No, that’s not the sound of Fyodor Dostoevsky rolling in his grave; they’re just drilling tunnels 200 feet below the 19th-century writer’s historical childhood street. By 2010, Moscow will have a new author-themed metro station—Dostoevskaya—whose interior design might very well send depressives scouring their pockets for extra Zoloft.

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?