There are times when the best political commentator on Russia remains Nikolai Gogol.


The great absurdist died in 1852 but he still has a lot of things more right than the daily papers. He described in loving detail the life of the bureaucrat whose job is very carefully to stop any decisions being made of any importance. He knew how easily Russians can be gulled into putting their savings into "dead souls" schemes or lucrative investment funds.


Gogol's sharp pen had a lot to say about relations between the capital and the provinces. In the "Government Inspector" the impostor Khlestakov dazzles two provincial women with his stories about life in Petersburg, where a single watermelon cost 700 rubles and he consorts every day with pretty actresses and Alexander Pushkin.


"Oh, Petersburg, what a life it is, to be sure!" says Khlestakov. "You might think all I am is a copy clerk; oh no, the head of the department and I are on a friendly footing. He comes and slaps me on the shoulder and says: 'Come and have lunch, old chap!' I just look into the department for two minutes to say 'Do it this way, do it that way.'"


Kostroma is only seven hours from Moscow to the north, but even from that distance the capital looks fairly Gogolian. The news on the local radio about members of the government meeting members of the State Duma might as well come from China.


For your average provincial manager Moscow is the place where all the money goes in taxes -- and not much of it comes back, probably because it has slipped into the pocket of some Khlestakov dining at the Metropol.


Kostroma, like most provincial towns, has slumped since the end of the Soviet Union. The statue of Lenin and the Dzerzhinsky Street are still in place, but a Moscow-style service economy has barely arrived.


One factory manager with good reformist credentials looked back almost fondly to the days of the command economy when at least the ministry was duty bound to look after you.


Nowadays they have the worst of both worlds. The center still pulls all the bureacratic strings and passes the decrees, but the centralized economy has collapsed. Many of the factories are reduced to barter to sell their goods. Much of the Kostroma region's timber -- its main resource -- used to go to Georgia, but that market has completely vanished.


Now at least the provinces can pride themselves in their new spiritual secret weapon, called Alexander Solzhenitsyn.


Solzhenitsyn stopped off in Kostroma two weeks ago on the last strait of his odyssey across Russia. Judging by the space given him in "Northern Truth," the local newspaper, he received a very warm welcome. Twelve journalists apparently staged a lightning raid on his top-floor room in the Hotel Volga, and the writer was happy to answer their questions.


Solzhenitsyn clearly had the right instincts. If he had merely touched down at Sheremyetovo-2 the chattering classes could have written him off as an out-of-touch emigre fresh from the Vermont pine woods, whose only living link with Russia was his well-thumbed Dal dictionary.


But when he stepped off the train into the camera lights and the rain at Yaroslavsky Station, Solzhenitsyn could look any Moscow intellectual in the eye and say "When were you last in Omsk? Or Chita? Tell me what you know about Blagoveshchensk."


The tour was a chance for Solzhenitsyn to work on his ideas about reforming Russia. He talks a lot about rebuilding the country snizu, "from below," starting with local institutions and only then making big changes in Moscow.


"Moscow gets all worked up and lives only for itself, not for Russia. Because it's lost its living link with the provinces. A fight is going on between parties and groups, a fight for power and for the money which power gives," Solzhenitsyn said, according to Moskovskiye Novosti.


No one seems to know how exactly Solzhenitsyn would like to replace the great imbalance between Moscow and the provinces. Judging from Kostroma, it is fairly immoveable.


One lugubrious factory director sitting in the waiting room of the governor of Kostroma was hoping that the governor could put in a few words with the government or the Federation Council.


It was not hard to picture the spiral of supplications winding from the director's factory floor, through his office, the governor's and then along the corridors of the White House or Kremlin in Moscow until it reached the top.