Thinking Out Loud: Liminal Moscow

There is supposed to be a great duality between Moscow and St. Petersburg, which dates back at least as far as Tolstoy. Unfamiliar as the great man seems to have been with the naturalistic fallacy, he used Moscow, with its deeply Slavic roots and organic layout of concentric rings, to represent purity and Russianness; Petersburg, a logically planned city built by Peter I, the great Westernizing tsar, represented the unnatural and foreign.

Nowadays, this duality translates into a rivalry; there is a sense that one must be a "Moscow person" or a "Petersburg person." Seems unfair: despite its lack of organic street cred, Petersburg's advantages over Moscow are such (art, theater and music; a more relaxed or even bohemian attitude; history that has not been nearly as obscured by Soviet and post-Soviet modification either architectural or spiritual; the very fact that the government isn't there) that anyone with a soul would choose the former.

Nonetheless, I've been unable to definitively choose a side, though I've spent plenty of time in both cities. The problem is that they play fundamentally different roles in my personal narrative of Russia. Petersburg – the crown jewel of the Yale concert band tour that first took me to Russia and the site of my first summer study abroad experience – has always been a destination; Moscow has always been a gateway. I've been to Moscow upwards of a dozen, possibly twenty, times – twice for a long stay of about a month – but I can only think of one time that I wasn't passing through on my way to somewhere else. And often, it's been on my way in and out of the country.

It didn't take long for me to notice that Moscow's character is fickle. Coming from the U.S., the city feels very Russian. I notice the smells (diesel and dill!) and the Russian voices around me, the Khrushchev-era apartment blocks, the onion domes and public parks that used to be princes' estates, the old women in head scarves, the disregard for traffic laws. But coming from the provinces, it seems garishly western, with its billboards in English, European clothing stores and restaurant chains, and money and privilege on obnoxious display in every imaginable way. Either way, it's jarring. So instead of feeling like the capital and the essence of Russia, it feels liminal, a city between two states of being.

I should note that although my experience falls in line with the popular idea that Moscow isn't "real" Russia and the provinces somehow are – the provinces are where I've spent most of my time in Russia, so they define it for me – I don't really buy into the implicit value judgment. First of all, it's essentializing: what fits with our idea of the Soviet is real, and what has changed since 1991 is not? Really?

Second, it misses the point of the difference between Moscow and the provinces – it's not that Moscow chose a different path, but that it has enough money to choose anything at all. The provinces have their little bits of Moscow's modernization and conspicuous consumption, where they can afford them, but mostly they have a lot of obsolete collective farms and factories, an aging population, and government buildings full of former Party apparatchiks who stay in power and in favor with the Kremlin by maintaining the status quo and not doing anything too exciting. (But the provinces are also beautiful and fascinating and full of wonderful people! Visit them!)

In any case, I'm venturing back into that weird liminal space of Moscow on Monday, at least for a few brief hours. I'm glad; I'm not sure what it would be like to get to Kazan without getting a dose of the most – and least – Russian of cities.