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Evolution of the Political Landscape of Moscow as Capital

  • URBAN STUDIES
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Abstract

Political landscape includes a wide range of tangible and intangible phenomena. The appearance of a capital is not only the political history of the state imprinted in buildings and monuments, but also a reflection of the ideas of the national elite about its social support, development prospects, the outside world, and diverse social ideas about space. Material objects, which shape urban environment, representative buildings of federal and regional authorities, monuments, and memorials play a special symbolic role as the dominant categories of the matrix of new representations. The objective of the present study is to trace the stages of evolution of the most important material elements of political landscape with a case study of monuments and buildings of government institutions in Moscow. The features of the modern distribution of government buildings and monuments in the city have been considered. The historical hyperconcentration of government buildings in or near the center of the capital has been confirmed. Two large areas of their high concentration have been identified: in the area of Lubyanka, Kitai-gorod, Staraya and Novaya squares and within the Moscow City business complex. Despite the transfer of a number of federal institutions outside the center, no noticeable spatial decentralization of the administrative functions of the capital has yet occurred. The geography of the monuments follows the general patterns of the capital’s layout. Their location reveals the radial-ring and sectoral structures of the city, as well as the specialization of individual districts. The undisputed dominant features of the landscape are monuments dedicated to the heroes and events of WWII (more than 40% of the total number of monuments), which constitute one of the pillars of modern Russian identity. The significance of many of the capital’s monuments is based on a powerful long-standing discourse. Despite the erection of monuments to rehabilitated public and political figures, victims of new wars and terrorist attacks, as well as monuments with Orthodox themes, the monument landscape of the capital has not changed radically during the post-Soviet period.

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Notes

  1. Moscow is divided into 12 administrative districts, 125 rayons within them and 21 separate settlements in two districts, including the territories incorporated to the city in 2012 (the so-called New Moscow). Rayons and separate settlements are municipal entities, that is, they have elected bodies of self-government.

  2. https://kontikimaps.ru/how-old/moscow?p=h-msk (accessed July 16, 2022).

  3. The death of Stalin was considered the conditional date for dividing the Soviet period into early and late.

  4. https://vestnikstroy.ru/articles/ratings/20-krupneyshikh-stroek-moskvy-za-poslednie-10-let/ (accessed January 26, 2022).

  5. https://www.sobyanin.ru/achievements/bestcity2022 (accessed February 26, 2023).

  6. http://www.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/69914/ (ac-cessed August 26, 2023).

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors express their gratitude to the students of the Faculty of Geography of Lomonosov Moscow State University A.I. Alexandrova and A.S. Karasev for collection of the data and preparation of cartographic materials.

Funding

The article was supported by the state task of the Institute of Geography of the Russian Academy of Sciences no. AAAA-A19-119022190170-1 (FMGE-2019-0008) and the SPACEPOL project (Project-ANR-21-CE22-0023).

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  1. Institute of Geography, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia

    V. A. Kolosov & M. V. Zotova

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  1. V. A. Kolosov
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Correspondence to V. A. Kolosov or M. V. Zotova.

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Kolosov, V.A., Zotova, M.V. Evolution of the Political Landscape of Moscow as Capital. Reg. Res. Russ. 13 (Suppl 1), S40–S54 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1134/S2079970523600208

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