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When I arrive in Moscow, I am picked up from the airport by Roman, a patriotic taxi driver sent to collect me courtesy of The Garage Museum of Contemporary Art Before I take my seat in the back of the BMW he is driving, Roman tells me that he loves his country, his wife, and Princess Diana, after whom he named his daughter Having discovered this is my first visit to the city, he decides to take me on an impromptu tour of the centre We drive past ‘Putin’s house’, aka the Kremlin, and St Basil’s Cathedral, where he launches with glee into a retelling of a legend of Ivan the Terrible, in which the original ‘Tsar of all Rus’ pokes out the eyes of the cathedral’s architect in order to ensure he never makes anything so beautiful again Then onwards to the glass-domed shopping centre, GUM, itself a potted history of Russian politics: commissioned by Catherine the Great, nationalised after the revolution, briefly used by Stalin to display the body of his wife Nadezhda after she committed suicide, and today a mall so firmly at the lux end of the spectrum that even the ice cream concession is made by Bulgari Last but not least on the tour is Pushkinskaya Square, to view ‘the first Soviet McDonald’s’, where today Roman buys his morning coffee He opens the glove department and proudly shows me the evidence: full of empty cardboard cups   This particular McDonald’s outlet opened on a January day in 1990 30,000 people turned up, and in a sign of the coming change, employees handed out red flags with yellow logos to the crowds, the hammer and sickle replaced by the golden arches The queue that snaked its way around the square that day would not be a one off Come summer, visitors would still be waiting in line for eight hours, to experience the freedom of blocking their arteries in the US style One year later, the Soviet Union would fall, and in the murky scramble that ensued, a few men would make their fortunes buying up state-owned