A Clue to Moscow’s Reaction to Kursk: Muscovites Feel Less Responsible for What Happens Elsewhere in Russia than Do Other Russians, Levada Center Poll Finds

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug.22 – A new Levada Center poll provides an important clue as to why residents of the Russian capital are not expressing more outrage about the Ukrainian incursion in Kursk Oblast than they are: it finds that Muscovites feel in general less responsible for what happens elsewhere in Russia than do other Russians.

            Those striking survey findings by the independent polling agency, the latest of a variety of sociological investigations which confirm just how different Muscovites are from Russians elsewhere in the Russian Federation, can be found at levada.ru/2024/08/22/chuvstvo-otvetstvennosti-i-vozmozhnosti-vliyat-na-situatsiyu-iyul-2024/.

            Commenting on these findings, Anatoly Nesmiyan who blogs under the screen name El Murid says that he doesn’t see anything surprising in them. Like the residents of most other megalopolises, he argues, Muscovites feel closer to other Muscovites and residents of major cities around the world than to Russians as such (t.me/anatoly_nesmiyan/20173 reposted at kasparov.ru/material.php?id=66C842050C677).

            For residents of the Russian capital, Dubai, Tangier, London or Paris are closer than are many parts of the Russian Federation, a pattern El Murid says is typical of many big cities elsewhere. Their residents divide people not by territory but by the cultural parameters that link them together, connections they don’t have with other parts of their own country. 

            Consequently, fires, floods or even the occupation of portions of the Russian Federation are events less close to Muscovites and about which they feel less responsible than do residents of smaller cities and rural areas who still divide the world territorially rather than culturally. If this is in fact so, it goes a long way to explain Muscovites reaction to Kursk.