Katia Verber is running late. That's not unusual for an It girl in Moscow, where the Soviet-built streets are choked with traffic. Not helping matters is that the 24-year-old socialite's It car - her mother's chauffeured gold Bentley — has just broken down. "I'm so stressed!" sighs the feathery voice on the other end of the line when I call to check in. "I'll be there in 20!"
Two-and-a-half hours later, Katia flies into the Starbucks on the storied Old Arbat Street. I can't help but ask: If you shell out $250,000 for a car, it should work, right? "Oh, no. No, no, no," she says in crisp English, with the patience of a kindergarten teacher. "Bentleys break down all the time."
Before I can respond, her $7000 luxury titanium Vertu cell phone is beep-beep-beeping. Loudly. "Ugh, I hate this ring," she says, raking through the contents of her studded Balenciaga bag with both hands. "It lets everyone know you have a Vertu. It's so embarrassing!" The phone keeps on beeping. Finally she finds it and answers with a perky "Ah-loh?"
Katia, a dark-haired heiress with piercing eyes and perfect teeth, is like one of the Hilton sisters here. She's the daughter of Alla Verber, who helps run Russia's biggest luxury retailer, Mercury, which brought Dolce, Gucci, and Prada to Russia in the mid-1990s. Katia works as a buyer at Mercury, but she spends much of her time posing for Russian glossies and deciding which party invitations to accept.
This is not the Moscow of yesteryear, when the waiting list for a clunky Volga sedan was often five years. Soaring oil prices transformed this one-time capital of communism with dizzying speed. Even today, Moscow still boasts 73 billionaires (compared with New York's 70), and the number of Russian millionaires shot up last year to 136,000. But the gap between the rich and poor is growing, too: The average wage is still a measly 16,253 rubles, or $686 a month, and 18.9 million Russians subsist below the poverty line on monthly wages averaging less than $170.
There are two Russias, as Katia says: One hobbles along, while the other races forward, spending its oil cash with the sort of careless abandon that you could find only in a country where toilet paper was once considered a luxury good.
I've come to see how Katia's half lives.
SEE PHOTOS OF KATIA AND HER FRIENDS
