Guestwords: Moscow Hampton

I recently read a description of Russian winter wind as "cutting into one's face like a flung handful of ground glass." That's about right.

Cold aside, Moscow's January is brutal. The month hovers, a relentless chalky gray. Slick-iced sidewalks, masquerading as doughy, brown slush, force even nimble ballerina feet into a staccato shuffle.

It is this season, borne like a yoke clear through to May, that turns even the most leather-faced pragmatists into sentimental saps. The sunny TV ad for Wrigley's gum is an evocative masterpiece. Taking off your socks is as sexy as skinny-dipping. Astroturf is intoxicating. Anything, anything that reminds you of summer is a gift.

Country Cottages

Summer here is defined by the dacha, or summer house. To Western ears, it sounds deceptively like that Hamptons specialty, the country home. But Russian dachas are not the exclusive real estate of the rich. Even that screeching babushka who monitors escalator traffic in my metro station has one.

And though it may consist of two miserly, unlighted, unheated, waterless, and toiletless rooms (how I hope it does), it is still called a dacha, and she will probably live there most of the summer. Her raptor stare will soften.

She will dig up potatoes and bulbous beets from her modest garden plot. Her swollen fingers will gently pluck raspberries destined for preserves from her single bush, leaving only the bald white knobs to tease the birds.

Enormous Mansions

But this is the old school. For the ripped-off Soviet pensioners - and there are millions - these dacha routines are not merely bucolic; the food harvested and rubles saved are necessary for survival.

So they continue to toil in their gingerbread cottages, even as bulldozers roar next door, excavating vast swaths for Russia's new "kottegi," the grotesque mansions of Moscow's outrageously rich and the future of the city's outskirts.

These kottegi, looming, often enormous brick and glass structures, are popping up at such a wild clip it makes East End '80s development look as orderly and refined as a Japanese tea ceremony. Highway billboards hawk planned communities. Metal gates with electronic codes are replacing the log benches favored by tipsy town elders. And if you look carefully, sometimes you can spot a turret poking through the birches.

Russia's East Hampton

One popular dacha town, a 45-minute drive from central Moscow, is Russia's East Hampton. In Russian, it's Nikolina Gora, or Nicholas's Hill. The well-paved road out there is remarkable because it's well paved, which can mean only one thing: Expensive cars carrying important people are traveling on it. The road, frequently blocked by President Boris N. Yeltsin's cavalcade of blue-sirened Mercedes-Benzes, passes the headman's apartment building.

Soon, as Stalin-era apartment blocks give way to forest, comes Zhukovka, the stomping ground of Government elite since the dictator's days. To the right is the sprawling new estate of Sergei Filatov, the silver-haired former head of Yeltsin's administration. To the left is a shrouded entrance into the woods that conceals all manner of government dachas, tennis courts, saunas, big-screen TVs, leggy girls.

A sign for Barvikha is never passed without comment. This mysterious village is home to the eponymous sanatorium where Yeltsin convalesces after heart attacks or quintuple bypass surgery.

Gone Gourmet

And all along the way, kottegi. Mostly they are built like Queens, shoulder to shoulder, but for no apparent reason. That the setup is influenced by a notion of zoning is unlikely. Perhaps they are trying to approximate the Soviet-style communal apartment in a rural setting. More likely it is a safety in numbers theory.

A drive to Nikolina Gora is unsatisfying without a stop at the Barefoot Contessa. This tidy outdoor market used to have the charm of Grace's hot- dog stand of old - or at least the Milk Pail - and served the same purpose: a first sniff of the docile country and a well-earned snack after driving so long. Though still run by the same stout, shrill band of vendors, the farmer's market has gone gourmet, and parking amid the all-terrain imports is risky.

Market Spectacle

Besides the perfect tomatoes and cucumbers, you can get blini with meat or cabbage, spicy eggplant with sauce, a roasted chicken, fresh milk, cakes and pickles, and eggs dyed with leaf shapes at Easter - all at twice the city prices. Over the summer, in Dean & Deluca fashion, a bar and restaurant opened. Mountain bikes and wicker furniture sell down the street, near another new, 24-hour store that sells rum with a BMW key chain attached.

One violently rainy day I stopped at the market to buy lunch. I put a few feeble pages from a newspaper on my head and began to haggle for radishes. Into the center of the market, like a horse strolling into your living room, drove a glossy green Jeep Cherokee. The tinted window buzzed down.

A vendor immediately trotted over to the open window with a cake. Another followed with fat peaches. Soon a small, servile crowd formed. Inside I saw a beautiful, languid, black-haired woman. She slowly nodded yes or no as produce was offered through the ad hoc drive-through window, careful not to let her mobile phone or leather pants get wet.

Maybe she was a movie star, or a politician's wife. Like Spielberg sighted on 27 East, she could be headed only one place.

In Come The Coolers

The stately dachas of Nikolina Gora were originally built for academics and scientists. It was a quiet community where Moscow's big thinkers could walk on the wide, hilly banks of the Moscow river. Generations of learned, or at least privileged, wore shallow indentations into the porch steps.

Now their descendants are grumpy but resigned to the yellow and red (foreign and diplomatic) license plates that fill the narrow streets. By necessity they rent out their houses to these comparatively rich newcomers, maybe only for the summer.

Some, journalists mostly, have shares. Others come just for the day, maybe to swim at the beach, formerly called Dip-plyazh, or diplomatic beach, but now open to the masses and their beer coolers.

The Real Thing

A little to the west, where the real intelligentsia stroll, you can sometimes see a guy riding a horse on the other side of the river. Nearby, you are obliged to turn up your nose at the modern dacha rented by the party of Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the fascist bad boy of Russian politics. In Russia's East Hampton, only Joey Buttafuoco could be a worse neighbor.

In hushed tones, you also point out the luscious, magical spot where Nikita Mikhalkov shot part of "Burnt by the Sun," the 1995 Academy Award winner for best foreign film.

Of course I spurn Nikolina Gora's glamour. My dacha last summer was the real thing - outhouse, wild apple orchard, and bathtub in the kitchen. Kottegi have not spared my village, but at least, as in Nikolina Gora, construction is rather discreet. Still, they are beginning to block views of the farmland, which we locals find appalling. My village is called Dmitrovskoye, which in English means "Sagaponack."

Sarah Koenig, a former reporter for The East Hampton Star, works for the Moscow bureau of The New York Times.