This was a project cloaked in utmost secrecy. Only employees of the secret service and their families were allowed to live there. Exquisitely trained, they spoke French in summer and English the rest of the year.

Uncle Boris greatly enjoyed his trip to Paris. It was something he spoke of with great pride (and a bit of exaggeration).

After Perestroika, and Uncle Boris’s death, strange rumors started circulating. Dark stories and witness reports about a sham Paris, from people who helped construct it or had lived there. Was this Paris a pie in the sky, a fantasy - or was it, in Kaminer’s words, a sort of ideological condom to protect the Soviet people from the destructive lure of Western life?

Here’s the rest of the story: Back in those days, a crafty Dutch journalist was traveling in the old Soviet Union. He saw a snapshot of a Paris prizewinner, a sturdy milkmaid, in front of the Eiffel Tower. The tower looked “suspiciously socialist,” however, and his discerning Dutch nose smelled a rat.

The milkmaid traded him the photo for a voice recorder. A few months later, the snap and a story of the phony Paris appeared in a Dutch boulevard magazine.

Nobody really took it seriously in Holland - everyone thought it was a joke. Behind the still-sturdy Iron Curtain, however, there was no laughter. The chief of the committee for state security ordered an immediate dismantling of the counterfeit Paris. To the very last brick, the city was taken down. Several brigades of workers from the departments of defense and of the interior were kept busy. It had to be done quickly, almost overnight.

It was rumored later that more money was spent dismantling Paris than it had cost to build it. Due to the hurried nature of the demolition, many valuable objects were lost. All the equipment bit the dust, so to speak, along with 500 Philips TV sets, a few hundred refrigerators, some vehicles and quite a number of windows and doors.

The thieves weren’t pursued. In the best interests of state security, what remained of ”Paris”” was left to rot on the tundra. Latter-day tourists marveled at the strange architecture cropping up all around: Beautiful leaded glass windows on pigsties, wide, grand doors on farmhouses. Various other curiosities were strewn along the roadsides, monuments of a lost era.

Back to our financial markets: Trulala, Never-Never-Land. Bogus city. Credit
sandcastles. Built to reward the faithful, a playground for the select few
playing Russian Roulette with Other People’s Money. Debris removal costing
even more than phony construction. A pipedream-carrot dangled in front of the slaving masses.

But where’s the Dutch journalist who’ll expose what’s happening? What will it take for every last person to discern what’s going on in front of their very eyes? And what will the financial world look like in a year? In 2? In 3?

Stand by. The last chapter hasn’t been written yet. That Parisian waiter’s still tallying up the total.

Now, hand me that box of Kleenex.