By April 2013, the population of Moscow had surpassed 12 million people, adding 500,000 since 2010 and 2 million since 2002. Another 1.5 million commute to Moscow for work every day, and yet almost 10 percent of all Russians live or work in in the capital today. Moscow has changed since the moment the curtain on the USSR dropped, with the sounds of Tchaikovsky's “Swan Lake” on all four existing TV channels during the 1991 coup. The Red Square, the Kremlin, and vivid colors of the Saint Basil's Cathedral are still the calling card of Moscow for foreigners, but the real Moscow is much more than that. Only five miles away from Kremlin one finds the new business district—Moskva City, with 19 skyscrapers built in 17 years. Among them, the Mercury City Tower is the tallest in Europe; the Federation Tower will take the lead upon completion.
It is only five miles from Moskva City to the Kremlin, but good luck making it in twenty minutes, even at low-traffic times of the day. Traffic is terrible; it is a by-product of the way new Moscow was built. The building permits were handed out by a corrupt Moscow government, regardless of the inability of the city's infrastructure to sustain the added load, and the city could not cope with the new demands. Moskva City and many other smaller construction projects throughout Moscow were built mostly by migrant workers, many of them illegal.
Labor migration is still the driving force of the Moscow's population growth: last year Moscow's population increased by 123,000 people, which includes 107,000 migrants. Migrants are not just general laborers or construction workers. Some areas of Moscow's life are controlled by non-Russian diasporas, and some of these diasporas are very wealthy and very well connected. The influence of the Dagestani diaspora goes all the way to Prime Minister Medvedev's office, according to Russian press. Georgian expatriates dominate Moscow's organized criminal underground. On the criminal side, the entire megalopolis is divided into zones of the criminal control based on ethnicity. The by-products of the massive labor and business migration to Moscow are ethnic tensions, which from time to time escalate to open violence.
Moscow is as different from the rest of Russia (except maybe for Saint Petersburg) as New York is from the rest of the United States. It was this way during Soviet times, and it remains this way now, even after Russia entered the “new brave world” of the free market economy. The divide is natural: according to Mercer's 2013 survey of the cost of living for expatriate employees, Moscow surpassed Tokyo, and took second place worldwide, trailing only Luanda, Angola. Russians do not face the high costs which foreigners have to pay, but still wages in Moscow are about four times higher than in the north Caucasus republics. The average wage in Moscow is roughly $1900 (about 56,000 rubles) per month, while university-educated professionals can expect to be paid $3000 to $5000 per month. This immediately places Moscow apart from the rest of Russia.
Deep down inside many Muscovites despise the rest of the country, and even casually use the term zamkadie (which translates to “The Land beyond the Beltway”); the rest of Russia reciprocates this feeling. Nevertheless, everything in Russia must be processed through Moscow. There is no regional business or political clan which can exist without having “their man,” or better, their lobby, somewhere in the Moscow corridors of power; even purchase orders for Gazprom divisions in west Siberia are approved by Gazprom’s Moscow office.
The situation is the same with Russian politics. All of the essential politicking is done in Moscow, and Moscow politics reverberate across all nine time zones of Russia. The Russian system of power is corrupt and ineffective, so this reverberation is often more sound than action, but it is only the sound that matters.
All one needs to get involved in practical politics in Russia is to get plugged into Moscow elites; however, if you want to know what Russians think and feel, you need to leave Moscow and travel across the country. (This is the secret of Vladimir Putin's support: he did not get the real majority in the capital in the 2012 elections, but still won the presidency because of the support of the silent majority of Russians.) The Russian government appreciates the importance of Moscow and Muscovites for political stability in Russia, and spends about seven times more per capita in Moscow then in a Siberian city like Irkutsk or Novosibirsk. Yet the government still faces the strongest opposition in Moscow. Needless to say that massive budget spending in Moscow widens the gap between the capital and the rest of the country, both materially and emotionally.
This is the backdrop to the upcoming Moscow mayoral elections. The vote will take place on September 8, 2013, following the June 2013 decision of Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin to resign his position and to run for the job in democratic elections. Vladimir Putin supported this decision. It is, in fact, Putin's move to win Moscow—Sobyanin is reliably the Putin's man, and is among contenders for the succession of Dmitry Medvedev as prime minister, but as a serial political appointee, he has never been elected to any office, including the position of the mayor of Moscow. He needs public exposure, while Putin needs to deal with claims about an undemocratic power grab, loudest in Moscow. Nevertheless, a voluntary resignation and running in democratic elections is a very bold move for a Russian politician. The elections will not necessarily be truly democratic, and timing is carefully chosen: the city is melting from summer heat, voters are either on vacation or at their dachas (rural cottages), and there will be no time for the opponents to prepare. If Sobyanin wins, the ultimate goal of winning the support of Moscow will be accomplished by Putin.
Meanwhile there is a side effect of Sobyanin's move: Putin’s opponents jumped at the opportunity to run in open elections. The Moscow elections are an event of national significance, so exposure is also nationwide. So far (according to semi-independent Levada-Centre polls in May 2013) only 41 percent of Russians know of the Western “darling”, Yale-trained opposition figure candidate Alexy Navalny, and only 6 percent of those support him. Government-funded WCIOM data is more favorable for him: 53 percent of Russians know who Navalny is, while veteran opposition leader Boris Nemtsov is known among 78 percent of Russians. Running for Moscow’s mayor gives the opposition an opportunity to break out of the confining political circles of Moscow and Saint Petersburg, and get Russians to know them better.
Leading opposition candidate Alexy Navalny had built his reputation on the fight against corruption (a kind of a Sisyphusian task in Russia, which is only the fifth priority for most politicians). In 2007 he was expelled from the opposition party Yabloko for nationalism. He later denied his nationalist views, but his TV appearances and some speeches tell a different story.
At the time when the 2013 mayoral election was announced, he was being prosecuted for corruption and embezzelment, but he decided to run anyway. He was nominated by the Russian right-wing party RPR-PARNAS (Republican Party of Russia–People's Freedom Party) and started to collect signatures in his support on June 14th. This is when odd things started to happen. In order to become the official candidate, the nominee has to present 73,000 endorsements by the regular citizens, and more than 110 endorsements by the members of the Moscow legislature. Navalny did well with the regular folks, but failed to get enough endorsements from the legislature members; other candidates besides Sobyanin found themselves in the similar situation. Sobyanin (surely cleared by Putin to do so) came to the rescue and convinced the United Russia faction in the Moscow legislature to support his opponents. With no hesitation, Navalny accepted help from United Russia, a party he has referred to as the “Party of Crooks and a Thieves. He got his registration documents on July 17th, but was sentenced to six years of hard labor on July 18th. He was arrested immediately. The next day the state prosecutor's office protested the arrest and Navalny was released, but a written order not to leave Russia remains in force. Such a “catch and release” game is very unusual, where the judicial branch is de-facto controlled by the Kremlin. It does not really matter whether it was the result of behind-the-scenes political fights or whether it was a planned action by Putin directly. What matters is that Putin came out as the unbiased arbitrator who kept Navalny in the game. Later Putin commented on the “excessive sentence” for the opposition candidate. Navalny continues his campaign, and is likely to have a decent showing in September.
In the case that Navalny (or another opposition candidate) will not win, Sobyanin wins as the clean, democratically-elected mayor with a public mandate to govern, and as the one who did all in his power to level the playing field and keep elections fair. Putin comes out as a supporter of fair democratic elections, while the lack of the public support for the opposition will be demonstrated in elections. A bonus for Putin is a squabble among the opposition which will take years to heal.
At the same time, a “built in feature” of fair elections is that sometimes the underdog wins. Navalny's campaign is going well and unopposed by the establishment, so he has a theoretical chance to become such an underdog. However, Navalny's only experience in the executive branch was the role of the adviser to the governor, which almost landed him in jail. As a winner he would take on the responsibility for the management of a city of 12 million, which has a decades, if not centuries, long tradition of corruption. His job will be not to criticize the United Russia and Putin, but to keep the lights on, water running, sewer system working, and streets clean. This is an impossible task to do without cheap migrant labor—and Navalny has promised to deport all illegals. There is a very slim chance that if elected Navalny will become a successful mayor, and a very solid chance that he will fail, or will become a part of the corruption. In any case, it will be a heavy blow to the opposition, and Putin wins again.
This win-win situation for Putin is the result of 13 years of a “managed democracy” policy in Russia, which has left a scorched field for the opposition. There is simply no suitable mid-level figure available to assume the role of mayor of a city like Moscow or Saint Petersburg.
Photo: Vladimir Putin and Sergey Sobyanin, by the Press Secretary for the President of the Russian Federation.
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Moscow's Mayoral Elections: A Win-Win for Putin
August 26, 2013
By April 2013, the population of Moscow had surpassed 12 million people, adding 500,000 since 2010 and 2 million since 2002. Another 1.5 million commute to Moscow for work every day, and yet almost 10 percent of all Russians live or work in in the capital today. Moscow has changed since the moment the curtain on the USSR dropped, with the sounds of Tchaikovsky's “Swan Lake” on all four existing TV channels during the 1991 coup. The Red Square, the Kremlin, and vivid colors of the Saint Basil's Cathedral are still the calling card of Moscow for foreigners, but the real Moscow is much more than that. Only five miles away from Kremlin one finds the new business district—Moskva City, with 19 skyscrapers built in 17 years. Among them, the Mercury City Tower is the tallest in Europe; the Federation Tower will take the lead upon completion.
It is only five miles from Moskva City to the Kremlin, but good luck making it in twenty minutes, even at low-traffic times of the day. Traffic is terrible; it is a by-product of the way new Moscow was built. The building permits were handed out by a corrupt Moscow government, regardless of the inability of the city's infrastructure to sustain the added load, and the city could not cope with the new demands. Moskva City and many other smaller construction projects throughout Moscow were built mostly by migrant workers, many of them illegal.
Labor migration is still the driving force of the Moscow's population growth: last year Moscow's population increased by 123,000 people, which includes 107,000 migrants. Migrants are not just general laborers or construction workers. Some areas of Moscow's life are controlled by non-Russian diasporas, and some of these diasporas are very wealthy and very well connected. The influence of the Dagestani diaspora goes all the way to Prime Minister Medvedev's office, according to Russian press. Georgian expatriates dominate Moscow's organized criminal underground. On the criminal side, the entire megalopolis is divided into zones of the criminal control based on ethnicity. The by-products of the massive labor and business migration to Moscow are ethnic tensions, which from time to time escalate to open violence.
Moscow is as different from the rest of Russia (except maybe for Saint Petersburg) as New York is from the rest of the United States. It was this way during Soviet times, and it remains this way now, even after Russia entered the “new brave world” of the free market economy. The divide is natural: according to Mercer's 2013 survey of the cost of living for expatriate employees, Moscow surpassed Tokyo, and took second place worldwide, trailing only Luanda, Angola. Russians do not face the high costs which foreigners have to pay, but still wages in Moscow are about four times higher than in the north Caucasus republics. The average wage in Moscow is roughly $1900 (about 56,000 rubles) per month, while university-educated professionals can expect to be paid $3000 to $5000 per month. This immediately places Moscow apart from the rest of Russia.
Deep down inside many Muscovites despise the rest of the country, and even casually use the term zamkadie (which translates to “The Land beyond the Beltway”); the rest of Russia reciprocates this feeling. Nevertheless, everything in Russia must be processed through Moscow. There is no regional business or political clan which can exist without having “their man,” or better, their lobby, somewhere in the Moscow corridors of power; even purchase orders for Gazprom divisions in west Siberia are approved by Gazprom’s Moscow office.
The situation is the same with Russian politics. All of the essential politicking is done in Moscow, and Moscow politics reverberate across all nine time zones of Russia. The Russian system of power is corrupt and ineffective, so this reverberation is often more sound than action, but it is only the sound that matters.
All one needs to get involved in practical politics in Russia is to get plugged into Moscow elites; however, if you want to know what Russians think and feel, you need to leave Moscow and travel across the country. (This is the secret of Vladimir Putin's support: he did not get the real majority in the capital in the 2012 elections, but still won the presidency because of the support of the silent majority of Russians.) The Russian government appreciates the importance of Moscow and Muscovites for political stability in Russia, and spends about seven times more per capita in Moscow then in a Siberian city like Irkutsk or Novosibirsk. Yet the government still faces the strongest opposition in Moscow. Needless to say that massive budget spending in Moscow widens the gap between the capital and the rest of the country, both materially and emotionally.
This is the backdrop to the upcoming Moscow mayoral elections. The vote will take place on September 8, 2013, following the June 2013 decision of Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin to resign his position and to run for the job in democratic elections. Vladimir Putin supported this decision. It is, in fact, Putin's move to win Moscow—Sobyanin is reliably the Putin's man, and is among contenders for the succession of Dmitry Medvedev as prime minister, but as a serial political appointee, he has never been elected to any office, including the position of the mayor of Moscow. He needs public exposure, while Putin needs to deal with claims about an undemocratic power grab, loudest in Moscow. Nevertheless, a voluntary resignation and running in democratic elections is a very bold move for a Russian politician. The elections will not necessarily be truly democratic, and timing is carefully chosen: the city is melting from summer heat, voters are either on vacation or at their dachas (rural cottages), and there will be no time for the opponents to prepare. If Sobyanin wins, the ultimate goal of winning the support of Moscow will be accomplished by Putin.
Meanwhile there is a side effect of Sobyanin's move: Putin’s opponents jumped at the opportunity to run in open elections. The Moscow elections are an event of national significance, so exposure is also nationwide. So far (according to semi-independent Levada-Centre polls in May 2013) only 41 percent of Russians know of the Western “darling”, Yale-trained opposition figure candidate Alexy Navalny, and only 6 percent of those support him. Government-funded WCIOM data is more favorable for him: 53 percent of Russians know who Navalny is, while veteran opposition leader Boris Nemtsov is known among 78 percent of Russians. Running for Moscow’s mayor gives the opposition an opportunity to break out of the confining political circles of Moscow and Saint Petersburg, and get Russians to know them better.
Leading opposition candidate Alexy Navalny had built his reputation on the fight against corruption (a kind of a Sisyphusian task in Russia, which is only the fifth priority for most politicians). In 2007 he was expelled from the opposition party Yabloko for nationalism. He later denied his nationalist views, but his TV appearances and some speeches tell a different story.
At the time when the 2013 mayoral election was announced, he was being prosecuted for corruption and embezzelment, but he decided to run anyway. He was nominated by the Russian right-wing party RPR-PARNAS (Republican Party of Russia–People's Freedom Party) and started to collect signatures in his support on June 14th. This is when odd things started to happen. In order to become the official candidate, the nominee has to present 73,000 endorsements by the regular citizens, and more than 110 endorsements by the members of the Moscow legislature. Navalny did well with the regular folks, but failed to get enough endorsements from the legislature members; other candidates besides Sobyanin found themselves in the similar situation. Sobyanin (surely cleared by Putin to do so) came to the rescue and convinced the United Russia faction in the Moscow legislature to support his opponents. With no hesitation, Navalny accepted help from United Russia, a party he has referred to as the “Party of Crooks and a Thieves. He got his registration documents on July 17th, but was sentenced to six years of hard labor on July 18th. He was arrested immediately. The next day the state prosecutor's office protested the arrest and Navalny was released, but a written order not to leave Russia remains in force. Such a “catch and release” game is very unusual, where the judicial branch is de-facto controlled by the Kremlin. It does not really matter whether it was the result of behind-the-scenes political fights or whether it was a planned action by Putin directly. What matters is that Putin came out as the unbiased arbitrator who kept Navalny in the game. Later Putin commented on the “excessive sentence” for the opposition candidate. Navalny continues his campaign, and is likely to have a decent showing in September.
In the case that Navalny (or another opposition candidate) will not win, Sobyanin wins as the clean, democratically-elected mayor with a public mandate to govern, and as the one who did all in his power to level the playing field and keep elections fair. Putin comes out as a supporter of fair democratic elections, while the lack of the public support for the opposition will be demonstrated in elections. A bonus for Putin is a squabble among the opposition which will take years to heal.
At the same time, a “built in feature” of fair elections is that sometimes the underdog wins. Navalny's campaign is going well and unopposed by the establishment, so he has a theoretical chance to become such an underdog. However, Navalny's only experience in the executive branch was the role of the adviser to the governor, which almost landed him in jail. As a winner he would take on the responsibility for the management of a city of 12 million, which has a decades, if not centuries, long tradition of corruption. His job will be not to criticize the United Russia and Putin, but to keep the lights on, water running, sewer system working, and streets clean. This is an impossible task to do without cheap migrant labor—and Navalny has promised to deport all illegals. There is a very slim chance that if elected Navalny will become a successful mayor, and a very solid chance that he will fail, or will become a part of the corruption. In any case, it will be a heavy blow to the opposition, and Putin wins again.
This win-win situation for Putin is the result of 13 years of a “managed democracy” policy in Russia, which has left a scorched field for the opposition. There is simply no suitable mid-level figure available to assume the role of mayor of a city like Moscow or Saint Petersburg.
Photo: Vladimir Putin and Sergey Sobyanin, by the Press Secretary for the President of the Russian Federation.
