By the early 1990s, the Arbat — already Moscow’s premier tourist strip — had filled with small shops trading in a chaotic mix of real antiques, Soviet-era memorabilia, and imported luxury goods of wildly uneven authenticity. Counterfeit and gray-market Swiss watches were a booming trade: cheap Chinese and Southeast Asian fakes badged as Cartier, Patek Philippe, or Rolex circulated freely alongside genuinely smuggled or gray-imported originals, with sellers routinely swearing an item was «the real thing» («родной,» literally «native» or «one’s own») regardless of the truth. Breitling, historically a step below Rolex and Patek Philippe in prestige, was in this period one of the more commonly counterfeited «entry-level» luxury brands — which is exactly why Zhorik feels the need to ask, point-blank, whether the watch on offer is hot or genuine, and why the answer is worth taking with a grain of salt.