On the subway in St. Petersburg, "there is no trash, no litter, no graffiti. It is clean down there."

"Remarkably tidy for a nation that doesn't have the reputation for being pristine. And no, I did not see a cleaning squad attending to human slovenliness. I saw an occasional (but rare) guard, that's all," writes my colleague Nina, with excellent photographs.

And I saw a populace that is proud. Too proud to deface what is regarded as uniquely grand, uniquely theirs.

Which brings me to the final point: the metro was built in the years just before and after the death of Stalin. The stations are a work of art. Soviet art. There isn't a better place to come face to face with it than at the metro stations.

Times have changed since the days of Lenin or Stalin. We're back to Russia now, as opposed to the Soviet Union. And Saint Petersburg, as opposed to Leningrad. But although the city name has changed and the commercial face of Russia has surely changed too, moving further and further from the post-revolution communist rhetoric of its leaders, here -- unlike in Poland [where Nina grew up] -- the monuments to those leaders have, for the most part remained in place...

Perhaps this is true to some extent in most countries: we, too, have trouble letting go of glorified images of generals and leaders whose period of governance did not exactly embrace all the values we claim to hold dear. But in Poland, the erasure of a communist past has proceeded rapidly following the return to market capitalism. The changing of Warsaw street names is a prime example of this. Not so here....