More than one Moscow miracle

MORE than the luxury hotels, upmarket stores, eye-popping skyscrapers, top-of-the-range cars and crippling prices, perhaps the most dramatic measure of how much Russia has changed over the past 20 years is that Moscow is a tough place for an atheist like myself to be these days.

And that’s not just because the delightful St Basil’s Cathedral down on Red Square is the only place of worship I’ve ever seen which resembles a bouncy castle. No, tantalising evidence of the supernatural seemed all around us in the Russian capital, and that’s before we even get on to the subject of Richard Dunne performing his many miracles in the Luzhniki.

Exhibit A: colleague Paul O’Hehir was standing outside our hotel one evening when a blacked-out limousine screeched to a halt in front of him. The rear window rolled down and the man inside began shouting aggressively at Paul in Russian. When that didn’t get the desired response, he switched to English, barking ‘Porter! Porter’, ordering Paul to ‘Come here! Now!’.