Putin's position is assured - if enough people vote to validate the election. And if they don't, someone told me with a shrug, well, then Putin will find a way to solve that

In Moscow for a special edition of Start the Week, I am driven, in the dirtiest taxi I've ever been in, skidding (seat belt not supplied) over ice and deep potholes, into the city. It's a more confident place - you now pay in roubles, rather than dollars - and also much filthier. Russian petrol is so polluted and the traffic so dense that the air is filled with choking fumes. The taxi delivers me to the door of one of the new-build hotels that are springing up everywhere. I am greeted by the soon-to-be-familiar anodyne pop music that accompanies the unending loop of anorectic models prancing down gangways that is Fashion TV.

Welcome to the Muzak society. While the subway, that efficient, cheap and glamorous Soviet transit system, is mostly silent, step outside and you will be bombarded by sound. At Red Square, what greets the visitor is recorded religious music blaring from loudspeakers on the kitschy, Disney-like Chapel of Our Lady of Iver. The chapel, purporting to be 18th century, is in fact a copy. It, and the Resurrection Gate behind it, were destroyed on Stalin's orders to make access for tanks and crowds easier.

In Russia, however, the past is easily reconstructed. In 1995, the mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, had both the Iversky chapel and the Resurrection Gate rebuilt: "The same," as he is quoted as saying, "but better." Meanwhile, Mayor Luzhkov is busy knocking down the famous Stalin-era Moscow Hotel designed by Schusev. Walk into Red Square and the chapel's holy chanting is replaced by advertising jingles that herald the proximity of GUM - that old state department store now boutiqued to carry only the most exclusive of designer gear. I sidestep a portly Lenin lookalike, beside whom I could be photographed, and head for that other Schusev design, the Lenin Mausoleum.

I was here in the 1970s, when snaking crowds meant a lengthy wait unless you identified yourself as a foreigner or a new bride. Now the crowds are gone and the biggest problem is finding someone trustworthy to hold your bag. Moscow is full of uniforms, of soldiers and militia and private security guards, but this is the only place I visit where there is any visible attempt to control potential trouble - which means no bags are permitted.

In the past, the guards around Vladimir Ilyich stood to perfect and immobile attention. Now they use subtle hand signals to guide visitors through the semi-darkness. Lenin, himself once yellowed and waxy, has been given a recent make-over and lies, delicate in his coffin, looking almost perky.

Coming out, calmed by the dignity of the mausoleum, I go in search of food. In an underground shopping mall, a security guard points out a sushi bar. He and his colleagues are kitted out in black, Mao-style jacketed suits and peaked hats that seem strangely familiar. Only in the middle of the night does it dawn on me why: they're dressed like the Imperial Guard in Star Wars.

Fancy dress and abrasive encounters characterise this city. Forget politics. No one is particularly interested in talking about the result of the forthcoming presidential elections (scheduled for 14 March). With an 80 per cent approval rating, Vladimir Putin's position is assured - if enough people vote to validate the election. And if they don't, someone told me with a shrug, well, then Putin will find a way to solve that.

Eighty per cent approval, and the only person who said anything positive about Putin during my time in Moscow was a Communist Party member who commented that at least the workers were now being paid. By the rest, Putin is viewed as an old-style dictator who will end up controlling not only the media, as he already does, but also the entire country. The recent detention of the dollar billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Russians say, is Putin's way of announcing that no one, not even Russia's richest man, is safe.

The night before we record the programme, the panellists and Andrew Marr dine at Cafe Pushkin. It's in Pushkin Square, which somewhere contains a statue of the poet, now hidden by bumper-to-bumper traffic and garishly neon-lit fast-food joints dominated by that ubiquitous yellow M of McDonald's. Step into the cafe, though, and you find yourself in the ornate and slightly faded interior of an early 19th-century society meeting place. But the building is in fact new, its interior merely distressed to look old. Meanwhile, next door, the mayor has ordered the pulling down of a genuine, and perfectly beautiful, 18th-century block.

Talk about the eradication, and at the same time the repetition, of history. Out in the Arctic, an ice station has just sunk: just as the ice ship Chelyuskin, in my book, was once similarly destroyed. And here in Moscow I sit, watching the long-aproned, Pushkin-style waiters bustle past, thinking that this peculiar Russian habit of rewriting the country's own history is part of what fuelled my fascination with the society and led me to write Ice Road.

Gillian Slovo's novel Ice Road is published by Little, Brown (£14.99)

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