MOSCOW - Tourists at the souvenir stands on the edge of Red Square smirk and chuckle as they buy T-shirts emblazoned with Lenin's glowering visage and Soviet propaganda posters. But 20 years ago, the Soviet Union was no joke.

For a history-minded visitor, Moscow may be one of the world's most challenging destinations. In a city now full of consumer goods, one of the hardest things to find is a sense of how bleak life was under the hammer and sickle.

Unlike Rome or Athens, where the tourist is called upon to imagine the glory that once was, in Moscow you have to visualize what wasn't there. Walk into a food store and imagine the shelves empty; picture the store without a clever name or attractive logo - its sign would have read only "meat" or "milk" or "products."

These days it's unlikely that one's tour guide briefs the secret police at the end of the day. Your hotel may not be cute or comfy, but it's probably not overtly scary like the Rossiya, a signature Soviet monstrosity that's now a vacant lot. In a way, this may be kind of a disappointment: Going to the Evil Empire had more cachet than a trip to the Overpriced Capital.

Nonetheless, there are a few places where visitors can feel like the clock's been rolled back to long before the Berlin Wall fell, and get a small taste of totalitarianism, of how the Soviet system quietlybullied even its most submissive citizens.

The most potent site is Lenin's Mausoleum, the epicenter of the overwhelming blind devotion to a man whose every utterance was treated as revealed word. Despite repeated suggestions that it should be closed and Lenin's mummified corpse buried, the mausoleum is still open 15 hours each week.

And it's still a profoundly unsettling experience. Guards take umbrage at any even mildly disrespectful behavior, admonishing a recent visitor to take his hands out of his pockets. The corpse, under a glass cover, shows a sickly white face set off with garishly rouged cheeks. Visitors get only about 30 seconds to take a look as they walk by, the point apparently being to make a show of devotion rather than to reflect on what Lenin did.

As institutional and deferential as this may seem, it's less so than it used to be. The line of pilgrims used to snake across Red Square; now, visitors marshal in an adjacent alley, as if setting out for a slightly shameful activity.

Soviet authorities took every opportunity to lecture their people on the regime's purported nobility and accomplishments and to exhort them to live up to the image - not only in words but in images. Nowhere is that more visible today than in the older stations of Moscow's subway, masterpieces of Stalinist all-encompassing propaganda.

None of these sites can replicate the Soviet experience for more than a few moments, but for many visitors that's more than enough.

"I don't think I would have liked it here then," said Assumpta Abondo, a visitor from Dubai doing some shopping at a souvenir stand.

For her companion Yasmin Mazouzi, the problem isn't that the Soviet experience is hard to find, but that it still seems so prevalent.

"The people are rude, policemen stare at you," she said. "You're a bit scared, really."