It was a hot and sunny Sunday afternoon when Lena Miro (the pop-lit writer Elena Mironenko) was wheeling her way home, happy and sated after a Goya exhibit and some stuffed cabbage at a chic Moscow cafe. "When all of a sudden, out of nowhere, a vile old woman with a massive bag on wheels threw herself under my car," Miro wrote on her blog. "I almost knocked the bowling pin down." Miro was rattled, but then she had a soothing thought: "It occurred to me: I could've run over this scum (the world would only benefit from this), but to give myself a serious headache over some old cunt was a little silly."

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And then she got to thinking: what the fuck. Why are these people even here, in her city? Why not impose an entry fee to Moscow -- say, $200. "Then we'll have beautiful people driving around in beautiful cars, not collective farmers in their farting wrecks, or office schmucks in their miserable Passats," she mused. "And anyway: let these office drones take the metro to their kunstkameras, or, even better, have them go somewhere far away. Maybe Kolyma" -- the remote site of some of the most notorious Soviet-era gulags. "Let them pan for gold. That way, we'd at least get some use out of their pointless existence."

Healthy thoughts, to be sure, in a city plagued by infamous congestion. Miro, a card-carrying member of United Russia, is not the only celebrity doing her part to give voice to the party's patrician inner monologue. When confronted with the growing public outrage over his behavior on the roads, Oscar-winning Russian director Nikita Mikhalkov retold an old pre-revolutionary joke. "A peasant nursed and nursed his anger at his master," Mikhalkov said, "but the master didn't know shit about it." Last month, when Mikhalkov was finally stripped of his migalka -- a blue VIP car siren that, when turned on, allows the driver to circumvent all traffic laws --  his public bitching about the loss seemed to know no bounds. And it's not hard to understand why: With that blue light flashing, a driver can cut through traffic like an ambulance, and everyone else must scatter. (Although some VIPs don't even bother issuing that warning.)

In this season of strange movements of the bulldogs under the rug, the migalka and all it stands for have become what passes in Russia for a hot-button campaign issue: the people -- or the bydlo, the plebes, as the elite and the plebes themselves refer to the non-elite -- get upset at the constant abuse of gratuitous privilege, and the state throws a few of its most insignificant pawns under the bus to show that it has the interests of the people at heart. Which, of course, is not quite true.

In principle and by law, migalki are supposed to go only to the most important officials, officials who have really important meetings to go to, meetings that could make or break the future of Russia. Thus, Barack Obama has a helicopter to get around stoplights and traffic jams; Dmitry Medvedev has a blue migalka. Then what about the prime minister, Vladimir Putin? He has one, too. As do the finance minister and the defense minister and other cabinet members. The Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church has one.

And then the definition of "important" becomes rather swimmy and 970 people get a migalka. Officially. Nearly double that number of "special sirens" are actually on the roads. Who has them? Some of the president's advisors, some big businessmen who get them through connections. Who else? The deputy head of the Federal Customs Agency, who recently turned his siren on one weekday morning to speed to the dry cleaner's. Filmmaker Mikhalkov, ostensibly because he was the head of the Defense Ministry's Public Council. (When a journalist called him to ask why a film director would need a siren, Mikhalkov responded with a tirade so explicit, so bleep-worthy, that it firmly established him as Russia's leading artistic light.) Even more bizarrely, so does this woman, who called in to a Moscow radio station in January to complain that no one pays attention to her migalka:

Radio host: "Tatyana, tell us, where do you work?

Tatyana: "I don't work."

Radio host: "Then in what way did you acquire a special siren?"

Tatyana: "Well, it's my car and it has a siren installed on it and I just wanted to say that people who demand to be treated well --"

Radio host: "Tatyana, Tatyana, one second. On what basis do you have a special siren?"

Tatyana: "Why would I tell you where I got a special siren!"

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