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New frontiers within old borders How Russia could overcome its increasing ‘Moscow-ism’ Russia is a huge country, the biggest swathe of land under one rule there is on this planet. It is one of the striking facts of the Russian Federation that, despite the enormous distances, there is only relatively little separatist forces. In history that was achieved by brute suppression or by establishing a collective aim. Visiting Novosibirsk today, for example, still allows one to perceive the enormous effort and the pioneering spirit of its creators and the scale of ambition of these days. Creating a real place, a city with metropolitan ingredients was seen as a cultural achievement. In that sense the Russian people and the Americans are not so different. What was the movement in westerly direction there is the ‘go east’ mentality here. Building a nation around the continuous exploration of new frontiers in both cases created a remarkable sense of cohesion amongst its citizens. It created a feeling of ‘making’ the country together. For a long time this joint effort was reflected in a federalism that distributed the blessings of soviet rule across this enormous territory. Jobs, cultural offers and economic activity were distributed across the entire country. They could not only be found in Moscow but also in many other cities – sometimes even at a higher quality. This made unity and equalness perceivable for a very large group of the population. Today this is not the case anymore. To an ever increasing extent, jobs, cultural life and economic activity are concentrated in Moscow and to a lesser degree in Saint Petersburg, creating a hinterland of unprecedented scale. One of the few nation-wide economic activities that are left is the exploitation of natural resources and supporting industries. But culture, service and knowledge industry – the jobs that most likely drive the economy in the future? When newly created’ they usually are located in the countries two biggest cities and nowhere else. This gives young people no chance but moving away from places they actually probably don’t find all that bad to Moscow and Saint Petersburg. This process is as much a result of the logic of clustering of skills and economic activity as it is a result of increasingly centralized administration and funding streams that always origin in Moscow. Sociologist Richard Florida and his team at the Univeristy of Toronto (CA) clearly have demonstrated, that place does matter if one wants to succeed in a particular economic activity. Since the Russian state consciously and unconsciously centers all its activities and the activities it funds in Mos-
cow, the city has become ‘the’ place for almost all those who want to succeed. This is where the story could end – the Russian Federation as one city and a little annex at the Baltic Sea and with an enormous hinterland that secures the wealth in providing natural resource but has lost any relevance in cultural terms. The question is: is such a structure inevitable and desirable? What could be an alternative scenario? Luckily the trend of the last 20 years has not managed yet to eliminate all activity in the hinterland. It is not dead. In recent years we have seen a number of second tier cities to rediscover themselves and develop their own strategies in how to create new impulse and define their own route to the future. Their rise is based on a careful observation of what the big two offer and what they cannot provide and therefore leave room for a cluster to develop elsewhere. In Perm local initiative has managed to put the city on the cultural map of Russia, simply by creating a liberal atmosphere that made artists, gallerists and theatre directors develop activities there. This has been supported by public investment into cultural institutions and the creation of a new strategic masterplan that moves away from a quantitative approach to planning and introduces quality as a key parameter for successful urban development. In Irkutsk, private initiative is active in saving the cities relatively untouched historic core of wooden houses making it a destination of its own kind in the future. Even the few investments of the central government that do not focus on exploitation of natural ressources, such as the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sootchi will create new activity in remote regions. But these activities are still scarce given the scale of the country. Instead every city, its administration but also its ambitious citizens should think of what resources are available in their city and investigate where opportunities and ultimately markets lie that are currently not or only ill served. Using that as a starting point to develop a new cluster offers a high chance of success when done properly. But there is an additional effect: the simple fact that activity unfolds creates over-proportional attention, especially when there is so little happening elsewhere. This can be used to secure private investment which – in the absence of substantial public funding – might be the only way to make anything happen.