Art Imitating Life

On first glance, Moscow is a well preserved city, and then you see a facade such as this where the facade is a facade, it's just a painted screen over te building. Behind are crumbling walls, rotten window frames, and very often a derelict building. This is on Tsverkaya, one of the main thoroughfares into Moscow, but they are all over the city. The building next to where I live is the same. It's a pretense, but at least it's a more photgenic one.