Moscow property market:Moscow is a city made for developers wanting to make big money fast. The Russian capital is the middle of Europe's biggest construction boom, fuelled by sky-high oil prices.
More than 30 skyscrapers are going up across the city and hundreds more buildings are being torn down to make way for office blocks, apartment complexes and shopping centres.
Russia is now second only to Saudi Arabia in the amount of oil it pumps, and from being in debt just five years ago, Russia now has a massive $100 billion surplus. Moscow holds four-fifths of the country's wealth and boasts more billionaires than New York.
With the stock market tiny and the rest of the economy moribund, property is the only act in town. The result is that land rents in downtown Moscow have quadrupled since 2000 and young Russians who once discussed politics and Pushkin now talk of mortgages and interior design.
This boom has sucked in developers and architects from across Europe, while fuelling controversy as dozens of historic buildings are levelled. Beauty is not at a premium, as huge slabs of concrete tower over what remains of historic Moscow.
Giants such as Ikea are opening huge new mega-stores on the city limits and architects are scrambling to meet the desperate shortage of office space for foreign companies.
Planning rules are virtually non-existent and conservationists publish logs of scores of listed buildings that are torn down, with the courts too weak to stop them.
This boom is masterminded by the city's mayor Yuri Luzhkov, second in power only to President Vladimir Putin. Luzhkov is a controversial figure, because a huge chunk of city projects are built by concerns owned by his wife, Yelena Batruna, named this year as Russia's first female billionaire.
On the other hand, Luzhkov has transformed the city from a drab Soviet-style area to one of bright neon kitsch.
Typically, the city demands from developers building office blocks that they add on extra floors for the city to rent out. As a result, Moscow has become almost a state within a state and has clashed with the Kremlin over whether the city or the government has the right to more than 1,100 properties used by the former Soviet government.
All this has generated fury among conservationists, notably over the fate of the Stanislavsky theatre, one of Moscow's most famous. To fund its development, the city insisted on building a huge office block in the back yard which looms over the original structure.
The boom has seen Moscow's own architects and developers swamped with work, while conservationists say the developers will end up destroying one of Europe's most historic cities.