For a Few Rubles More

on the back of a bicycle taxi, Paris                                                             KW

A couple of years after the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union became Russia and its former satellite countries, I found myself talking with a Polish man in the grocery store. I asked him how everyone was doing there, and the first thing he told me was that his country was being overrun by the Russian mafia. It was tragic, frustrating, and frightening, he said. Fast forward to my summer trip to France, where we saw graffiti in a couple of different places that read "Russian Mafia" in large black letters. In Paris, where tourist signs were once in English and German or Italian, they are now in English and Russian (see pic above).
   We heard a lot of Russian in Paris and on the Riviera, and that's just one of the signs of how much things have changed in the Motherland. There's a lot of money there, and those who have it want everyone to know. German photographer Frank Herfort became fascinated with all the new buildings that have been going up in the area. "You feel that each building wants to scream out that I'm the best, the biggest, the richest," he says (slideshow): http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20131021-post-soviet-imperial-splendour