Moscow, 2000

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 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

theories onto an economic, political, social and urban landscape strewn with the wreckage of failed visionary and illusory schemes long past. The impulse to see one’s own prophecies spring to life on Russian soil has long been all too apparent, from the towers of early Bolshevism to the kitsch of Stalinist socialism, from the space-age fantasies of the 1960s and 1970s to the contrivances of post-Soviet generation. No grand scheme — even those which appear to have been imported from Planet Mars — is too small for Planet Moscow.

This has been so, be it Lenin’s proletarian revolution, Stalin’s reengineered society, Khrushchev and Brezhnev’s socialist replacement for America, or the market delusions of turn-of-the-twenty-firstcentury macro-economists. Unreal planning and building projects by architects over the past century have been — and remain — but pallid reflections of the megalomaniacal notions for social engineering held by politicians and philosophers.

Nothing seems human in scale when it comes to Moscow. The Stalinist industrialization of the 1930s led to the most massive wave of migration to one city in the shortest time that had ever been experienced. Even the mundane has been huge. No one should be surprised that Moscow built the world’s largest hotel in the 1960s, only to be torn down less than a half-century later. Moscow’s vast scale befuddles the imagination of mortals. The city is planetary in reach. Lost behind all these fulfilled and failed schemes and dreams stand people. Imperfect, every day human beings have built lives of passion and dignity among the wreckage of some of humankind’s most delusional episodes. Muscovites are a special breed. Confronted by bonecrushing brutality, they have repeatedly reinvented their city and themselves, looking for points of advantage at every turn. Their story is one of heroism and stupidity, success and catastrophe.

The real life tale of Moscow is to be found in the miniature as well as the gargantuan. The harsh realities of early twentieth-century Moscow were seen best by looking at the infamous patches within hastily subdivided rooms — the ugol (literally, a “corner”) of communal apartments — in which tens of thousands Muscovites bedded down between factory shift. The skidding stop of a black car in the middle of the night, the stomp up the darkened staircase, and the pounding on the door of an apartment scared into silence brought soul-wrenching life to the Moscow of Stalin’s time. Stories of children eating their first orange on some random May Day during the 1950s told a broader tale of post-war recovery; while furtive encounters with the music of the Beetles on well-worn tape cassettes revealed more about the future of the Soviet Union than mammoth hotels. Lines of old women standing on street corners selling their life’s possessions in the 1990s warned that the workings of the market would not be magical; just as glass disco floors

with sharks swimming underneath set expansive limits for hedonism.

Moscow’s small moments remind us, even in cities of cosmic ambition, that living and breathing human beings produce a textured nuance that distinguishes one community from all others. Beyond stupidity and injustice and pain, the mundane renders life livable. This is why generations of Muscovites have produced great art, literature and music.

Behind visionary paradigms, programmatic scenarios, radical proposals, physical transformations and utopian experiments lies a profound truth. Moscow is too large both physically and spectrally to share any planet. The city’s unending search for a truth that can transcend mere fact provides its own gravitational pull; one constantly challenging notions of the normal. Planet Moscow’s arrogant assertion of its existence eventually pulls everyone and everything into the resulting maelstrom. It is indeed a pause in the universe in which the meta-city constantly becomes reality.

Main Pavilion, Exhibition of the Achievements of the National Economy, Moscow. Photo: Ketrin.sv. 2012. Wikimedia Commons. CC license 3.0.