Muscovites Actively Disliked by Residents of 12 Major Russian Cities, New Poll Shows

Paul Goble

            Staunton, May 31 – A new survey conducted by the Zoom Market agency ranked residents of 12 Russian cities according to their dislike of Moscow and Muscovites, the latest indication that the historical divide between the capital and what Muscovites call “the provinces” is widening and that residents of the latter are angry not only at the center but at its residents.

            Perhaps not surprisingly given recent events, Yekaterinburg led the list of cities in terms of hostility toward the capital and its residents. It was followed by St. Petersburg, Kazan (the only non-ethnic Russian city on the list), Voronezh, Chelyabinsk, Volgograd, Samara, Rostov, Perm, Omsk, Saratov and Novosibirsk (the-village.ru/village/city/news-city/352027-no-love).

            Overall, 56 percent of the residents of these cities were angry that “all the country’s money is in Moscow, 24 percent said they viewed Muscovites as arrogant, 12 percent said residents of the capital were lazy, and “eight percent expressed certainty that Muscovites do not like people from other regions.”

            At the same time, however, the poll of 1440 Russians found that two out of three of them (67 percent) wanted to move to Moscow if they had the chance because of the opportunities life there presented. As long as the center could hold out that as a real possibility, it could easily deal with the hostility; but now, there are fewer jobs in Moscow as well, and that has changed things.