Pandemic has Only Exacerbated Sense that 'Moscow isn't Russia,' Sociologists Say

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 2 – The relationship between Moscow and Russia beyond the ring road has always been a lively and sensitive one because of the hyper-centralization of the country’s political and economic system, but it has become even more fraught as a result of the pandemic, sociologists Aleksey Levinson and Lyubov Borusyak say.

            In both Moscow itself and outside it, there is near universal agreement that “Moscow is not Russia,” an expression that reflects and hides many significant economic experiences and political and cultural attitudes, they argue (forbes.ru/obshchestvo/401957-moskva-ne-rossiya-za-chto-nashi-sootechestvenniki-ne-lyubyat-sobstvennuyu-stolicu).

            At one level, this attitude reflects only the fact that people in Moscow live better than people elsewhere in the Russian Federation, the occasion not only for envy but also anger because many outside the capital believe that Muscovites live better in the first instance because they take from everyone else who thus lives less well.

            But this has broader meanings as well. “Everything that Moscow and its rulers are proud of – the new buildings, the widening of streets, the construction of roads and overpasses – in anti-Moscow discourse becomes the occasion for accusing Moscow of being a parasite and wasteful.”

            This relationship is complicated by the fact that in many cases, even those angry at Moscow accept it as a synonym for the country as a whole as when Moscow and Washington stand for Russia and the US and view the historical features of the capital such as the Kremlin and Red Square as focal points of Russian national identity.

            Moreover, Levinson and Borusyak say, those who hate Moscow also want to go there because of their belief that only in Moscow can they make careers and grow rich.  This has led to a constant flow of people from the Russian hinterland into the capital, something that is often obscured by the large influx of gastarbeiters from Central Asia and the Capital.

            According to the sociologists, “Muscovites do not want to think about the fact that the demographic resource of the Russian hinterland is close to exhaustion while that of Central Asia is still great or that Asian workers are not eternally going to come to Russia and Moscow but go elsewhere if money is better.

            Something else that many forget is that many outside of Moscow speak of their anger at Moscow as a way of not naming their anger against the powers that be, against the way that Moscow both as the seat of the federal government and as a city sets the agenda for others to follow or to oppose.

            “The situation with the epidemic has again sharped the theme ‘Moscow isn’t Russia,’” the two sociologists say, in large measure because Moscow entered and is now exiting the pandemic first and can be blamed for bringing the coronavirus to the rest of the country and then leaving it to its own devices as Moscow recovers.

            But despite all this, the two say, “even the most intense Moscow haters if asked to describe about the worst future of Russia inevitably speak about the disintegration of the country into minor principalities, that is, about the loss of the present system of connections which are guaranteed by the existence of Moscow as the super-center.” 

            “Without Moscow,” even those who hate it in many ways, “Russia cannot be.”

            But that view may change for some because increasingly, for Russians from “the provinces,” Moscow may still be Russia but it is at the same time “a stepping stone from Russia to the broader world” they intend to move on to.