My favorite Atom dweller was a brawny, idealistic engineer named Igor. While most new capitalists practiced some form of wheeling and dealing — importing jeans, computers, rock albums — Igor was one of the few who had set out to make it as a private manufacturer. His plan was brilliant. People were suddenly making money, but they regarded the new private banks with suspicion. Igor retooled an old factory to produce high-quality safes.

For Russia, it was a time of confused quest, a longing to be normalniye lyudi — normal people. Thousands, including a contingent from Atom, had poured into the streets to face down an attempted coup by hard-liners, and to celebrate their newfound power. But then what? Everything from the rules of the marketplace to the meaning of life had to be improvised on the still-festering ruins of a monstrous failed experiment. Rackets abounded. Mystics and healers and hypnotists attracted huge crowds. In their search for something to believe in, Atom residents invited a priest to give weekly instruction on their closed-circuit TV channel. One resident, seeking a more secular kind of fulfillment, hosted a free-love commune.

Flash forward a decade, halfway to the present. The new Russia was still a work in progress. That obscure K.G.B. colonel was a popular president. Putin provided prosperity enough, a paternalistic sense of order and a reassuring narrative of national pride. The price — unless you represented a real threat to the regime, in which case the price could be very high indeed — was bearable: an unspoken acceptance of the way things are, a small surrender of dignity. Shut up, get rich.

For many, the endearing confusion of the early ’90s had given way to disillusionment. Robin Hessman’s splendid documentary “My Perestroika,” released last year, follows five Moscow friends a little younger than my Atom focus group. The film captures the ambivalence of those who straddled the Soviet days and the new freedom. They live reasonably well, they are free to say what they think, but something, some larger purpose, is missing. “You know,” says Borya, a high school history teacher, who had been at the barricades in 1991, “the ideals that burned in a person’s heart in the early ’90s, they were profaned, and there was nothing left to fight for.”