Moscow (colloquially: Nerezinovsk, Default-City — the capital of Russia
The name derives from the Moskva River of the same name, which means "hemp."
The Nature of the Phenomenon
The capital of a great country.
Origin of the Name
The oldest recorded form of the city's name is "Moskov," as documented in chronicles and other sources; only considerably later did it come to be pronounced "Moskva."
In the Merya language, there was a root word — "moska" — meaning "hemp."
One should not immediately accuse our distant ancestors of drug abuse. Hemp was cultivated exclusively for peaceful purposes: it was used to produce fiber, from which clothing, sacks, and various other items were sewn. Interestingly, the predecessors of the Merya on Moscow's territory — the Dyakovo tribes (named after the village of Dyakovo in Kolomenskoye, where their first settlement was discovered), who lived in the floodplain of the Moskva River as early as the beginning of the first millennium AD, also cultivated neat fields of hemp.
So does Moscow's name derive from hemp? The logic holds: Finnic peoples grew their "moska" in the Moskva River floodplain for a full thousand years, and so the river could easily have come to be known as the Hemp River among the Dyakovo tribes and the Merya.
Opinions on Moscow
It is hard to imagine a city less suited to serve as a national capital than the servilely celebrated "most beloved of all." I have no wish to waste time refuting the cynical myth that Moscow is "the heart of my Motherland." All of Russia, with every inch of its Soviet-scarred hide, perceives Moscow as nothing other than a concentration of lordly arrogance, insatiable venality, and shameless collective egotism. No one writes to Moscow out of joy — only out of grief and need. No one comes away with a smile — only with manufactured goods and foodstuffs.
The first impulse of any ordinary provincial is not to ask with enlightened reverence, "So how is our Stalin (Brezhnev, Putin) doing?" but to land a heartfelt punch on Moscow's smug face.
It was the Muscovites who started calling those without a Moscow residency permit by the demeaning word "provincial." And it was Moscow that insisted that the propiska — the most odious form of serfdom — outlast Emperor Alexander II the Liberator, trample the Constitution underfoot, and spit squarely onto the robes of the Constitutional Court.
In its claim to exceptionalism, Moscow is incorrigible — but that is only half the trouble. The main trouble is that Moscow clings tenaciously to its status as the capital, though it has no grounds whatsoever for doing so.
All government offices in Moscow are situated in such a way as to make access for the ordinary Russian as difficult as possible. Television has shown the ceremonial gates of the Prosecutor General's Office on Bolshaya Dmitrovka thousands of times. But you, petitioner from Vologda, don't rush there hoping to be heard. The prosecutor's reception office is not there — it is on Blagoveshchensky Lane. That is about half an hour's walk from Mayakovskaya metro station — but only for a seasoned local. For the out-of-town visitor, reaching the prosecutor's reception is a ton of sweat, even on a frosty day. Along crooked, slippery pavements, with not a single signpost, no house numbers visible, and unfriendly passersby who still regard the newcomer as a rival for "our sausage" — you won't manage it in half a day. And it turns out that appointments are taken from six in the morning. Not in a computer, but written by hand on someone's palm. Come back tomorrow.
Only a handful of capital institutions are accessible on foot. Only the most daring taxi drivers will agree to take an out-of-towner to the Central Election Commission or the FSB reception on Kuznetsky Most. The various offices of the Ministry of Education are scattered across dozens of locations: Tverskaya, Lyusinovskaya, Shabolovka, Berezhkovskaya Embankment, Chistoprudny Boulevard… Mishear the name of the required federal department by even a little, and off you go to the other end of this sprawling megalopolis.
And that is a day. An entire day of a person's life.
Washington has Embassy Row. England, Japan, France, Germany, Russia — all on Massachusetts Avenue. In Moscow, Massachusetts Avenue is Losiny Ostrov. Embassies hide like mushrooms in the forest. France, Germany, America, Italy — all scattered across the vast city. And you go and find them.
Need one even mention that there is not a single government building in Moscow near which one could calmly park an ordinary car without special plates? The crowning absurdity of the capital is not even the Kremlin with its security personnel, but the KGB — or whatever it is called now. The secret service office is in plain sight — but you can't get near it. The KGB has been on Lubyanka for a century, yet the building is stolen property. They took the premises from an insurance company and have been torturing enemies of the people in these unsuitable commercial spaces for a century.
Moscow is so ill-suited to fulfilling its functions as a capital that I am forcibly cutting short my enumeration of the serious circumstances that prevent Russia from making normal use of its government's services. However, some of the most glaring deficiencies demand at least a brief assessment.
1. Without the Baltic states, Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova, the capital finds itself on the western fringe of Russia. Vast, promising regions of the country are becoming something like colonies that are objectively striving for decolonization. The military vulnerability of the capital is enormous.
2. The concentration of Russia's overwhelming political, economic, financial, and cultural potential in a single city is holding back the country's even development and impeding the proportional distribution of modern infrastructure. The gap between European Russia and the boundless East is growing to a degree that threatens the existence of a unified state.
3. The intertwining, merging, and interpenetration of various elites — arising from daily interaction (social circles) — creates a particularly favorable environment for the collective cover-up of lawlessness, corruption, and authoritarian rule exercised by a narrow circle of insiders, in other words: a camarilla.
4. Bringing Moscow to a state even minimally meeting the requirements expected of the capital of a modern democratic state would require investment that is nowhere on the historical horizon.
5. Experience has shown that no administrative innovations are capable of fundamentally changing the mindset of hardened Soviet bureaucracy. A market economy does not improve Soviet Power. On the contrary, Soviet Power, having drunk its fill of free billions, suppresses and strangles the market — above all by substituting administrative impunity for competition.
6. Russia will not survive another revolution. Meanwhile, in a large city, coups (like those of February, October, and August) become far too easy an undertaking, manageable by literally a few thousand people. As a result, a small part of the population imposes its own order on the entire nation.
Is there a way out of this situation? There is, and a perfectly obvious one. Moscow and Russia's center of government must be separated as quickly as possible. Moscow will, of course, remain where it is. But governing the country requires a new capital. And not right next door to the old one, but somewhere in the middle of Russia — in the Urals, in Western Siberia.
It is hard to enumerate all the advantages of such a solution, while the current state of affairs is hopeless. A city specifically planned and built to serve the government would serve not itself but the country. In it, the long-familiar privileges would wither away — from special clinics and Rublyovka highways to special sirens and motorcade lanes. Every one of its car horns would sound like "special," every road would be a government road. Its population would consist of professional (and non-partisan) civil servants. Deputies would come and go. And perhaps we would live to see the day when our presidents, having served their term, would stop clinging to Moscow and learn to go home.
Perhaps the most significant of the possible objections is money. And perhaps the most surmountable. Ask any architect — the answer will be: building a capital from scratch is simpler and cheaper. And the value of the countless buildings currently occupied by the government in Moscow is so great that selling them into private ownership, if it does not fully cover the costs, will at least make them very modest. In any case, Ingosstrakh would buy the Lubyanka building with delight and generosity.
The government suffers from migraines, cursing petrodollars. Creating a major center in the heart of Russia would not stoke inflation, but would generate masses of jobs and sharply increase the capitalization of the mineral wealth and land holdings of Siberia and the Far East. Not immediately, but the flight of Russians from places where the Japanese would be working miracles would come to an end.
And if the journey to Paris is three times longer from the new capital, the flight to Tokyo or Beijing will be shortened by exactly the same amount. They do fly to Tokyo, after all. When we become wiser and wealthier, they will fly to us too.