It's Friday afternoon in the sprawling capital, and we're zipping past construction cranes and shiny new megamalls ahead of the weekend traffic.

One of Katia's acquaintances, Dasha Zhukova, recently made headlines here when her billionaire boyfriend, Roman Abramovich, reportedly threw down $120 million on two paintings for Dasha's art gallery. Abramovich, who made his dollars in oil and owns Britain's Chelsea Football Club, is perhaps the best-known billionaire in Russia, but the richest is Oleg Deripaska, who made his fortune in aluminum. Then there's the country's sixth-richest man, Mikhail Prokhorov, dubbed "Russia's most eligible bachelor" by the tabloid press, until he was arrested for allegedly running a high-end prostitution ring.

Katia and I cruise by a chichi strip mall called Luxury Village, which her mother helped build in a bucolic wood an hour outside Moscow. Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent, Tiffany, and a Lamborghini dealership sparkle among a forest of birch trees. "It's [near] where all the really rich people live," Katia says as we crawl along a two-lane country road cluttered with billboards advertising posh real estate and the opulent furniture that goes with it. As if on cue, several Audis with black-tinted windows speed by.

But the paved pedestrian thoroughfare of Luxury Village is a ghost town. "When people shop here, they buy a lot," Katia explains when I ask how this spotless Stepford village stays afloat. "They don't worry about the price." Then she announces that she needs a cigarette and some sushi. So we head to A.V.E.N.U.E., a totally empty restaurant with an imported French chef and piped-in, nondescript techno music. We take a red-leather booth, and Katia orders a pack of long, super-slim smokes called Vogues and a $26 California roll to fortify her for shopping.

A few hours and several thousand dollars worth of Balenciaga dresses later, we are running late again, this time for a drinks thing with Katia's fashionista friends at Denis Simachëv, the Moscow restaurant of the moment.

At the eatery, disco balls dangle from the ceiling, a gold-plated Kalashnikov assault rifle rests on one wall, and a painting of George W. Bush hangs above the bar, depicting the president boogying with world leaders in what appears to be the inside of a prison.