Last time I was in Moscow, six years ago, the rouble was in free fall. Schools were crumbling. You could not live on what a teacher was paid, and a university lecturer told me: “Sometimes I want the days of Brezhnev back again. We couldn’t travel abroad much, but our pay bought something, and people valued education.”

I met a paediatrician who could not keep her family on her salary. So on Saturdays she cleaned the flat of an American businessman who paid her in dollars, and earned more than in the whole of the rest of the week.

They say it has all changed now. I have just returned from Moscow, where Joseph Ordzhonike, the deputy mayor, told me that schools have improved beyond recognition. Nearly half of the city’s budget is spent on social policy, including health and education. “Each year we build 15 new schools in Moscow, and Moscow teachers are much better paid now,” he said.

But there is a downside. And it is one that British policy-makers ought to study closely, because our present direction, with its heavy reliance on private sector involvement and undermining of teachers’ pay scales, leads straight to the place Moscow is in now.

Most of Moscow’s 15 new state schools a year rely for their capital on the private sector. I heard of one, whose sponsoring consortium is headed by former Russian Prime Minister Evgeni Primakov, which has a new, spacious building, a good teacher: pupil ratio and well-paid staff. Places are free, but parents must pay for three school exchange tours a year for their children to cities such as London and Paris, at $1,500 each. The average Muscovite has as much chance of finding $4,500 a year - somewhat more than pound;3,000 - as of flying to the moon.

So most of Moscow’s children attend the old, crumbling Soviet schools, where underpaid Soviet-trained teachers cannot equip them to thrive in Russia’s new market economy. “They are run in the Soviet style, with an emphasis on discipline and rote learning,” a Moscow teacher told me. “Their directors do not know how to go out and get sponsorship. So they decay.”

Compare this with the vision the Government has for English schools. In two years’ time, there will still be comprehensive schools, struggling on diminishing state funding, alongside new specialist schools and city academies, in which the private sector is being offered generous inducements to invest.

Specialist schools will select 10 per cent of pupils on “aptitude”. City academies are modelled on the Conservatives’ city technology colleges, and are likely to try to replicate the same selection scams, which included interviewing prospective pupils and their parents. In other words, privately sponsored schools will find backdoor ways of selecting their pupils. We know from our experience of grammar schools that when you select, you reject the poor.

Having opened up two classes of school - privately sponsored schools for the elite and ordinary comprehensives for the hoi polloi - the next stage is to create two classes of teacher.

The Russians are not hampered by nationally agreed pay rates. In Moscow’s privately sponsored schools, teachers are paid well. But in ordinary state schools they are very badly paid. This is the position our ministers have been trying to reach. Performance-related pay and flexibility are staging posts on the troubled road to a nirvana where the obstacle of nationally agreed pay rates disappears. Schools can overpay or underpay teachers according to the dictates of the market.

Britain has seen nothing quite like the trauma of the collapse of communism in 1991. But we have made our own version of that transition - the eclipse, for the time being, of the idealism that underlies communism and the triumph of the idea that business is always right. Russia is discovering that slavery to capitalist ideologies is not always preferable to slavery to communist ones. We, who managed to avoid the second slavery, ought to be trying to avoid the first.

Francis Beckett is a freelance journalist and commentator.