MOSCOW -- Moscow seems to have the biggest concentration of furniture stores per square kilometer in the world. Downtown is a cramped place, with barely enough space for designer clothing and jewelry boutiques. Yet, in the peripheral neighborhoods, furniture stores thrive.

Store names are laconic and businesslike. One is unlikely to come across an Uncle Vanyas Sofas or a Kremlin Futons. Bigger stores name themselves in the plainest possible way -- Furniture. Smaller ones proudly point to the source of their goods -- Spanish Furniture, Italian Furniture, German Furniture, Finnish Furniture and Spanish Furniture (for some reason, Spain is very popular with the furniture people in Moscow).

After years of political debate, uncertainty and protest, Moscow has found solace in adamant consumerism. Everybody seems to be involved in redecorating his or her apartment. Richer people are moving the walls and installing marble baths; poorer ones are applying new wallpaper and paint.

Every person has some exciting news to share with friends. A low-income academic reports the purchase of a $600 sofa that looks so grand in a minuscule room that he and his wife jokingly refer to it as "Mother Sofa." A better-off publisher starts every conversation by acknowledging the recent acquisition of six Spanish doors, $400 apiece. A prosperous businesswoman brags of lapis lazuli walls in one of her bathrooms (only 15 years earlier nobody in Moscow thought that lapis lazuli could be used for anything except necklaces and rings).

The first thing one does when moving into a brand new apartment is to rip off all the tiles, wallpaper and sometimes even the floors, and start building his very own fantasy world. Of course, harsh reality must be taken into account. Many have to do all the redecoration themselves, or hire cheap labor from Moldavia or Ukraine.

The upper-middle class goes for what's called "evroremont" a sort of Euro-refurbishing. It's hard to say why Europe and not America has been designated as the key word in the world of redecorating. In Russian mass culture, America still rules, be it movies, rock music or slang. However, painters, masons and carpenters choose to ignore this. Interestingly, evroremont is a very specific term, and a person who can afford it automatically passes into a higher social stratum. In other words, an evroremont serves as nomenclature, like a job with the Communist Party 15 years ago.

Probably, the main feature of an evroremont is painted walls. Russia used to be a wallpaper country, but recently its tastes have changed. However, moving from wallpaper to paint is remarkably expensive as all the walls inside the apartments are rough and often crooked. It takes days of hard work to make them nice and smooth. An evroremont person must be obsessed with the plumbing fixtures, including shower cabins, baths, toilets and taps. A living room might be left inadequate, the kitchen Spartan, but the bathroom must have a heated floor and a posh mirror.

Having finished the splendid redecoration, the new bourgeois unexpectedly faces a difficult problem: the policy on shoes. Customarily nobody in Moscow allowed guests to keep their shoes on -- not for the sake of their comfort, but for the sake of tidy floors and carpets. An evroremont invariably involves either expensive carpeting or the installation of even more expensive fancy wood floors. Of course, the owner of a refurbished apartment loves all of the new items dearly, but he knows that, in Europe, guests generally don't walk around in slippers or socks. Therefore, each time he has new guests, he goes through painful agony, and often the old habit wins out. One can hardly blame the guy for that: His floors look so beautiful.

Arguably, the consumerism boom is transforming Russia more profoundly than anything else. The furniture stores have finished off the movie theaters that were built in huge numbers all over Moscow in the 1970s. Having lost popularity with the collapse of the Soviet movie industry in the '90s, they were immediately bought by private entrepreneurs and stuffed with tables, armchairs and shelves. They still look pretty eerie with all of that furniture sitting in immense halls designed to screen Soviet war epics. The armchairs look like frogs at the bottom of a cave.

After a while it became apparent that even the space of the movie theaters was not enough to accommodate the growing needs of customers. Feverish construction of new showrooms began.

Without a doubt, the refurbishing epidemic speaks volumes about the new feeling of stability in Russia. Richer people benefit from the robber barons' economy; those who used to invest in movable pieces of luxury such as sports cars and jewels now feel secure enough to invest in bathtubs and chandeliers. Their less lucky compatriots stopped saving money for the rainy day and started spending on new stoves and curtains.

Sure, this is true almost exclusively for Moscow and not for the rest of the country, which is still stuck in an economic bog. The thing that keeps Russia afloat is the exuberant export of oil and gas; the lion's share of the revenues remains in the capital, reaching the lower classes in the form of subsidies and better wages.

Recently, coal miners in the Tula province, 160 km south of Moscow, went on strike because they hadn't been paid for six months. The salary of a coal miner in Tula is about $100 a month -- the cost of a single kitchen cabinet in a Moscow furniture store.