Moscow City Administration’s Much-Ballyhooed Reductions in Force a PR Exercise to Calm Other Russians and the Kremlin, Rybakova Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Mar. 10 – On March 4, the Moscow city government announced that it was slashing its staff by 15 percent, a move that suggested the city notorious for its lavish approach was responding to the difficulties other locations in Russia are currently facing  (themoscowtimes.com/2026/03/04/moscow-city-government-plans-major-layoffs-amid-budget-strain-a92120).

            But in fact, journalist Tatyana Rybakova says, all the powers that be in the Moscow city administration were doing was to engage in a PR action designed to reduce criticism of the city from both the population beyond the beltway and in the Kremlin, criticism that “has become a political problem” for Mayor Sergey Sobyanin (themoscowtimes.com/2026/03/10/moscows-lavish-excess-has-become-a-political-problem-a92186).

            The reductions in force the mayor has announced are much smaller than he wants to suggest, the journalist says. Sobyanin has relied from the start on outsourcing of tasks, maintaining a small central staff surrounded by a large number of contractors who do the actual work – a very different situation than in other Russian population centers.

            Consequently, the cuts he has announced won’t reduce the real size of the city’s employment, given that tasks now performed by regular staff can be shifted even more completely to contractors. That may deceive some Russians outside of Moscow but it is unlikely to deceive the Kremlin which certainly knows the score.

            Moscow City should be cutting back, Rybakova says, given that it has “the largest budget deficit in absolute terms this year, 229 billion rubles (2.9 billion US dollars), far more than the Yamalo-Nenets AD which ranks second with a deficit of 84 billion rubles (one billion US dollars) and vastly more than anyone else.

            What makes this article noteworthy is that it is a rare example of a publication about something many know about but also know not to talk about: the growing envy and anger many Russians beyond the ring road feel about the capital city. That someone is now publishing a story like this indicates that the problems this is causing are rapidly increasing.