MOSCOW, Aug. 29— By Monday this week, the owner of Shury-Mury, a popular downtown Moscow restaurant that offers a country atmosphere and Russian cuisine, had made his decision: his prices would have to go up.
By the time he changed the menus yesterday, the cost of his baked sturgeon and blinis filled with red caviar had shot up by 30 percent.
''Already for a week, we had been working at a loss,'' said Vadim Nikitin, 29, who in these times of trouble, has taken to watching two hours of television news every night, anxiously scanning the airwaves for information that will help him figure out which way his country is going, and what its currency is worth.
Two weeks ago, before the de facto devaluation of the ruble and the subsequent reshuffling of the Russian Government, one dollar equaled 6.2 rubles. Today, it is worth pretty much what anybody says -- from 10 rubles at some currency exchange booths, to 20 rubles on an incipient black market, to 11, the rate set after Friday after brief trading on an electronic inter-bank exchange.
Mr. Nikitin's problem -- shared by virtually all restaurateurs who have built business on Moscow's bubble economy -- is that much of the food he feeds his customers comes not from the Russian countryside but from abroad. And while he was hesitating about how much to charge for his dishes, his suppliers were not.
''Sturgeon was 50 to 60 rubles a kilo last week, today it is 100 rubles, and that is the wholesale price,'' Mr. Nikitin said.
A bigger problem was his deliveries of imported alcohol, which ground to a halt last week as wholesalers sat on their cases, waiting to figure out their value in Russia's fast-evaporating currency. Even though he pays his employees in rubles, their salaries -- like his rent -- are pegged to the dollar, a hangover from the turbulent days of Russia's triple-digit inflation in the early 1990's, a habit that lingered on long after the ruble reached stable levels in the last few years.
Larissa, as an employee at the Moscow office of a multinational company, also earns dollars. That's good news, given the way the ruble has been going this week. The bad news is that she cannot draw dollars from the debit card her employer uses to pay employees' salaries.
In fact, Larissa, who asked not to be identified by her last name, has not even gone near her bank all week, not after a colleague showed up late at work one day, with a tale of woe heard all across this dollar-infected city.
The young woman had gone to her bank at 6 A.M., where she was the 41st person to sign up on the day's waiting list. At noon, the bank manager appeared to tell the crowd that there would be no dollars, only rubles at the fictitious rate of 7.8, an official level that has remained on the books since Moscow's interbank currency exchange shut down for business last Wednesday morning.
''Some people are taking rubles in small quantities, some managed to take out their dollars before this whole thing began,'' Larissa said. ''I have decided to wait and see what happens.'' She said the company has said that on Monday, it will pay salaries in rubles -- at 9.5 to the dollar.
These are dizzy days for Moscow's yuppies, who have grown used to big salaries, often paid in dollars, from the banks, foreign firms, real estate companies and other businesses that rode the wave of the capital's recent boom years. Many of these people are so young that they have known nothing but well-paid, white-collar jobs. Aleksei Smirnov, a 19-year-old real estate broker, stood in line at a currency office Friday with a fistful of dollars, which he wanted to trade at a rate of 12 rubles to the dollar.
His first reaction when the ruble collapsed was to go the country.
''We don't have any money in the bank, so we avoided that problem,'' he said, as he waited in line with his girlfriend Natasha Kolucheva, 18. ''We have our money under the mattresses. Natasha has several thousand, I have a bit less.''
But as luck would have it, when their turn came to go into the bank, the teller had run out of rubles, and the couple went looking for other ways to get enough rubles to get through the coming week.
By mid-week, Moscow was in a mad spending spree. ''People were buying everything,'' said Aras Agalarov, president of Crocus International, which owns a chain of 70 stores across the city, from a giant household store on the outskirts to chic boutiques scattered around the center.
Many of his competitors in the luxury goods business simply shut their doors this week, hanging out signs that said things like ''closed for technical reasons,'' or ''closed for inventory,'' which as excuses go, were not too far off the mark: they were in fact waiting to see which way the ruble will jump, whether to raise their prices by 10, 20 or 30 percent.
Mr. Agalarov, who is also vice president of the Moscow International Business Association, chose another route. He stayed open, and sold at his old prices -- which brought a wave of customers, buying at twice their normal rate.
''It was like having a big sale,'' Mr. Agalarov said. ''It was the end of the season anyway, so we already had marked goods down by 30 percent. The Government just went and added another 50 or 70 percent to the discount, that's all.''
