Living in anachronistic space: Temporalities of displacement in Moscow's Soviet-era standardised housing

In 2017, the Moscow municipality announced the demolition of several thousand remaining Soviet-era, standardised apartments (khrushchevki). Known as the Renovation, the renewal project promises to replace the khrushchevki with new residential districts. Based on fieldwork in Northern Izmailovo, a district targeted for demolition, this article analyses encroaching displacement by foregrounding the temporal experiences of affected residents. Building on literature that explores the political underpinnings of discourse and aesthetics in urban renewal projects, with particular attention to Rancière's temporal politics, the article contends that the Renovation depends on the discursive construction of its targets as spatial anachronisms. This renders the Soviet-era housing blocks, and those who live within them, vulnerable to a spectrum of modernising aestheticising interventions—from minor ornamentation to wholesale demolition. Based on ethnographic data, the article shows how the initial stages of redevelopment have altered a local network of benches. For a group of long-standing, elderly residents, these disruptions have instigated more profound reckonings with their own sense of time in/and space, leading to an understanding that they, too, are seen as anachronistic features of the city. Paying attention to urban materiality on a granular scale, particularly in standardised housing estates, reveals the multifaceted temporalities that inform residents' engagements with the spaces of their home districts. The article argues that doing so counters the exclusionary temporal logic of the discourse of anachronism by denying its ubiquity. In turn, it speaks to growing geographic interest in amplifying alternative temporalities in the face of destructive, terminal change.     

蒙古统治罗斯后期政教关系的变化

蒙古统治罗斯后期,面对莫斯科公国的日益强大和金帐汗国的渐趋衰微,东正教会与蒙古统治者的联盟土崩瓦解,教会转而支持莫斯科公国,教俗联合吞并各公国,储备建立统一国家的实力,并最终推翻蒙古统治。政教联合促进了俄罗斯统一国家的形成和民族文化的发展,同时有助于莫斯科公国和教会国际地位的提升。     

Monumentality in Urban Design: The Case of Russia

A prominent American urban geographer and observer of the Russian urban scene provides an overview of grand planning and monumental urban design in Russia and the former Soviet Union through the lens of four themes outlined in a previous paper by Larry Ford (2008). In the process, he adds two more themes relevant to Russia and the former USSR: town building and architecture intended to define and legitimize state power, and the shaping or remodeling of society to reflect a regime's ideology. Noting the obstacles in the West to getting large urban projects planned, accepted, and completed, he argues that monumental urban landscapes appear to demand some degree of sustained, centralized, authoritarian leadership. The latter has been present in Russia and the USSR during much of the past millennium, including the present, but the emergence of new commercial/corporate forces in urban land development also bears scrutiny in studies of the processes promoting urban monumentality. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: O18, R14, R52. 10 figures, 44 references.     

GENTRIFICATION IN CENTRAL MOSCOW ‐ A MARKET PROCESS OR A DELIBERATE POLICY? MONEY,POWER AND PEOPLE IN HOUSING REGENERATION IN OSTOZHENKA

ABSTRACT. The recent process of housing redevelopment in central Moscow is examined in the light of the theory of gentrification. The study is based on the case of Ostozhenka as an emblematic example of a large–scale transformation of a central residential neighbourhood into the most expensive quarter of central Moscow. Using data collected through interviews, archive enquiries and field surveys, the paper addresses the preconditions, dynamics and mechanisms of this socio–political process. It is argued that gentrification in Ostozhenka shares many features observed in the other large cities of the world but, as predicted by theory, is locally embedded. It has been a product of a complex interplay of the market pressure aiming to meet demands from Moscow's successful post–Soviet economy and Moscow government's entrepreneurial and pro–development strategy for the city centre regeneration. The government privileges market forces: it empowers them vis-à-vis the original population and allows them to circumvent conservation institutions, while the achieved profit is shared between the private and public sides. Whereas the physical improvement of the city centre signifies departing from the Soviet legacies of under–investments in the housing built environment, the growing socio–spatial polarization undermines the social achievements of the Soviet system and denotes the triumph of the neoliberal urban regime in Moscow.     

Spatial Shifts in the Population of Moscow Region

An American geographer and senior Russian demographer/migration specialist examine spatial shifts in the distribution of population within Moscow city and Moscow Oblast in response to major social and economic changes occurring in the aftermath of the USSR's disintegration. This second installment (for the first, see Ioffe and Zayonchkovskaya, 2010) in a three-part study devoted to exploring the consequences and spatial manifestations of Russia's shrinking population is focused on the one relatively small part of that country that is expected to experience population growth over the next one and one-half decades (albeit strictly due to in-migration rather than natural increase). Particular attention is devoted to the effects of emerging real estate and land markets during the post-Soviet period, on the restructuring of the regional settlement system focused on the Russian capital, as well as the insights to be derived (based on a case study) from investigating processes of spatial population shifts at multiple scales.     

Social and political trust in Istanbul and Moscow: a comparative analysis of individual and neighbourhood effects

Aiming to bring local context into studies of social capital, our study uses samples of 4006 individuals in Istanbul and 3476 in Moscow using a comparable questionnaire. The stratification of each city's neighbourhoods on the basis of socio-economic characteristics provided the basis for the sampling. Using a multilevel modelling procedure, we show both that locality matters (neighbourhood effect proved significant) and that social capital may indeed be constituted in very particular ways in illiberal democracies such as Russia and Turkey. Social and political trust are frequently thought to contribute to social capital – that is, to provide social resources upon which individuals or groups may draw for their political efficacy. Trust in fellow citizens in Istanbul exhibits a positive relationship to associational activities (joining clubs etc.), while in Moscow social trust can be explained predominantly in terms of (lower) socio-economic status. At the same time, important similarities emerged between the two cases. For social trust, in both cities the 'cosmopolitanization thesis', which holds that those who associate more widely are also more trusting of fellow citizens, generally applied. Further, in both cities, residents with lower socio-economic status (though in Moscow this is complicated by education) and lower likelihoods of engagement in direct political action were more trustful of parliament . While this is the opposite of what we have been led to expect based on Western democratic polities, it is a reasonable outcome of illiberal democratic governance operating in these two cities.     

Immigration to Russia: Inevitability and Prospective Inflows

A U.S.-based geographer joins a senior Russian demographer in an effort to explore the potential flows of immigrants to Russia (principally from the Commonwealth of Independent States and to a lesser extent from China) to stem the country's recent population decline and compensate for looming decreases in the country's working-age inhabitants. More specifically, they examine the demand for immigration to Russia and assess the likelihood of three possible scenarios (high, medium, and low) to meet that demand by 2026. Particular attention is paid to the likely interplay of immigration and domestic migration in terms of its effects on the future distribution of migrants among Russia's federal districts. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: F220, J110, J210, J610. 6 figures, 4 tables, 33 references.     

New Moscow: An Exploratory Assessment

An American geographer specializing in Russia examines the unprecedented plan announced in mid-2011 by the country's President Dmitriy Medvedev to expand the territory of Moscow and move government offices to newly annexed areas. The plan aims to increase the land area of the capital by 155 percent, mainly by annexation of a vast tract southwest of the city. The author demonstrates that while "New Moscow" is envisioned as a multi-polar and low-density urban site, the historic core would likely focus on tourism. He discusses the official reasons given for the immense undertaking, the potential problems raised by urban specialists and local media, as well as the results of public opinion polls detailing the attitudes of Muscovites toward the city's proposed transformation.     

Russian Fiscal Federalism under Stress: Federal Support of Regions during the Global Financial Crisis

A former high-ranking Russian Ministry of Finance official examines the consequences of financial support extended to regions by the Russian Federation government during the global financial crisis in 2008-2010, for the purpose of exploring its potential impact on the regions' financial health in 2011-2012. The paper is structured around an analysis of the three major dimensions of that support: (1) legal and administrative actions undertaken at the federal level to reduce financial pressure on the regions; (2) increased issuance of intergovernmental fiscal grants in 2009; and (3) loans granted to the regions from the federal budget. The author argues that the financial crisis has provided a "stress test" that is useful in assessing the efficiency and flexibility of the Russian system of fiscal federalism.