And it explained to me why Mr. Putin rolled over so meekly on President Bush's decision to walk away from the ABM treaty, limiting missile defenses. In 1972, when that treaty was forged, Russian foreign policy was about one thing -- geopolitics, the ideologically driven global competition for influence with the U.S., and everything, particularly economics, was subordinated to that. Hence all the food lines. Today, Russian foreign policy is about two things -- geopolitics and geoeconomics -- and there is a real competition between the two. So if Russia can save money and win Western help by walking away from the ABM treaty, then walk it will.

Don't be fooled, though. Russia's military and foreign policy elite considered Mr. Bush's ABM move ''a slap in the face,'' said the Russian pollster Igor Bunin. If the U.S. doesn't come through now with what Mr. Putin believes he's been promised -- a new accord for deep cuts in nuclear weapons, a real Russia-NATO partnership, plus debt relief, W.T.O. membership and Western investment, Mr. Putin will be seen as another Gorbachev -- always giving and never receiving. ''Then elites could start to form a front against him,'' added Mr. Bunin. But for now, Mr. Putin is ignoring the whispers because in his view Russia will never again be a player in geopolitics unless it first masters geoeconomics.

What's new in today's Moscow is that there are young capitalists coming of age, and they believe they can get rich the Chinese way, by making things, not the old Russian way, by taking things from the state or from the ground. And without anyone noticing, in 2001 Russia's Parliament quietly passed a lot of the judicial and tax reform legislation that America was beating on it to pass for a decade.

I had lunch the other day in a combination art gallery-restaurant, Ulitsa OGI, which is part of a successful new chain started by Dmitry Jekovich and his partner. ''The difference between us and the oligarchs is that we're oriented on creating something new, not just privatizing something that existed before,'' he explained.

The confidence of Russia's new generation that it can actually do this ''capitalist thing'' has enormous geopolitical significance. One reason that Russia was so zealous about keeping so many nukes, and reflexively opposing the U.S., was because these were the only currency that defined it as a superpower. If Russians believe they can be powerful on the basis of geoeconomics, they aren't going to surrender all their nukes or quest for influence, but the chances of their being real partners with the West will be much, much greater.