I like Mercedes cars. But I'm not so sure about their owners. Why? Because I plain don't believe that anyone can earn the kind of money it takes to buy that kind of car. Not in this country, anyway. Nonetheless, Mercedes-Benz reports that Russia is the company's fastest growing market in the entire world.


So, what are these cars bought with? Production is falling in two-digit stages. The ruble is incredibly featherweight, losing and recovering a third of its value in a matter of days, with the inevitable prospect of further freefall. Logically, everyone should be riding bicycles, investing every kopek against the rainy day when the oil and gas run out. Instead, our former Komsomol functionaries, now self-styled businessmen, go for Mercedes. This is Psychestan, no question about that.


Yet I'll say this for these cars: They make for interesting reading. A Foreign Trade Association consultant approaches his Mercedes, lovingly parked in Kirovogradskaya Street, and notices a couple of curious-looking packages attached to the undercarriage. Subsequent attempts by specialists to deal with these appendages, alas, reduce the magnificent car to a heap of rubbish, useless even as scrap metal.


A Mercedes owner's love for the automobile can work miracles. Attacked by three armed assailants demanding the keys to his vehicle, one such car lover went berserk, put his assailants to flight, then pursued them in his trusty limo, finally apprehending them, with some help from the police, near the Kursky railway station.


Such happy endings are rare, though. The stories are mostly sad, like that of the chic Mercedes-600 which occasioned an unscheduled display of fireworks downtown recently when it exploded, bursting into flames like a matchbox and burning its driver to cinders. There was no hope of identifying him from what was left of the car, but some kindly soul reported to a newspaper -- almost before the flames were put out -- that the luckless driver was Sergei "Silvester" Timofeyev done in by Vyacheslav "Baboon" Vinner and his jolly band.


The Mercedes class, then, provides vicarious excitement for the metro people, for the country's little individuals who earn every penny they get and never get all the pennies they earn, either under the late unlamented socialism or the present rabid parody of capitalism. But what about them, the rush hour crowd, the nine-to-five sort? Do they stay out of the chase after Mercedes just to keep their dignity? Or out of sloth? Perhaps out of fear? Businessmen, after all, complain that it is open season on them. True, one has the sneaking suspicion that the complaints are sometimes voiced by the same people who are putting out contracts.


A recent survey has revealed that, in their Soviet past, 12 percent of today's most prosperous businessmen pursued successful careers in either the Party, the Komsomol or -- you guessed it -- the KGB. Forty percent of today's multimillionaires were, in Soviet times, in some sort of then illegal business, speculating in goods and currencies or running underground workshops.


Twenty-five percent are currently associated with even less legal, plain criminal circles. There are naturally no statistics on how many of these people made their fortunes in out-and-out crime, but ancient cartographers were right: Where you know nothing, place terrors.


All these categories seem to me to have one main feature in common: a disregard, blatant or latent, for the social contract, for such things as law and moral conventions, mostly seen as annoying impediments to grabbing the good things of life like flashy cars, chic villas and vacations in the Canary Islands. In the Soviet past, this process of acquisition went on clandestinely. Now it is all pretty much in the open, and it all looks fairly disgusting.


One could hope to weather this situation if there were some promise in the future. But there isn't. A country that has no elite endowed with certain minimal standards of decency and vision of the society's future is pretty hopeless, and one shudders at the thought of applying the word "elite" to Russia's present top classes. Just look at the country's highest military wading knee-deep in a sea of murderous scandal, to take the most recent example. Politics in Russia has been compared to walking barefoot into a railway-station toilet.


Turning from the upper crust to the lower, one realizes that Protestant or similar work ethics take hundreds of years to evolve, while it has taken just a few decades of socialism to knock out of the masses' heads any vague, if natural, leanings toward honest work. More than at any other time and place, the race was not to the swift and rewards were not to the most industrious, talented or competent. Hatred for work of any kind, with the attendant penchant for having something for nothing, manifested itself in the recent explosive proliferation -- on television screens, in business and on the streets -- of lotteries of varying degrees of immorality and criminality, most notably the popular appeal of pyramid schemes like MMM.


But does anything remain of Russia's traditional ethos of "suffering for the people" as the ultimate good? Hopes are expressed that it will go on lighting the way like a beacon for all the other classes, refining manners and tastes and ideas. Alas, this sort of intelligentsia is now more myth than reality, despite the presence on the Russian scene of patriarchs like Dmitry Likhachev and Sergei Averintsev. But who else?


This seems to be the whole trouble -- there are too few genuine specimens of the breed left around and too many Eduard Limonov-type smears on its garments. Wars, Stalin's purges and emigration have done their dirty work. And even if there were more of them, their mollifying influence on the masses or the new "elite" is only too easy to exaggerate.


So, is there any hope for this society, or is it totally bent on suicide, like a pack of lemmings racing for the brink? The way it looks to me, things will get much, much worse before they change for the better. Words will not help -- a great misfortune may. Some version of the Great Depression is what it will take for the top dogs to learn how suicidal it is not to share the goodies with the underdogs, who in their turn will have to learn to pull their weight. It looks like a rough time will be had by all, and one can only hope it will not come to another collective bloodbath. In the recent past, enough right-thinking individuals turned up in the right places to stand up and be counted. This country still has a chance, but only if this tradition continues, and if more people give up their Mercedes and their metro tokens, learning to make and drive some 21st-century version of the Zhiguli.


Sergei Roy is deputy editor-in-chief of Moscow Magazine. He contributed this article to The Moscow Times.