The beginning of demolition work at the Rossia Hotel on Red Square in March (TASS)This was once the meeting place of the Communist Party and government elite from the far-flung republics of the Soviet Union. I was once treated to lunch in the hotel's more-than-passable restaurant by the Georgian finance minister -- a man who certainly understood the value of money.

And outside on the pavement -- whatever the weather and whatever the time of year -- prostitutes plied their trade in full view of the deputies gathering just across the street.

Now the Moskva has gone and with it the girls and their minders. In their place -- a giant technicolor poster that stretches fully 60 meters and advertises the miraculous wonders of a Japanese camera.

Just around the corner at the foot of Tverskaya Ulitsa, the glass front of another monument to Soviet bad taste has also disappeared. The Intourist Hotel had few redeeming graces beyond a spectacular rooftop view of the Kremlin and Red Square.

And now, across the other side of Red Square, the hideous and monumental Rossia Hotel is wrapped up in its demolition clothes and about to meet the same fate.

Built in 1964-67, in the early years of Leonid Brezhnev's interminable reign, the Rossia was described recently by Mayor Luzhkov as "a dull, faceless box of steel and concrete."

In truth that does not do full justice to the horrors of a building that had more than 2,700 cockroach-infested rooms, occupied a space the size of 20 soccer fields, and was until recently the biggest hotel in the world. To my embarrassment, I once got lost in its labyrinthine corridors when I stayed there as a guide for Scottish tourists in the 1980s.