Word: barvikha
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...Barvikha Hotel & Spa, www.barvikhahotel.com, sits just west of Moscow, in the super-ritzy community of Rublyovka, where everyone from Joseph Stalin to Vladimir Putin to the oligarchs who once ruled Russia have camped out in sprawling dachas enveloped by thick forests...
...Barvikha to unwind. You go there to experience life as it is lived by Russia's élite. This is where today's boyar and his 20-year-old girlfriend get facials and hydro-massages and sip lemon water in fluffy robes while having their toenails buffed. This is where you pay top-tier prices - say, $250 for a 21/2-hour treatment - simply to be with other members of Russia's ruling class...
...That said, it's not all pretense at Barvikha. The facilities comprise a series of rectangular glass buildings with striking wooden slats on the exterior. The black-brown-ecru lobby is filled with recessed lighting and features a first-rate bar and restaurant. Service, which is never reliable in Russia, is as good as it gets in Moscow. Plus there's the spa, which is run by an English-speaking staff and seems to be permanently infused with the scent of jasmine and a soft, very hip soundtrack that will make you feel younger than you are - which would seem...
...women - a mix of political prisoners and criminals - worked in Stroilag in the Lenin Hills, a beauty spot overlooking the capital, building parts of Moscow State University and other academic institutions. Elsewhere in the city, prisoners built ports, airfields, homes and even dachas in the élite villages of Barvikha and Zhukovka, now the preserve of Russia's new rich. Alexander Solzhenitsyn served part of his time in a prison laboratory, a sharashka, in northern Moscow. It is still there, just around the corner from the studios of Russia's main TV networks. No plaques record its history...
Well before sunrise on Tuesday morning, a high-speed convoy of government vehicles made the short drive from Boris Yeltsin's luxurious sanatorium in the village of Barvikha to the heart center on the edge of Moscow. The patient was in a good mood, his spokesman reported later, and joked with the doctors. After two months of waiting, wild rumors and some nasty Kremlin infighting, the Russian President's heart-bypass operation--a procedure as crucial politically as it was medically--had finally become a reality. At 2 p.m., after seven hours in the operating room, during which Yeltsin...