By RYSZARD KAPUSCINSKI

Once again in Moscow after three years. First impression: The city looks better. I tell this to my Moscow friends. They are pleased. The Russians set great store by how foreigners view them. In their opinions they seek the answer to one of the most fundamental Russian questions, which recently was freshly formulated by the excellent Russian essayist Natalya Ivanovna: "Will Russia join 'the civilized world,' or will it continue along its separate path, which even today is deemed perilous by other nations?" In the course of the past decade, the city has lived through three different epochs. First, that of perestroika and glasnost. At that time, in the second half of the 1980s, Moscow was transformed into a huge debating club, into a unique, peculiar Hyde Park. For the first time, there was freedom of speech. One could finally talk, express opinions. And one could write the truth. Dozens of newspapers and periodicals appeared; the print runs of even exclusively literary monthlies were in the millions. People bought these things, read them, collected them.