SHORT ESSAYS ON COMMUNITY, DIVERSITY, INCLUSION, AND THE PERFORMING ARTS
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Moscow, 2000
Moscow at the dawn of the twentieth century was Russia’s “Second Metropolis.” With nearly 2 million people, Moscow was one of the top dozen most populous cities in the world, among the largest half dozen cities in Europe, and the second most populous city in the Russian Empire just behind the capital St. Petersburg. Prodded by a vibrant merchant expansiveness, textile-oriented “calico” Moscow rapidly diversified its economy. The city had become the Empire’s primary magnet for peasants moving to cities. Moscow was proving itself to be the Empire’ s most dynamic urban center, spawning a vast network of smaller industrial centers on rail lines extending every which way. The gravitational pull from this Planet Moscow reached a couple of hundred miles in every direction; an urban economic network that was home to 10 million, many of whom were integrated directly into Moscow’s economic orbit. Moscow’s twentieth-century fate probably would have been beyond the imagination of anyone living on Planet Moscow at the time. Moscow grew and grew to become the headquarters and command center for an ideological empire that extended to nearly every continent. The city stood at the center of massive military and prison kingdoms of a previously unknown scale; it became the showcase for all that was
thought to be good about Soviet-style socialism. Both socialism and its capital status transformed the city, creating a culture of absolute power which left little room for accommodation. Clocks from Prague to Pyongyang marked Moscow time. Planet Moscow’s reach extended thousands of miles to embrace well over a billion people. No soothsayer in 1900 could have predicted such a future. The collapse of the Soviet Union has done little to reduce Moscow’s predominance of the Central Eurasian plain. Contemporary Moscow busily tries to bully its way into the very top of the global urban hierarchy. The Moscow of today is an urban imperialist in a manner that Muscovites of a century ago would never have dreamed possible. The city has become more than a metropolis or even a megalopolis; it is the center of its own urban solar system. Beyond mere narration of expansive urban growth, tracing Moscow over the past century-and-a-quarter offers a story of urbanism as a metaphysical phenomenon. The city always has been about more than making money and housing workers. Moscow has been an expression of the grandiose dreams of theorists with revolutionary intent. Moscow stands even today as a grand social experiment. Any number of people come to Moscow to impose their personal
