MOSCOW -- The most common word used by foreigners to describe Soviet Russia was "gray." Be it the cityscape, clothes or official culture, everything looked evenly unpleasant, unexciting, drab. Nowadays, the maddening communist evenness is gone, but Russia has become home to something equally disturbing -- outrageous gaps and contrasts in a society molded by unbridled young capitalism.

While retired people queue for hours to buy discount medicines, young executives sail yachts in the Mediterranean. Some people hop between sushi bars and French restaurants while others limit themselves to potatoes and bread. The poor draw from their meager salaries to pay taxes, the rich do not -- and so on.

Only a few years ago, however, the line separating the haves and the have-nots was gray: a yacht owner might live in a dreary Soviet apartment, a banker would buy his caviar in the outdoor market. But today the lifestyles of the rich and poor are totally separate.

Interestingly enough, the great divide lies in transportation. Car ownership isn't limited to the rich -- hundreds of thousands of old Soviet-made wrecks still cruise Moscow together with BMWs and Toyotas. However, BMW and Toyota owners never travel by subway if their car breaks down -- instead, they call a cab. The owners of wrecks, on the other hand, rely on subways to save money, even if their cars are running. Tens of thousands of Muscovites haven't ridden the Moscow subway in years, and the gigantic underground spiderweb, started by Josef Stalin in the 1930s, is becoming a dingy ghetto.

The new social division is territorial, and brings to mind HG Wells' novel "The Time Machine." This classic describes a future world inhabited by two races -- the underground working-class Morlocks and the carefree Eloi who dwell on the surface.

Wells describes the Morlocks' underworld as a labyrinth of stinking squalid passages; of course, the Moscow subway is not that bad, and a dozen or so stations designed under Stalin actually look like splendid cathedrals with mosaics, stained glass and frescoes. More importantly, trains still run on time. Yet a second-rate feeling permeates the underground labyrinth.

Originally, Stalin wanted the subway to serve as an air-raid shelter in the event of war -- hence the amazingly deep location of older stations. However, nobody in Stalin's era or after bothered to supply the system with proper ventilation and a ride underground on a hot day is not unlike traveling through the wet tropics.

The underground is host to just one pleasing species -- violinists who usually play French elevator music from the 1970s -- as well as two hazardous -- peddlers and beggars. Peddlers sell cheap stuff no one needs, like plastic toys and dubious vitamins. Beggars sell only their misery.

It is hard to tell who are more unsettling, women as mothers with crying toddlers or veterans of the war in Chechnya -- red-faced, unshaved, and blurry-eyed. Then there are the beggars who cleverly disguise themselves as nuns and monks from remote monasteries and ask for donations, reaping profits from the nation's religious revival and traditional superstition. They collect more than both the fake mothers and veterans do.

The rush hour has one more beneficial function: It slows the movement of numerous beer bottles, which otherwise roll freely through the subway cars. Made of heavy dark glass and still dripping with thick, smelly foam, they attack people's feet like vicious self-propelled grenades. Every jerk of the train -- and Moscow subways are about as smooth as roller coasters -- sends bottles flying. Old ladies -- the notoriously stern Russian babushkas -- silently and angrily purse their lips. Nobody else seems to care.

Unlike New York, Russia's capital doesn't have amber or orange terror alerts, yet it is a city that experiences Islamic terrorist attacks every few months. The last one occurred less than five months ago in the subway during rush hour. While riding the subway system's endless escalators, one is endlessly exposed to recordings asking people to remain vigilant and report any suspicious activities or abandoned luggage to the police.

But if an alert citizen does notice something suspect, the chances that he would be able to prevent a terrorist attack are slim as there are virtually no policemen in the subway system. They procrastinate on the surface at the entrance to subway stations, harassing unlicensed farmers who attempt to sell thin bunches of celery and radish to commuters rather than patrol where they are needed most -- in the bowels of the transit system. It is impossible to say what accounts for this: personal cowardice, a lack of discipline or bureaucratic imbecility. In any case, rank-and-file Muscovites are on their own underground.

The only thing that makes them feel somewhat secure are cell phones. The cell-phone market is one of the fastest-growing areas of the Russian economy. Even people with low incomes aspire to get one to use in emergencies -- and only in in emergencies. To keep their bills low, they only share their cell phone numbers with family members and a trusted friend or two.

In a city where thousands of households still don't have ordinary phones, many subway stations in downtown Moscow are equipped with powerful transmitters, allowing commuters to use their cell phones 30 meters underground. The service fades away in less central locations, but the reassuring feeling of security provided by the new technology doesn't.

As for the privileged race, the Russian Eloi, they don't have to deal with such problems, yet they still complain when they can't get descent roaming service in Paris or Hawaii.