Moscow Guide
Introduction to Moscow
In Siberia, they call Moscow "the West", with a note of scorn for its bureaucrats and politicians. To Westerners, the city looks European, but its unruly spirit seems closer to Central Asia. For Muscovites, Moscow is both a "Mother City" and a "big village", a tumultuous community with an underlying collective instinct that shows itself in times of trouble. Nowhere else reflects the contradictions and ambiguities of the Russian people as Moscow does – nor the stresses of a country undergoing meltdown and renewal.
The city is huge, surreal and exciting. After a few weeks here, the bizarre becomes normal and you realize that life is – as Russians say – bespredel (without limits). Traditionally a place for strangers to throw themselves into debauchery, leaving poorer and wiser, Moscow's puritan stance in Soviet times was seldom heartfelt, and with the fall of Communism it has reverted to the lusty, violent ways that foreigners have noted with amazement over the centuries. No excess is too much for Moscow's new rich, or novye bogaty – the butt of countless "New Russian" jokes.
As the nation's largest city, with some twelve million inhabitants (one in fifteen Russians lives there), Moscow exemplifies the best and worst of Russia. Its beauty and ugliness are inseparable, its sentimentality the obverse of a brutality rooted in centuries of despotism and fear of anarchy. Private and cultural life is as passionate as business and politics are cynical. The irony and resilience honed by decades of propaganda and shortages now help Muscovites to cope with "wild" capitalism. Yet, for all its assertiveness, Moscow's essence is moody and elusive, and uncovering it is like opening an endless series of Matryoshka dolls, or peeling an onion down to its core.