Shopping malls have been popular in the United States and elsewhere around the world for many decades. Now, they are gaining in popularity in Russia.

As Andrew E. Kramer reports for the New York Times: “Shoppers who find that 250 stores aren’t enough can go ice skating, watch movies, or even ride a carousel, all under a single roof. While it sounds like the Mall of America, this mall is outside Moscow, not Minneapolis. ‘I feel like I’m in Disneyland,’ Vartyan E. Sarkisov, a shopper toting an Adidas bag, said recently while making the rounds of the Mega Belaya Dacha mall. Instead of bread lines, Russia is known these days for malls. They are booming businesses, drawing investments from sovereign wealth funds and Wall Street banks, most recently Morgan Stanley, which paid $1.1 billion a year ago for a single mall in St. Petersburg. One mall, called Vegas, rose out of a cucumber field on the edge of Moscow and became, its owners say, larger than the Mall of America if the American mall’s seven-acre amusement park is not counted in the calculation of floor space. A few offramps away on the Moscow beltway, another mall scored a different kind of victory: the Mega Tyoply Stan shopping center drew 57 million visitors at its peak in 2007, well ahead of the 40 million annual visits reported by the Mall of America. As American malls dodder into old age, gap-toothed with vacancies, Russia’s shopping centers are just now blossoming into their boom years, nourished by oil exports that are lifting wages.”

Click the photo to read more of Kramer’s article.

Photo by James Hill for the New York Times