MOSCOW is all things to all
people. For Westerners, the city may
look European, but its unruly spirit
seems closer to Central Asia. To
Muscovites, however, Moscow is both
a "Mother City" and a
"big village", a
tumultuous community which possesses
an underlying collective instinct
that shows itself in times of
trouble. Home of one in fifteen
Russians, it is huge, surreal and
apocalyptic. Its beauty and ugliness
are inseparable, its sentimentality
the obverse of a brutality rooted in
centuries of despotism, while
private and cultural life in the
city are as passionate as business
and politics are cynical.
Moscow has been imbued with a
sense of its own destiny since the
fourteenth century, when the
principality of Muscovy took the
lead in the struggle against the
Mongol-Tatars who had reduced the
Kievan state to ruins. Under Ivan
the Great and Ivan the Terrible -
the "Gatherers of the Russian
Lands" - its realm came to
encompass everything from the White
Sea to the Caspian, while after the
fall of Constantinople to the Turks,
Moscow assumed Byzantium's
suzerainty over the Orthodox world.
Despite the changes wrought by Peter
the Great - not least the transfer
of the capital to St Petersburg -
Moscow kept its mystique and bided
its time until the Bolsheviks made
it the fountainhead of a new creed.
Since the fall of Communism,
Muscovites have given themselves
over largely to the "Wild
Capitalism" that intoxicates
the city, as Mayor Luzhkov puts into
effect major building programmes
which are changing the face of the
city more radically than at any time
since the Stalin era. The
construction boom seemed to reach
its height with the celebrations of
the city's 850th anniversary in
1997, but intensive building
activity continues throughout the
centre.
The City
Discounting a couple of satellite
towns beyond the outer ring road,
Moscow covers an area of about 900
square kilometres. Yet, despite its
size and the inhuman scale of many
of its buildings and avenues, the
general layout is easily grasped - a
series of...
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