Don't look now, Stalin's skyscrapers, but there's a new, equally unsettling panorama in town: Moskva-Siti (literally Moscow-City) is a cluster of angular skyscrapers that, when completed, will be the Putin generation's futuristic monument to papa ruble. In the thin fog of a mild January, it looks positively dystopian. But there's one lingering question: Why on earth does it have a blue, digital clock tower?

This clock looks like something you'd have on your bedside table if it were 1995. It alternates between time and temperature with the enthusiasm of a second-grader showing off his calculator watch. In short, with the exception of the word “Siti,” this is the cheesiest thing the Russians could have tacked on to their state-of-the-art business center.

Furthermore, it’s a beast. At 755 feet from the ground, it’s the highest clock in the world. Its face is 40 feet tall and 100 feet wide. My neighbors can read it from their windows, a mile and a half away, through the fog. Another friend tells me she has no need for a clock in her house since the thing went up, and she lives nearly three miles from it.

For all these reasons, I should hate the clock tower. But I can’t. Together with the buildings and the fog, it evokes the menacingly beautiful L.A. of Blade Runner; a future as imagined by people in the past. Because, whatever otherworldly delights may come their way, Russians’ concept of what looks “modern” will always be shaped by that first glimpse of a forbidden world that opened up to them in 1991—mullet hair, clock radios and all.