farmer’s Market held nary a farmer.

The buzzy-bucolic name had been cooked up by a local restaurant group for their organically minded epicurean food hall. We wandered this New Russian arcadia, ogling hundred-dollar boxes of Italian chocolates, farmhouse French cheeses, newfangled sashimi, and Iberico hams, all arranged under the dramatic sweep of the stainless-steel ceiling. Here was Moscow throwing down its Guccied gauntlet at storied food halls like Berlin’s Ka De We and London’s Selfridges.

A dewy-cheeked Kyrgyz Eve called out from a fruit aisle with a shiny red apple.

“This, dear madam, is honey-sweet,” she enticed. “Just arrived from Bordeaux. Or perhaps something tart—a Pippin from Britain? Or here,” she sirened on, “here’s our own little apple!”

A bumpy, mottled-green specimen of the native Semerenko variety now reposed in her delicate hand.

“Looks homely,” I muttered.

“Oh, but the heavenly taste will transport you straight to your dacha childhood,” our Kyrgyz lovely promised, smiling ethereally.

I chewed on a wedge and grimaced. The apple was sour. Around us cute Central Asian boys in retro flat caps slavishly steered shopping carts for ekskluziv patrons. Somehow the sight didn’t inspire old dacha reveries. And the whole au courant local-seasonal note rang hollow too—just another bit of imported post-bling bling. Not to mention that “our” apple was crazy expensive.

“Anya,” I said, noting the Kyrgyz Eve’s name tag. “We’re namesakes!”

“Nyet.” She suddenly went glum. “Aynazik is my native name,” she murmured. “But think anyone here would bother pronouncing it?

“Moskva—zloy gorod,” she whispered, holding out an apple for the next passing customer. “Moscow—mean city.”

On the way out we received more free oranges, along with a lustrous onion from Holland. Boarding the trolley back to the flat, I felt extremely alienated from this new Moscow. I called Dad’s wife, Lena, on my cell to ask if there were any affordable food shops in this city of Cartier-priced pippins. “Not in the center, my dear!” Lena giggled. Non-elites no longer lived in the center. They sold or rented their flats and lived off the income in faraway suburbs rich in diskaunt outlets like Kopeechka (literally “Little Kopek”). “You can try taking a metro, then a shuttle bus to Kopeechka,” suggested Lena. “But their produce is often rotten.”

We found Mom in the khi-rize, prattling on three phones at once.

“Moscow,” she was saying to someone. “What a mean city.”

The Easter weekend’s unsentimental journeys were over; the work week was upon us.

So just what brought me—you might wonder by now—to Putin’s mean petro-dollar capital for an entire month? An incoherent jumble of motives, really. Seeing family. Resavoring flowering boulevards and dusty museums. Testing the scandalous scale of apple sticker shock. Fishing for socialist relics—my poisoned madeleines—amid the gleaming piers of Villeroy & Boch showrooms.

Beyond that? Beyond that I had one clear task on the agenda, and it was all Dasha’s doing.

Dasha Hubova was a professor of cultural anthropology turned TV producer. We’d met by chance at a three-star chefs’ conference in Madrid. I had read her article on the oral history of the 1932 Ukrainian famine. It was gut-wrenching stuff about the death of infants, cannibalism. Imagine my shock in Madrid when I learned that this very Dasha now ran Telecafé, the twenty-four-hour digital food channel owned by Russia’s media giant, Channel One. From famines to round-the-clock food porn—such a New Russian trajectory, I thought.

Little realizing where that trajectory would intersect with mine.

“Come to Moscow, we’ll give you a show,” tempted Dasha after filming me a bit in Madrid. She even agreed to a separate gig for my mother when I glowingly flacked Mom’s credentials. (“Ace at historic meals! Chirps like a nightingale in lilting Russian, uncorrupted by post-Soviet Americanisms!”)

Mom was ecstatic. Her luggage to Moscow held photogenic wardrobe ensembles and a thick folder of notes for her six-part show-to-be on historic cuisines. Sixty years after failing her drama school exams in Stalin’s Moscow, my mamochka, Larisa Naumovna Frumkina, was finally getting her close-up. And her cooking had gotten it for her.

Each of us was assigned a chef and filmed in his kitchen. Mom’s partner was Alexander Vasilievich, from a restaurant called CDL (the Russian acronym for Central House of Writers), part of the old Writers Union. One of Moscow’s most flagrantly historic locations, its Gothic-romantic 1889 mansion was where Soviet literary elites gathered for legendary dinners and readings—all inaccessible, of course, to us mere mortals. Here the devil dined in Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita.

And here now, dropping in on Mom’s shoot, I heard a director shout: “Svet na geroinyu—more lights on the heroine!”