Seeking Historys Individual Cities: Moscow and St. Petersburg

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However, people who lived in medieval Moscow obviously could not foresee that their urban planning patterns would come to pose such a problem several centuries later. To deal with this problem, the authorities decided to start the construction of an underground network. In November , at 13 Rusakovskaya Street, not far from Sokolniki, seven workers equipped with a horse and cart got down to work, digging their spades into the frozen ground.

The natural course of urban life in Moscow was regularly interrupted by fires, riots and epidemics. Fires from natural causes were not infrequent, either. The All Saints Fire of almost razed the city to the ground. The plague epidemic is believed to have claimed as many as , lives and practically left the city a ghost town. There is still no agreement among historians as to whether the fire was the result of arson on the part of defiant residents, or was part of an official strategic plan. One way or the other, it forced Bonaparte to retreat to the outskirts, where he spent the next days in the Petrovsky Palace, northwest of Moscow.

It was from there that he watched the city ablaze, the city that he never actually conquered. The Petrovsky Palace underwent major refurbishment during the reign of Nicholas I. Part of pre-Napoleonic Moscow can still be seen on Maroseika and Pokrovka, where the French command took up their residence. Some of the houses on these streets survived the fire. After its liberation from the French invaders, Moscow had to be rebuilt, much of it from scratch.

Before , there were churches in Moscow, but only survived the Napoleonic campaign. Funds for the ambitious project had to be raised nationwide, and it was not completed until Moscow faced large-scale destruction in later periods, too. In , the Kremlin was heavily damaged as a result of artillery shelling.

A glimpse into history

Then in Soviet times, the authorities had many historical buildings knocked down out of ideological reasons. Predictably, the demolition campaign proved the harshest on churches. Many beautiful wooden buildings were lost, however something new always appeared in their place. In the 18th century, an aqueduct was built from the town of Mytishchi to Moscow which supplied the city with clean water until the final quarter of the 19th century.

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Explore treasures of Moscow, St.

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‘Come visit me in Moscow, brother’

The itinerary provides the perfect introduction to the customs, traditions and beautiful landscapes of Southern Russia. Highlights of Southern Russia: Following the collapse of the Soviet Union , there was a time period when limitchiks could qualify for housing registration, which usually meant they received a room in a communal apartment; however, many limitchiks left the city as the removal of state price controls made basic living expenses unaffordable. The workers who remained usually lived in substandard conditions.

The allowances made for limitchiks were discontinued altogether in the s; after the limitchik disappeared as a phenomenon. This cessation of migrant labour in the city, along with the nationwide price liberalization, caused an economic downturn in Moscow, as in other large Russian cities. At that time some Muscovites believed that it would be easier to eke out a living outside the city. At the beginning of the 21st century, migration to Moscow remained strong, but former administrative restrictions on migration had been overshadowed by economic ones; Moscow had become one of the most expensive cities in the world to live in.

The privatization of real estate and the decline in public housing construction made the acquisition of new dwellings extremely difficult. Practices for monitoring temporary employees also changed. While under the Soviet regime limitchiks were accounted for more or less accurately, in post-Soviet Moscow the guest workers who replaced them were not. As a result, efforts have been made to control illegal entrance into Moscow, including requiring all non-Russians to carry identification cards in order to register for work.

Moscow has an aging population. In the early 21st century the death rate was almost double the birth rate , a larger proportional discrepancy than that of any other Russian city. Like most of Russia, Moscow has a low rate of fertility. Many older Muscovites have chosen to remain in the city, while many young people are deterred from moving there because of its high cost of living and housing. Life expectancy is higher there than in other cities in the country. Most notably, although a disproportionate share of national wealth was concentrated there under the Soviets, the degree of concentration has significantly increased since Women make up more than half the workforce.

They constitute the vast majority of workers in the textile and food-processing industries, and they predominate in the teaching and medical professions. As a result, the structure of the labour force had to adapt.

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Rapid privatization left many factories in the hands of owners who chose to invest their earnings either abroad or in the retail, banking, telecommunications, and research and development sectors of the city, rather than in modernizing their plants. Moreover, a dividend of this precipitous change was the end of the service shortages that once characterized the city. Despite the decline of manufacturing in the post-Soviet period, Moscow remains the largest industrial centre in Russia.

It dominates an industrial region that extends east and northeast to the Volga between Yaroslavl and Nizhny Novgorod formerly Gorky. Ball bearings are manufactured both for the increasingly important auto-making industry and for other purposes.

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Another major branch of engineering is the manufacture of machine tools, particularly grinding lathes, precision cutting tools, and machinery for the textile industry. Precision engineering is highly developed and is noted for measuring and other instruments, as well as for watches. Food processing is one of the few manufacturing-related industries that expanded and modernized following privatization. Furniture making is part of a varied timber-processing industry, which also makes pulp and paper.

Some timber is used in the vast construction industry, which includes not only the large numbers of workers actually employed in building but also those engaged in making building materials, such as reinforced concrete sections, glass, and bricks. The privatization of the Russian economy spurred the development of a substantial financial sector, including dozens of banks and several securities exchanges.

The Muscovites have heightened purchasing power, and dozens of traders buy foreign-made usually Chinese, Turkish, and Polish clothing and footwear in Moscow and resell the merchandise in outlying Russian provinces. Many of the stores are fairly large, particularly the department stores.

The best-known and most heavily patronized of them is GUM , the direct descendant of the medieval trading rows. In the s a spacious underground shopping mall was built under Manezhnaya Square. Many of these markets are run by individuals who are not ethnically Russian, primarily people from Transcaucasia. All homes in Moscow are supplied with heat and electricity.

Electrical generating stations are fired by natural gas , which is piped via a grid system from fields in Siberia and elsewhere. Large gas-storage facilities have been constructed near Moscow, and a pipeline surrounds the city. An older heating plant lies close to the Kremlin, and a newer one is located north of Moscow Ring Road. Electrical power also comes from nuclear plants and hydroelectric stations on the Volga River. Other power sources include the large thermal stations at Konakovo to the northwest and Kashira to the south. As a world-renowned capital, Moscow has become a popular tourist destination.

Free-market reforms have encouraged the construction of new hotels and the modernization of existing hotels in the city.

Antidote to the chaos of Moscow

The government also opened new tourist offices and refurbished many cultural centres, places of worship, and shopping districts. Moscow is the hub of the Russian rail network. Russian freight transport is heavily dependent on the railways, which are also vital to passengers, especially to the tens of thousands who commute daily on the train lines between Moscow and its suburbs.

Trunk lines radiate out from the city in all directions. The first in operation was the St. Petersburg line, opened in Others include the Savyolovo line, running north to the Volga and on as a secondary route to St. Petersburg; the Yaroslav line, which is connected by way of the Trans-Siberian route to Vladivostok ; the Nizhny Novgorod line, linked to Kirov ; the Kazan line, the most direct route to the Urals and Siberia; the Ryazan line, leading to Central Asia and the Caucasus region; the Pavelets line, a secondary route to the European south and the Caucasus; the Kursk line, the main route south to Crimea and the Caucasus; the Kiev line to Ukraine , Hungary , and Slovakia; the Smolensk line to Minsk , Warsaw , and Berlin; and the Riga line to the Baltic.

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