late soviet to post-soviet Mo$cow

a visitor to what afterwards came to be recognized as having been the last years of the Soviet Union, if they had the potential in them, could see how the outer "unfreedom" in which the vast Russian majority lived in a kind of enforced solidarity (if with a necessary humor against the Soviet system and ideology) helped to build a kind of "inner freedom" (a common enough self-/socially conscious topic of Russian kitchen commiseration of those times) which gave an inner intensity, content and vitality which the more externally free "Western" travelers might discern (though often enough not) as visitors
with the transition from "the big village Moscow" of the "late Soviet period", to booming Mo$cow with its malls and billionaires, and all the variety of entertainments and activities which had formally not existed for most people in the USSR, the external freedoms and possibilities and activities, have meant that the average, passive Russian, who had a greater "inner life" by the force of necessity of social and living conditions in the past, is quite happily now able to live his or her inner life in relation to greater "outer freedoms".
only those for whom "the inner life" is a personal need (when not perhaps required by outer life), continue to evince the inner life more common in what I call the enforced monasticism of the Soviet times.