Western commentators wonder why Russia's brutal war in Chechnya hasn't brought more protesters out on Moscow's streets. But for most Muscovites, concern is centered on the survival battle they're waging every day just to get enough money to live. In one of the most desperate marketplaces in all of Russia, octogenarians peddle their prescription drugs to punk teens desperate for a high. PNS associate editor Andrew Meier, currently traveling through Russia on an Alicia Patterson Foundation fellowship, has lived in and reported from the former Soviet Union since the early 1990s.

MOSCOW -- News that Russia's special forces had at last assassinated Chechen commander Dzhokar Dudayev undoubtedly brought joy to Boris Yeltsin's beleaguered inner circle. But outside the steep Kremlin walls, most Muscovites couldn't care less. Salaries and pensions are just too little for people to fret over Russia's prolonged military quagmire in the south. Even Moscow's opulently-outfitted bankers and "biznesmeny" barely took note.

An artist friend, Slava, put it succinctly: "Making money is all everyone cares about now." The transition from the old Soviet centrally-planned economy to the new laissez faire (or not so fair, given the long arm of the "Mafiya") has taken its toll.

Signs of the economic imbalance Russia's so-called "reforms" have wrought are everywhere. Homeless people -- mostly women and children -- beg all over downtown Moscow. So too each day thousands of babushki (elderly women) line the train stations and metro-underpasses around town to hawk Marlboros, kittens, porn tabloids, stockings -- anything that might supplement their meager pensions, the average being around $25 a month.

Meanwhile Russia's new Richie Riches -- well-muscled young turks with thick wads of dollars -- cruise Moscow's nightclubs and casinos in packs, cellphones and glittering girlfriends attached to their hips. There are bigger, fatter cats strutting around town, too: bankers and "biznesmeny" who have made millions selling off the Motherland's vast natural resources. Their armored entourages now choke Moscow's once-grand avenues with their Jeep Cherokees and BMWs -- their bodyguards sitting cozily behind the tinted glass.

Drive 20 minutes outside the city and you'll see Russia's first suburban subdivisions: rows and rows of five-story weekend "kottedzi" (cottages) the New Russians or "Novy Russkie" as their poorer compatriots call them (a pun on "nouveau riches") are building with the spoils of the ancient regime. These gaudy red-brick castles, instant monuments to overnight windfalls, are fast outnumbering the traditional countryside abodes of the old Soviet elite, the quaint wooden dachas that once stirred the enmity of the people way back in the dawn of glasnost. With all the security cameras, electric fences and guardhouses, one wonders if the new elite is building these mansions not for relaxation but as hideaways of last resort.

Between these two extremes is one of the most desperate marketplaces in all of Russia -- ulitsa Nikoskaya, an ancient narrow street in the center of town midway between the old KBG headquarters and Red Square. Here each day, outside Moscow's "Pharmacy No. 1," desperate buyers and sellers pass back and forth, whispering to each other, "Do you have any?" and "How many do you need?"

With the ruble now pegged to the dollar and Russian stores stocked with expensive imported goods from the West, this furtive give and take is one of the last vestiges of the old Soviet black market which has taken a dire downward turn. Here the sellers are hungry octogenarians with prescription medicines, and their buyers, teenagers with little to do but get high.

It is hard to imagine stranger trading partners than a five-foot-tall babushka in a pink woolly beret and a punk-rocker of no more than 12 in a black Sex Pistols t-shirt. The pensioners are here to sell their prescriptions (for high blood pressure, arthritis and so on) to the teenagers who in turn mix and cook them into cheap highs -- along the lines of amphetamines or speed. The young people fill the corners and doorways for an entire square block around Pharmacy No. 1, their hands and faces bearing the scars and scabs common to speed abusers in the U.S.

"Is it expensive?" a visitor inquires. "Not when we all get together and share it," responds Petya, 14. "Do the police do anything?" "Nothing except turn their eyes," says Petya's friend Lyona. "And the elderly here, do they feel bad about selling drugs to teenagers?" "Some probably do," offers a 16-year-old girl, Oksyana. "But after all, what choice do they have?"

Western commentators who wonder why more Russians aren't protesting in the street over the war in Chechnya would find the answer here on ulitsa Nikolskaya. "Chechnya?" says Lyudmila, one of the few prescription-peddlers brave enough to talk to a visitor. "Are you crazy? I've got enough troubles of my own to last me until I die."