MOSCOW.

Formerly the capital of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR, 1922–1991), and in the early twenty-first century the capital of the Russian Federation, Moscow is Russia's principal megalopolis—an industrial, banking, scientific, and cultural center.

Between 1914 and 2004 the sociopolitical paradigm of Moscow's development changed twice: in 1917, when the Communist regime was established, and in 1991, when it collapsed. Accordingly, the forms of property ownership changed (from market to planned regulation, and then back to market), as well as the patterns of social life, local government, cultural development, and everyday life. From 1914 to 2004 the city's area grew fivefold, thanks to the incorporation of bordering settlements. In 1960 the oval Moscow Ring Road (MRR), 109 kilometers in length and encompassing an area of 886.5 square kilometers, became the city's border. In 1985, after a number of large tracts of land under housing construction beyond the MRR had been incorporated into the city, its area grew to 998 square kilometers.

POPULATION

With more than 1.6 million inhabitants, Moscow in 1914 ranked ninth among the world's largest cities (after London, New York City, Paris, Berlin, Chicago, Vienna, Philadelphia, and St. Petersburg). By 2002 it had grown to more than 10.3 million inhabitants. Throughout the twentieth century, population growth resulted mostly from in-migration. Twice the population fell dramatically as hundreds of thousands fled to safer regions: during the civil war (in 1918–1919 by 434 thousand) and World War II (in 1941 by 2.2 million). During the Soviet era, migration into Moscow was artificially restricted. On 27 December 1932, after the introduction of domestic passports and the propiska (residence registration) system in the USSR, settlement in Moscow was prohibited except in the event of marriage, enrollment in Moscow higher-educational institutions, or employment in certain specific jobs.

Stalinist policies imposed strict supervision over population movement. In 1934, for example, sixty thousand people left Moscow, fearing checks by the police and subsequent repression. The propiska was abolished only in 1993, replaced by a system of registration and permission to live and work in all regions. This change in legal norms resulted in a dramatic rise in migration into Moscow from the early 1990s onward (especially after the USSR's disintegration in 1991). By the mid-2000s, Moscow housed more than 7 percent of Russia's total population.

In the mid-2000s, Russian was the native language of 95 percent of Moscow residents. Despite a gradual rise in multiethnicity throughout the century, the majority of the population remained Russian: 87.8 percent in 1926, 89.2 percent in 1970, and 84.8 percent in 2002. Other major population groups included Ukrainians (2.2, 2.8, and 2.45 percent in 1939, 1989, and 2002, respectively) and Tatars (1.4, 2.1, and 1.6 percent in 1939, 1989, and 2002, respectively). After 1991 a decline in the number of Jews (0.76 percent in 2002) was caused by mass emigration to Israel, Germany, and the United States, and by the ethnic assimilation of new generations born in mixed marriages. By contrast, the proportion of Caucasians (Armenians, Azerbaijanis, Georgians, Chechens, and so forth) rose from 0.35 percent in 1939 to 0.95 percent in 1959 and to 4.5 percent in 2002.

The worst outbreaks of xenophobia occurred in 1915 (anti-German pogroms during World War 1, when Germany was Russia's major foe); in 1948–1953, during the campaigns against so-called cosmopolitanism, which targeted the Jewish intelligentsia; and in the late 1990s and early 2000s during anti-Caucasian pogroms at the markets, when traders from the Caucasus were targeted.

WORLD WAR I AND REVOLUTION

The twentieth-century history of Moscow, like that of other world megalopolises, was complicated and often dramatic. In 1914 Moscow was a picturesque city full of new, multistoried apartment blocks and old, prestigious detached houses. Twenty kilometers of central streets were illuminated by electricity. Thanks to efficient municipal authorities, the city had modern water-supply and sewage systems and a wide network of streetcar lines. Free medical service for the population was provided by eighteen hospitals with beds for seven thousand patients, eleven maternity homes, and thirty-two outpatient clinics. In 1915 all children had access to free primary education at 333 primary schools for seventy-five thousand pupils. The city had 15 higher-educational institutions and 160 libraries (including 76 public ones). In 1910 a telephone station for sixty thousand subscribers was built. Radio broadcasting started in 1914. Industry was represented by more than twelve hundred enterprises, of which twenty-five had a labor force ranging from one to six thousand workers. The dominant branches were the textile industry (43 percent of the general volume of production and 40 percent of the labor force) and the food industry.

This dynamic period of growth was interrupted by World War I, during which Moscow was inundated with refugees from the war-ravaged western provinces of the Russian Empire. More than 1,075 hospitals with 100,000 beds were established to treat wounded soldiers. The situation steadily deteriorated: wages could not keep up with inflation, and the supply of food and goods markedly declined. By 1916 there was a shortage of bread, the trams stopped, and the gas supply was repeatedly interrupted. The decline in the standard of living resulted in a rising wave of strikes, from 27 in 1914 to 235 in 1916. In January–March 1917 a fuel and food crisis erupted, followed by the onset of starvation.

Moscow was shaken by mass political demonstrations during the revolutionary year 1917. After the tsar abdicated in March, power passed into the hands of the provisional government. In June 650,000 persons (56 percent of all registered voters) took part in elections to the City Duma (municipal council) in which the Socialist Revolutionary Party (SR) won the overwhelming majority of votes. At the same time the Moscow Soviet (Mossovet), a rival political body of workers, steadily increased its influence on the population. After September the SR's chief rival, the Bolsheviks, dominated the Mossovet. By October the Soviet and the Duma were governing in parallel. On 25–26 October 1917 Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd. During the next eight days Moscow was the scene of political confrontation between Reds (supporting the Bolshevik Soviet) and Whites (supporting the bourgeois Duma), which degenerated into armed clashes. Barricades were erected, fires started, and gradually, Red militias from the suburbs infiltrated the city center and started to gain the upper hand over the Whites. For four days Bolshevik detachments bombarded the Kremlin with artillery shells, until the Whites defending it capitulated. In November 1917 the City Duma was abolished, and power passed into the hands of the Mossovet.

During the civil war of 1918–1920 that followed the revolution, businesses were nationalized, and the Mossovet began to manage them in a centralized manner. Trying to solve the problem of insufficient housing, the Mossovet in April 1918 decided to pack more people into apartments (no more than one room per adult), and to settle the poor in the apartments of well-off residents. By the end of the civil war, the economy was in shambles. In 1920 industrial output in various enterprises was between 2 and 15 percent of the prewar level. Moscow streetcars stood idle, and water and electricity supplies were erratic. Bread rations were minimal even for children and hospital patients (133 grams per capita per diem, 400 grams per worker at major enterprises). In 1919–1921 a crime wave followed the release of criminals from prisons.

NEW ECONOMIC POLICY

After the introduction of the New Economic Policy (1921), which restored free trade and denationalized some small businesses, the economy revived. By the end of 1926 industrial production had risen to 93 percent of its 1913 level. But as early as 1926 the authorities already began to restrict the free market. In 1927 they introduced the centralized distribution of goods and the rationing of food and clothing. Two problems were especially acute: constantly rising unemployment due to the influx of newcomers from other regions (numbering about 270,000 new arrivals in 1927, for example), and thousands of homeless children who came to the city during the famine years right after the end of the civil war.

An authoritarian, one-party regime under the control of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks (later renamed the Communist Party of the Soviet Union) now controlled the country. In Moscow the Mossovet, despite its formally democratic principles, functioned under the vigilant supervision of the Moscow Committee of the Bolshevik Party.

The new regime had some indisputable achievements, such as the introduction of free medical care: between 1925 and 1929, for example, annual health screening for workers in state-owned enterprises and medical assistance to pregnant women were introduced. These measures led to a twofold decline in the rate of mortality. Another positive phenomenon was the increase in the literacy rate from 55 percent in 1914 to 85–87 percent in 1929. Relative political stability during the 1920s created favorable conditions for reviving the city's infrastructure. The years 1921–1925 saw the restoration and development of streetcar transport (eleven new lines connected the center with the suburbs); bus service, a public water supply, and road maintenance were all reintroduced; and electricity once again lit the streets. The shortage of housing was catastrophic, however. In 1928, for example, the average living space per person was just 5.5 square meters. Until the 1960s, communal apartments, where several families lodged together sharing one kitchen and one toilet, were the major type of housing.

Despite the primitive living conditions, Moscow in the 1920s had a thriving cultural life, with scores of theater and ballet schools and more than two hundred private and cooperative publishing houses. The quest for new solutions in architecture produced the innovative ideas of constructivism (pioneered by the Vesnin brothers Leonid, Victor, and Alexander, Moisei Ginzburg, and Konstantin Melnikov), which were reflected in the designs of office buildings, workers' clubs, and stadiums.

INDUSTRIAL RESTRUCTURING AND URBAN TRANSFORMATION IN THE 1930S

The campaign of the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin (1879–1953) to develop heavy industry resulted in the restructuring of the whole system of Moscow enterprises.The textile industry ceded its leadership in the Moscow economy to heavy industry (especially the aircraft and automotive industries), whose share in the general volume of production rose to 34.7 percent (1931) and then to 61 percent (1940). The largest Soviet factories, such as the Likhachev Plant and the "Hammer and Sickle" Plant, were located in Moscow. In order to intensify production, workers were trained to operate the newest European and American machinery, and foreign engineers were invited to the USSR.

All existing resources were pumped into the development of heavy industry, which resulted in a sharp decline in the standard of living. In March 1929 the rationing of basic foodstuffs (bread, sugar, meat, butter, and tea) was again introduced in Moscow. For example, skilled workers received 800 grams of bread and 200 grams of meat per diem; and 3 kilograms of cereals, 50 grams of tea, 600 grams of butter, and 10 eggs per month; while the rest of the population received two to three times less. But even these meager rations could not be guaranteed. Free trade was replaced by closed retail establishments and public canteens at factories and offices, where approximately 80 percent of workers received their meals. Rationing was abolished only in 1935–1936, after the rural economy had begun to "overcome the shock of collectivization." The low standard of living gave rise to popular discontent. Social protest, both potential and actual, was crushed by repressions, which turned into the Great Terror of 1936–1938. Moscow prisons were overcrowded, and so-called enemies of the people were brutally tortured.

The 1930s were also years of unprecedented construction that radically changed Moscow's appearance. In 1931–1934, nearly 0.5 million city residents, out of the total of 3.6 million, received new "social" lodgings free-of-charge. In accordance with 1932 construction regulations, ceilings were to be at least 3.2 meters high, and bathrooms were obligatory in new apartments. Because of the acute shortage of housing, however, one family, no matter how large, was entitled to only one room in a new apartment, and thus the old system of communal apartments received a new lease on life. Bolshevik leaders saw great propaganda value in the 1935 General Plan for the Reconstruction of Moscow, a blueprint for converting the city into the "model capital of the Soviet State."

The transformation of Moscow into a model city proceeded at the expense of the most precious monuments of architecture, however. Churches were ruthlessly razed; in 1931 the colossal Cathedral of Christ the Savior was destroyed, along with most of the ecclesiastic valuables stored there. A chapel of white marble, which had somehow avoided destruction, was later purchased by Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962), the wife of the U.S. president Franklin Delano Roosevelt; she donated the chapel to the Vatican. In the center of the city, giant administrative and public buildings sprang up: the House of the Council of Labor and Defense (the present-day State Duma), the Hotel Moskva, the Lenin Library, and the Theater of the Red Army. Six radial streets cutting through the city from the center to the suburbs were widened from 16–18 meters to 40–60 meters at the expense of old buildings demolished in the process.

The acute transport crisis of the 1920s was resolved in the 1930s by the rapid development of the city's transportation system. In 1935–1939 the first three subway lines, 40 kilometers long, were put into operation. By 1941 other infrastructure problems had also generally been solved; the water supply network increased twofold, and the sewage system was also expanded.

WORLD WAR II AND THE POSTWAR DECADE

World War II was a difficult time for Moscow. German forces invaded the USSR on 22 June 1941 and rapidly advanced into the heart of the country. During the first year of the war the city endured the tragic battle for Moscow that raged from 30 September 1941 to 7 January 1942. By November 1941 the Germans were only 35–50 kilometers away from Moscow. On 15 October 1941 the government issued a resolution "On the evacuation of the capital of the USSR, the city of Moscow." Alarmed by rumors that top officials were fleeing the city, the inhabitants succumbed to panic, which raged for three days. Some people grabbed whatever belongings they could carry and left the city, on foot or by car, trying to reach the eastern regions of the country, while the rest decided to stay and resist the enemy. On the fourth day Stalin, who had remained in Moscow, was forced to change his strategy radically and issued a new decree, "On the introduction of a state of emergency in Moscow," thereby, in effect, annulling the previous one. The decree imposed a curfew and around-the-clock street patrols.

After bitter fighting, by early January 1942 the frontlines were pushed westward and stabilized at 150–300 kilometers away from Moscow. Casualties were high on both sides: the Red Army lost 1 million servicemen killed in action, while the German army lost more than 0.5 million. Between July 1941 and June 1943, Moscow was also bombed repeatedly from the air.

The Moscow population conducted itself bravely during the war years. Between 1941 and 1945 more than 850,000 Muscovites went to the front. The remaining residents formed 3,600 voluntary self-defense units (81,600 strong) and about 13,000 fire brigades (205,200 persons). Volunteers built 211 kilometers of antitank barriers and dug 210 kilometers of trenches around Moscow. The Moscow subway functioned both as the most important means of transportation and as an excellent air-raid shelter. Between July and December 1941, 2.2 million Muscovites were evacuated east to Siberia and Central Asia, along with 498 industrial enterprises and numerous higher-educational institutions, museums, theaters, film studios, and so forth.

The remaining 654 enterprises were converted to military production under the slogan "Shells instead of buttons." Throughout the war they produced 126,000 aircraft, 3.5 million submachine guns, and 34 million artillery shells. The working day was eleven or twelve hours long. Sixty percent of workers were women and teenagers. In order to strengthen morale Stalin temporarily reduced the Communist doctrine's intolerance with respect to the Russian Orthodox Church. After Stalin met with church leaders in September 1943, a number of churches were reopened, and thousands of priests were released from the gulag (the abbreviation for Stalinist prison camps).

On 9 May 1945 Moscow joyfully celebrated the victory over Germany. The celebration of Moscow's eight hundredth anniversary (in September 1947) provided another occasion for an ideological demonstration of the regime's achievements: foreign delegations arrived (including from the wartime allies—the United Kingdom, France, and the United States), shows were held in the city's squares and stadiums, and temporary European-style cafés were installed in the streets. To the joy of the half-starved population, "gifts" from collective farmers arrived in the form of trucks loaded with agricultural produce.

New ideas in urban planning were embodied in a 1947 decision to construct eight high-rise buildings, modeled after those in New York City, in order to produce a single urban ensemble. (Seven were actually constructed.) Construction of eight- to ten-story residential buildings for the elite began in 1949 along the city's central avenues, such as Gorky Street and Kutuzov Prospekt. A tendency toward highly decorative classical splendor in building design replaced the ascetic style of worker housing on the city's outskirts.

The postwar decade was full of hardships for the Moscow population, however, with a housing crisis, food shortages, and increased street crime. Government concessions to popular hopes for more liberal policies alternated with "tightening the screws." Monetary reform was carried out in December 1947, accompanied by the abolition of the rationing of food and other basic necessities, and the introduction of a unified state system of retail prices. Factories were moved back to Moscow, and by 1948 industrial production reached prewar levels.

There was no liberalization in the sphere of politics, however. In order to inspire ideological consolidation of the population, in 1948 a campaign was initiated against "cosmopolitanism," mainly directed against the Jewish intelligentsia. It was followed in January 1953 by the fabricated "Doctors' Plot," when a number of physicians were accused of planning to murder some prominent Soviet bureaucrats and military commanders on the orders of foreign espionage services. A series of crowded meetings at factories and other enterprises were organized by the authorities to ignite hatred for the regime's "enemies." Only Stalin's death in March 1953 put a stop to such forms of "consolidating the people."

THE KHRUSHCHEV THAW

After six years as head of the Moscow Communist Party, Nikita Khrushchev (1894–1971) led the All-USSR Communist Party from 1953 to 1964, and simultaneously served as premier of the USSR from 1958 to 1964. The period of his leadership became known as "the Thaw" because of the liberalization of the forms and methods of government. Khrushchev's address to the twentieth Communist Party Congress in 1956, for example, openly criticized the tyranny of Stalin. Khrushchev's policies were not well balanced, however; positive social measures alternated with negative ones, thus producing popular discontent.

On the one hand, 1956 saw the abolition of a 1940 law that had made it illegal for workers to quit their jobs. Between 1955 and 1959 the minimum wage at state enterprises was increased by 35 percent; the retirement age was lowered to 60 years for males and to 55 years for females; the average work week was reduced to 46 hours; and maternity leave was increased from 70 to 112 days. To address the housing crisis in Moscow, new districts were created with the construction of four- to five-story apartment blocks, stores, kindergartens, polyclinics, and schools. Almost one-third of Moscow's population moved into the new apartment blocks, popularly dubbed khrushchebi (a play on trushchobi, the Russian word for slums). With a ceiling height of 2.5 meters, all sanitary arrangements crammed into one small cubicle, and a tiny kitchenette, these dwellings were regarded by many architects as primitive; but the authorities viewed the social benefit of more housing as a higher priority than aesthetics. Simultaneously, in downtown areas, tento fourteen-story blocks of apartments of special design were erected, intended for the political elite who by now had become firmly established as a top stratum of the Moscow population, with privileges and access to closed stores. After Khrushchev's twelve-day visit to the United States in 1959, new features were added to the urban infrastructure, such as self-service stores, automatic laundries, and special machines for selling tickets on buses, streetcars, and subways.

On the other hand, in contrast to some successful social projects, the failure of Khrushchev's agrarian reforms led to shortages and irregular supplies of many foodstuffs in Moscow, especially meat. Housewives often stood in line from daybreak for five to seven hours to buy meat. In 1962 increases in the price of meat (by 30 percent) and butter (by 25 percent) caused discontent among the population. Because of a crop failure, in 1963 more than twelve million tons of grain were imported at a cost of one billion dollars. From 1954 onward, the pendulum in the relations with the Russian Orthodox Church began to swing back in the opposite direction, and many churches and mosques were closed down or even destroyed.

After decades of "mutual suspicion" in private life under Stalin, social relations revived. One example of this is the "Moscow kitchen" phenomenon: frank late-night discussions and singing to the guitar in the tiny kitchens of private apartments. This phenomenon arose not only because restaurants and cafés were inaccessible to the Moscow intelligentsia (always short of money) but also because people feared that any open discussions in public places might be dangerous. Gradually, however, new communication spaces emerged, primarily in the sphere of the youth culture. Poetry recitals at the Polytechnic Museum drew thousands of people; fresh issues of the journal Novy Mir (New World) became the center of discussions; and a number of "jazz cafés" also opened in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

THE BREZHNEV ERA

Leonid Brezhnev (1906–1982), the leader of the USSR between 1964 and 1982, promoted the idea of turning Moscow into "a model communist city." Despite the propagandistic goals of this utopian slogan, the idea nevertheless led to the resolution of some of the most painful urban problems: moving environmentally dangerous industrial enterprises out of Moscow, implementing mass-housing construction projects and building new schools, and improving the public transport system. In the late 1960s and 1970s many inhabitants of downtown basements and 1930s-era barracks in working-class districts moved into more convenient lodgings with amenities in multistory apartment blocks. In twenty years the proportion of families inhabiting their own apartments grew from 35 percent to 85 percent. Thanks to the trend toward separate apartments, social communication changed among native Muscovites. Nuclear families now predominated, neighborhood ties were disrupted, and people lived more and more isolated private lives. The 1970s were also marked by the beginning of borrowing and copying Western lifestyles and behaviors, especially by the younger generation, who idolized the Beatles and other Western pop-culture celebrities.

However, new construction could not satisfy all the housing needs because of the heavy influx of workers from other areas to fill vacant jobs in construction and heavy industry, which were unpopular with Muscovites because they involved hard working conditions and night shifts. The annual influx between 1967 and 1987 of fifty to eighty thousand limitchiki—that is, migrants granted Moscow residence permits in limited quotas for employment in high-demand jobs—changed the composition of Moscow's population and urban culture. In 1976, for example, they constituted 33 percent of the workforce in heavy industry and 75 percent in construction. Lacking even minimal experience of life in a megalopolis, the migrants stayed secluded in their dorms among similar strangers and adapted poorly to the cultural, hygienic, and social norms of Moscow urban life.

During the 1970s and 1980s Moscow's social atmosphere gradually lost some of its former severity and isolation. Muscovites increasingly sought entertainment in shows and movies. Soviet cinema and its film stars became very popular, along with Italian and French films, which managed to avoid the ideological ban on foreign films thanks to the prominence of Communist parties in those two countries. Among sports, figure skating and hockey were immensely popular: the successes of Soviet athletes on the international arena gave rise to the creation of numerous free-of-charge children's centers for winter sports. Simple skating-rinks for individual recreation sprang up in almost every yard. New buildings for entertainment and recreation were erected: a circus, a children's music theater, the Taganka Theater.

The new construction in Moscow downtown areas resulted in the brutal destruction of some unique historic architectural ensembles, however. The construction of Kalinin Prospekt was accomplished by leveling the early-nineteenth-century blocks in Arbat Street. Experts noted that the new projects, despite their technological achievements and professionalism, were planned "with no love for the Old Moscow." The issue of humanizing the urban environment gave rise to serious opposition between society and the authorities. The struggle to save the city's historical legacy took the shape of a mass social movement, formalized as the All-Russian Voluntary Society for the Protection of Monuments of History and Art. The demolition of a block of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century buildings near the Kremlin in May 1972, shortly before the visit of U.S. president Richard Nixon (1913–1994) to Moscow, produced an outburst of protest from members of the artistic and scientific elites and from ordinary Muscovites, who wrote appeals to the Communist Party Central Committee and the Mossovet and sought meetings with top bureaucrats. The resulting compromise created nine preservation zones encompassing one-third of the city's central area, including pedestrian zones in the oldest streets (dating back to the fourteenth century), Stoleshniki Lane and the Arbat.

Preparations for the 1980 Moscow Olympic Games included radical improvements in the cleanliness and order of Moscow streets and squares and in the availability and quality of restaurants. Regrettably, this event failed to produce the expected effect, because the national teams of the United States, West Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, and other countries chose to boycott the games in protest against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

THE COLLAPSE OF THE SOVIET UNION: 1985–1991

Mikhail Gorbachev's leadership of the USSR (1985–1991) was characterized by his restructuring policies known as perestroika. Gorbachev sought to preserve the Soviet Union by reforming its economy and culture. However, the collapse of the regime proceeded with unexpected rapidity, its disintegration accelerated by the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster in 1986, when the leaders of the environmental movement started to discuss not only the problems of the environment, but social issues as well.

Moscow became a focal point of open discussion and a free press, one example of which was the newspaper Moskovskie Novosti (Moscow News). Boris Yeltsin, the head of the Moscow Communist Party organization in 1986–1987, called Moscow a breeding ground for political stagnation and a haven for corrupt bureaucrats. He replaced 60 percent of Moscow officials, banned the admittance of new limitchiki, and tried to improve the food supply. Yeltsin's radicalism alienated the central authorities, and he was removed from office. Soon he became the leader of the democratic opposition, which comprised a number of political parties created in 1988–1989. In 1989 and 1990 Moscow streets were the scene of continual political demonstrations, including one with one hundred thousand participants in February 1990. In the spring of 1990 elections to the Mossovet brought the democrats more than 60 percent of votes, and for the first time since 1917 the Communists lost their monopoly on power. In 1991 Yeltsin was elected to the new position of president of the Russian Republic.

These political changes provoked a serious economic crisis, further aggravated by painful denationalization of the economy, inflation, and the 1991 monetary reform (which, in effect, wiped out the population's bank deposits). In Moscow the food supply completely collapsed; sugar, vodka, and tobacco were rationed; and transportation and central heating barely functioned.

In the summer of 1991 Yeltsin, as president of Russia, banned all Communist Party organizations at enterprises and institutions. The conflict between Yeltsin and Moscow democratic forces on the one hand, and the central Communist apparatus on the other, contributed to the revolutionary events of 19–22 August 1991. The radio station Ekho Moskvy (Echo of Moscow) reported that on the order of the self-proclaimed State Committee for the State of Emergency in the USSR—a group of high-ranking government officials and Communist Party leaders, which had already removed Gorbachev from power—the military was preparing to seize Yeltsin and the other Russian leaders barricaded inside the government headquarters known as the White House. The attempted coup failed when thousands of people encircled the building, ready to become its "human shield." On 22 August the Moscow police, acting on the orders of Vice-Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, sealed the building of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. The failed coup led to the final collapse of the Soviet Union, as one by one the Soviet republics declared independence. The political crisis ended when on 25 December 1991 Gorbachev resigned from the post of president and on 26 December the Supreme Soviet voted to end the treaty that formed the USSR. In 1992 Luzhkov became mayor of Moscow and subsequently was twice reelected.

ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL TRANSITION

The economic crisis that followed the collapse of the USSR hit Moscow's population hard, causing social polarization; in 1995, for example, 47 percent of Muscovites lived below subsistence level. During the following decade, however, the situation slowly began to improve. In Moscow, trade, gas stations, small and medium-size industrial enterprises, and freight transport began to be privatized. European investors now participated in projects for the creation of new confectioneries, bakeries, breweries, and sausage factories. As a result, the food crisis was overcome, and from the year 2000 Russian foodstuffs replaced imported goods, which had dominated the consumer market in the 1990s. For the first time since 1917 Muscovites were not faced with the problem of where to buy food, and a network of cafés, restaurants, and takeaway outlets also emerged. The municipal government subsidized free transportation for retired and disabled inhabitants and free meals for 40 percent of schoolchildren.

Three trends may be noted in the development of Moscow in the late twentieth century: (1) improvements to major Soviet-era buildings such as office buildings, stores, theaters, and stadiums; (2) the implementation of new unique architectural projects; and (3) the restoration of national historical monuments destroyed on Stalin's orders, such as the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, the Cathedral of the Kazan Mother of God, and the Iverian Gate. Since 1995, forty thousand to sixty thousand apartments per year have been built, while the tenements known as khrushchebi have been demolished and their inhabitants moved to new municipal housing. Another positive development is the revival of religious life: In 2002 there were approximately nine hundred officially registered religious associations (500 Russian Orthodox, 25 Moslem, 15 Jewish, 12 Catholic) in Moscow, along with 532 Russian Orthodox churches, 7 mosques, 5 synagogues, and 2 Catholic cathedrals.

Serious problems of the 1990s and early 2000s include air pollution and traffic. The number of automobiles grew from 1.2 million in 1993 to 4 million in 2004. Automobile exhaust, according to data of 2000–2004, was responsible for 80–93 percent of pollution. In May 2004 a municipal law concerning environmental control was enacted. The traffic problem was somewhat alleviated after the opening of the Third Ring Road, thirty-five kilometers long, through the city's peripheral districts at the distance of five to seven kilometers from the center. Terrorist attacks were another serious problem in Moscow. Between 1999 and 2004 explosions in residential buildings and trade centers, on the subway and on planes, and the taking of hostages claimed the lives of approximately six hundred people. Finally, the cost of living rose dramatically; as of early 2005 the Economist magazine ranked Moscow with New York City in twelfth place among the world's most expensive cities.

See alsoRussia; Soviet Union.

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Galina Ulianova