Economist.com Cities Guide: Moscow Briefing - September 2005

News this month

Judges judged

Three former federal judges were sentenced in August to lengthy prison terms for illegally commandeering 71 apartments in Moscow, worth $2.5m, in the late 1990s. The convictions related to a scam run by the judges to steal the apartments of people who had died but left no instructions for passing on their property. The judges worked with a businessman who has since been sentenced to 12 years for falsifying documents in which relatives of the dead surrendered their claim to the properties. The judges then authorised the illegal documents for bribes of between $3,000 and $5,000 each. The judge who delivered the verdict (which took six days to read) condemned the actions of the defendants and said their crimes “undermined the authority of the power of the court”.

Poles apart

Diplomatic tensions increased between Russia and Poland, after two Polish embassy officials were attacked on separate occasions in Moscow. The incidents have been seen as retaliation for a Warsaw mugging of three sons of Russian diplomats. The Polish victims were attacked in broad daylight on August 7th and 10th, and both required brief hospitalisation.

Not to be outdone by Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, who had denounced the Warsaw mugging as an “unfriendly act”, Stefan Meller, the Polish ambassador, filed a formal complaint with Russia's foreign ministry and expressed concern that the attacks were politically motivated. A third attack on a Polish journalist a day later did little to allay his fears. The two presidents then worked to patch things up on the telephone. Arrests have since been made in Warsaw in response to the original muggings, and Moscow’s streets seem a little safer for Poles.

Restoration comedy

The long-awaited restoration of the Bolshoi theatre’s main stage hit a stumbling block in August, when German Gref, Russia’s finance minister, announced that there might not be enough government money to complete the three-year project. The renovation of the 180-year-old building was supposed to bring the crumbling theatre up to the standards of London’s Royal Opera House or New York’s Metropolitan. But the cost of the work is now estimated to be $900m, and Mr Gref has asked the theatre's management to explore ways of reducing costs by about two-thirds.

The setback has angered Moscow's cultural elite, and the project’s chief architect has said he will refuse to participate if the refit goes ahead with a reduced budget. It all sounds eerily familiar, echoing the controversy over the facelift given to the 19th-century Manezh Exhibition Hall, which incensed art historians with its speed and failure to attend to historical detail.

The power of youth

Youth politics are fashionable in Russia, or so various political powerbrokers want the city to believe. Hot on the heels of the Kremlin-sponsored “Nashi” (Ours), a slightly sinister new national youth movement, Yury Luzhkov, Moscow's mayor, has set up a Moscow rival called “Civic Change”. The city authorities have given the movement a building in central Moscow and a budget of 3m roubles ($105,000) for the first three months.

A senior official responsible for the city’s youth affairs described the programme as “a series of educational seminars for urban students...about the foundations of civic duty, patriotism and love for the motherland.” The target group appears to be the 800,000 students studying in Moscow’s institutes of higher education. Whether these attempts to influence the capital's young will work, and whether they can effectively prevent youth-led revolutions such as those in Georgia and Ukraine—the spectres of which frighten the Russian authorities—remains to be seen.

Parking prices

Beset as it is by bureaucratic impediments, living in Moscow has always had one saving grace: the ability to park anywhere, including on pavements, for a negligible cost. But official parking restrictions are on the rise, and in early August city authorities decided to increase the cost of parking in central Moscow's 4,700 official spots from 11 to 40 roubles ($0.39-1.40) per hour. To seasoned Russian drivers, the hike seems laughable, since the unscrupulous parking attendants who monitor the central spaces often demand at least 100 roubles per hour.

In order to combat this gap between official and “street” prices, the government has raised the monthly salaries of the attendants threefold, and set up a hotline to field complaints. A senior city transport official promised that these innovations were only the beginning, though whether Moscow is ready for London-style traffic wardens and congestion-charging zones is debatable.

Catch if you can

September 2005

Summer activities

Ongoing

Despite the end of Moscow's theatre and concert season, and the swift departure of many for the clean air of dacha-land, there are cultural consolation prizes for the city-dwellers left behind. Consider strolling down the Stary Arbat or around the flower-bedecked Bulvars (boulevards), taking in the street musicians and itinerant portrait painters. Or head for Sparrow Hills, ascending to the panoramic lookout at the top via the creaking ski lift. Or make your way down the Moskva river on a pleasure boat from Kievskaya station in the west, to the tranquil Novospassky monastery in the east, and see if you can pinpoint all of Stalin’s wedding-cake Seven Sister skyscrapers en route. There are outdoor concerts at some of the faded aristocratic country estates, such as Arkhangelskoye, on the city’s outskirts.

See the Moscow Times for up-to-date outdoor concert listings in English.

More from the Moscow cultural calendar