Four palm trees, each about 30 feet in height and made of heavy-duty plastic, stand incongruously in snowdrifts on Krasnaya Presnaya Street. Behind them in the gap between the legs of what appears to be a giant blue-and-yellow giraffe, customers can enter the Moscow branch of the Planet Hollywood chain of restaurants.
In the 80 years since the October Revolution of 1917 which brought the Bolsheviks to power, many bizarre monuments have appeared on the streets of Moscow, almost all of them on a heroic scale.
There have been hero factory workers raising their hammers to the sky, hero farm workers holding their sickles aloft, hero poets such as Vladimir Mayakov sky towering over Triumfalnaya Square in the north of the city and even a hero journalist, pen in hand reporting on the Great Patriotic War from outside the headquarters of the journalists' union on Suvorovsky Boulevard.
Elsewhere in the city Yuri Gagarin shoots into space on a stainless-steel rocket trail and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin appears in a myriad representations from minor murals on the metro to his massive statue, its bronze top coat blowing in an imaginary wind on Kaluzhkaya Square in the south.
For sheer bad taste, therefore, five years of capitalism have outdone three-quarters of a century of communism, by giving Moscow not only a glistening blue-and-yellow giraffe but also a plastic palm grove to make it feel at home when the winter blizzards arrive.
It is not surprising therefore that when I look at the site on St Stephen's Green, where another Planet Hollywood is under construction, I am overcome by feelings which range from apprehension to dread.
All in all, however, and giant giraffes apart, most Russians have welcomed the changes begun by Mikhail Gorbachev and pursued relentlessly by his successor Boris Yeltsin. They can, after all, run as fast as possible up Krasnaya Presaya to the phonetic comfort of the Dzhon Bull Pab for a few quick half-litres of warm bitter to erase the memory of the apparition down the street and of some of the less visible excesses which have accompanied it.
Moscow, it should be said, is booming. Each visit brings more surprises. For those with the money the city's shops, particularly its food stores, put those of Dublin to shame.
At Yurs, within cringing distance of the Giant Giraffe, bottles of Chateau Petrus line the supermarket shelves at five million roubles (£585) per bottle, there are eight different types of prawns to choose from in the frozen food section; suckling pigs form a ghostly chorus line on the butchers' shelves and genuine Russian Pelmeni (a type of ravioli) bears labels proclaiming it was "made in Brooklyn".
The KGB is gone, though it has been replaced by the SVR and the FSB and the FAPSI whose offices are peopled by those who once ran the show at the Lubyanka. Freedom of movement has been introduced with Russia's membership of the Council of Europe, though one can still be arrested and imprisoned for up to 30 days for being found on the street without one's internal passport.
As far as religion is concerned a new law has been instituted which gives great freedom to the Russian Orthodox Church but severely limits the activities of other faiths. Mr Mikah Naftalin, national director of the Union of Councils for Soviet Jews, put it this way: "This law is in effect a hunting licence designed to intimidate and persecute Jews and Western-oriented Christians, despite all the assurances to the contrary."
In the provincial town of Bryansk, the local Jewish community is finding it difficult to get a "licence" to practise; in Khakassia in southern Siberia the Lutheran community is having problems; and in Noginsk to the east of Moscow a group of Orthodox believers in communion with the Patriarch of Kiev in Ukraine have had their church closed down.
There are, therefore, as the 80th anniversary of October 25th (old style) or November 7th (new style) approaches, distinct reflections of the old days. But reflections they are, more shadow than substance.
The days of the gulags have ended and the mass executions of the Stalin era are but memories, however vivid, in the minds of the older generation. At the weekend, for example, just 400 people turned up at Levashovo outside St Petersburg to pay their respects at a mass grave in which 46,000 victims of the terror are buried.
There are, all the same, those who defy President Yeltsin's assertion that socialism should never return to Russia. Some of them will march through Moscow on Friday with their red flags and banners, denouncing capitalism, the Jews and the foreign menace.
Others come from a much more moderate background. One man put it this way: "To ignore the revolution and declare it a mistake, a random event, are useless efforts having nothing to do with either science or history.
"Russia has yet to find an answer to the question regarding the type of society towards which it is advancing but socialist ideas and values will no doubt be in demand."
Little heed is paid nowadays in Russia to the man who spoke those words. In last year's presidential election, Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, received only 0.5 per cent of the votes cast.