The inhabitants of Moscow are overwhelmingly of Russian ethnicity; the largest minority groups are Ukrainians, Belarusians, Armenians, Azerbaijanis, and Tatars. In addition, it is estimated that there were about a few hundred thousand undocumented immigrants from Vietnam, Afghanistan, and China residing in the Moscow area at the beginning of the 21st century.
Many residents of Moscow were not born in the city but migrated there during its rapid growth. Beginning in 1932, the Soviets restricted migration to Moscow, instituting a system of compulsory residence registration widely known as propiska. The system’s barriers were on many occasions sidestepped through marriage or through apartment exchanges (whereby a Muscovite would trade his communal apartment for one in another Russian city). Another option for those desiring to move to Moscow was to become a limitchik (an unrestricted migrant worker who usually performed the menial jobs scorned by native Muscovites). In the 1970s about two-fifths of new migrants were limitchiks, but that proportion declined in the 1980s. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was a time period when limitchiks could qualify for housing registration, which usually meant they received a room in a communal apartment; however, many limitchiks left the city as the removal of state price controls made basic living expenses unaffordable. The workers who remained usually lived in substandard conditions. The allowances made for limitchiks were discontinued altogether in the 1990s; after 1994 the limitchik disappeared as a phenomenon.
This cessation of migrant labour in the city, along with the nationwide price liberalization, caused an economic downturn in Moscow, as in other large Russian cities. At that time some Muscovites believed that it would be easier to eke out a living outside the city. By 1995, however, this downward trend stopped, and growth of the city’s population resumed. Throughout the 1990s Moscow’s population swelled by about 2 million, to 10 million inhabitants. At the beginning of the 21st century, migration to Moscow remained strong, but former administrative restrictions on migration had been overshadowed by economic ones; Moscow had become one of the most expensive cities in the world to live in. The privatization of real estate and the decline in public housing construction made the acquisition of new dwellings extremely difficult.
Practices for monitoring temporary employees also changed. While under the Soviet regime limitchiks were accounted for more or less accurately, in post-Soviet Moscow the guest workers who replaced them were not. Workers’ permits were limited to citizens of the Commonwealth of Independent States until 2007, when a new law allowed migrants from both the Commonwealth and other countries (migrants from the former being about seven times as numerous as the latter) to receive official employment authorization. Since 2000 the number of guest labourers (working mainly in the construction industry) has exceeded the city’s annual quota for temporary visas. As a result, efforts have been made to control illegal entrance into Moscow, including requiring all non-Russians to carry identification cards in order to register for work.
Moscow has an aging population. In the early 21st century the death rate was almost double the birth rate, a larger proportional discrepancy than that of any other Russian city. Like most of Russia, Moscow has a low rate of fertility. Many older Muscovites have chosen to remain in the city, while many young people are deterred from moving there because of its high cost of living and housing. Life expectancy is higher there than in other cities in the country. As a result, about one-fourth of Moscow’s population is over 55 years old.
Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the free-market reforms of the early 1990s, Moscow’s economy has undergone a dramatic transformation. Most notably, although a disproportionate share of national wealth was concentrated there under the Soviets, the degree of concentration has significantly increased since 1990. The city accounted for about one-tenth of Russia’s wealth in the 1990s; by 2001 Moscow’s share had grown to one-fourth (not including undocumented and unreported transactions). While the reported average salary in Moscow is significantly higher than the national average, salaries account for less than one-fourth of Muscovites’ aggregate personal earnings, compared with about three-fifths for Russians as a whole. The remainder of Muscovites’ earnings usually comes from entrepreneurial activities and from renting out personal property (apartments or dachas).
The city’s financial and research-and-development sectors (as well as what remains of its engineering and manufacturing sectors) are among the country’s most advanced. Women make up more than half the workforce. They constitute the vast majority of workers in the textile and food-processing industries, and they predominate in the teaching and medical professions.
The manufacturing and engineering sectors that dominated the Soviet capital’s economy shrank dramatically in the 1990s and were largely replaced by service activities. As a result, the structure of the labour force had to adapt. Central planning was meant to slow down this shift, but the number of those actively employed in manufacturing in Moscow decreased by half from the late 1980s into the ’90s. Rapid privatization left many factories in the hands of owners who chose to invest their earnings either abroad or in the retail, banking, telecommunications, and research and development sectors of the city, rather than in modernizing their plants. Yet, Moscow’s highly skilled labour force by and large quickly adjusted to the changes in the city’s economy. Moreover, a dividend of this precipitous change was the end of the service shortages that once characterized the city.
Despite the decline of manufacturing in the post-Soviet period, Moscow remains the largest industrial centre in Russia. It dominates an industrial region that extends east and northeast to the Volga between Yaroslavl and Nizhny Novgorod (formerly Gorky). Moscow’s industries generally rely more on the city’s skilled labour force than on raw materials. Many of Moscow’s factories are small, long-established plants that make highly specialized items.
Some of Moscow’s most important industries remain engineering and metalworking, which together employ a significant share of the industrial workforce. Ball bearings are manufactured both for the increasingly important auto-making industry and for other purposes. Another major branch of engineering is the manufacture of machine tools, particularly grinding lathes, precision cutting tools, and machinery for the textile industry. Precision engineering is highly developed and is noted for measuring and other instruments, as well as for watches. Aerospace design and manufacture is one of the most important engineering sectors in some of Moscow’s satellite towns, especially in Korolyov.
Moscow’s large chemical industry was originally geared to produce dyestuffs for the important textile industry (many types of natural-fibre and synthetic cloth are manufactured in the city). The chemical industry’s product line has been expanded, however, to include synthetic industrial rubber and rubber tires, paints, plastics, pharmaceutical goods, and perfumes. Many of its chemical products are derived from Moscow’s oil refinery, which processes petroleum piped from the Volga-Urals oil field.
Food processing is one of the few manufacturing-related industries that expanded and modernized following privatization. The industry, which consists of both giant combines and smaller concerns, accounts for about one-fourth of Moscow’s industrial labour force. Moscow has become Russia’s leader in terms of foreign investment in food processing. Several U.S.-based food-processing giants have opened plants in Moscow. Among the city’s most successful firms is the Kristall Distillery, which produces the renowned Stolichnaya and other brands of vodka.
Furniture making is part of a varied timber-processing industry, which also makes pulp and paper. Some timber is used in the vast construction industry, which includes not only the large numbers of workers actually employed in building but also those engaged in making building materials, such as reinforced concrete sections, glass, and bricks. Moscow’s printing and publishing industry is the country’s largest supplier of books, journals, and newspapers.
As the capital and largest city of Russia, Moscow, not surprisingly, is the country’s chief commercial and financial centre. The privatization of the Russian economy spurred the development of a substantial financial sector, including dozens of banks and several securities exchanges. Most foreign investment in the Russian economy passes through Moscow’s financial institutions. As the hub of Russia’s transportation network, Moscow also enjoys unchallenged supremacy as the country’s centre for domestic and foreign commerce.
The city’s retailing facilities are frequented not only by the inhabitants of Moscow itself and its satellite towns but also by people from throughout the country. Moscow’s consumer goods sector suffered in the early 1990s when the market was opened to inexpensive, higher-quality imports; however, at the start of the 21st century, about one-third of all goods produced in Russia were sold in Moscow. The Muscovites have heightened purchasing power, and dozens of traders buy foreign-made (usually Chinese, Turkish, and Polish) clothing and footwear in Moscow and resell the merchandise in outlying Russian provinces. This activity is supported by the city’s numerous melkooptovye (intermediary markets). Moscow’s shops offer a wide range of goods and are crowded with customers. Many of the stores are fairly large, particularly the department stores. Some of the popular department stores are Children’s World, the Central Department Store, and the Moscow Department Store. The best-known and most heavily patronized of them is GUM, the direct descendant of the medieval trading rows. In the 1990s a spacious underground shopping mall was built under Manezhnaya Square. An important part of Moscow’s retail trade is carried out at markets where farmers and small-scale traders sell fruit, vegetables, meat, liquor, and other goods. Many of these markets are run by individuals who are not ethnically Russian, primarily people from Transcaucasia.
All homes in Moscow are supplied with heat and electricity. Electrical generating stations are fired by natural gas, which is piped via a grid system from fields in Siberia and elsewhere. Large gas-storage facilities have been constructed near Moscow, and a pipeline surrounds the city. An older heating plant lies close to the Kremlin, and a newer one is located north of Moscow Ring Road. Electrical power also comes from nuclear plants and hydroelectric stations on the Volga River. Other power sources include the large thermal stations at Konakovo to the northwest and Kashira to the south.
As a world-renowned capital, Moscow has become a popular tourist destination. Free-market reforms have encouraged the construction of new hotels and the modernization of existing hotels in the city. The government also opened new tourist offices and refurbished many cultural centres, places of worship, and shopping districts.
Moscow has thousands of eating places, many of them inexpensive cafeterias serving the city’s workers. Other dining venues include cafés and pubs, along with more-exclusive restaurants specializing in ethnic cuisine (Chinese, Indian, American, Italian, Irish, Georgian, Tatar, Jewish, among others) that opened during the 1990s.
Moscow is the hub of the Russian rail network. Russian freight transport is heavily dependent on the railways, which are also vital to passengers, especially to the tens of thousands who commute daily on the train lines between Moscow and its suburbs. Trunk lines radiate out from the city in all directions. The first in operation was the St. Petersburg line, opened in 1851. Others include the Savyolovo line, running north to the Volga and on as a secondary route to St. Petersburg; the Yaroslav line, which is connected by way of the Trans-Siberian route to Vladivostok; the Nizhny Novgorod line, linked to Kirov; the Kazan line, the most direct route to the Urals and Siberia; the Ryazan line, leading to Central Asia and the Caucasus region; the Pavelets line, a secondary route to the European south and the Caucasus; the Kursk line, the main route south to Crimea and the Caucasus; the Kiev line to Ukraine, Hungary, and Slovakia; the Smolensk line to Minsk, Warsaw, and Berlin; and the Riga line to the Baltic. All these lines are now electrified—notably the Trans-Siberian and those to St. Petersburg, Kiev, and the Donets Basin (Donbass)—as are all suburban-zone lines, which carry the heavy commuter traffic. To link the radial lines, the Moscow Little Ring Railway was built in 1908 within the city; this has been supplemented by the Greater Moscow Ring Railway at a distance of some 25 to 40 miles (40 to 65 km) from the city.
Moscow is a major river port. The canalized Moscow River is able to accommodate only smaller craft, but the Moscow Canal, built by forced labour in 1932–37, is navigable for ships of seagoing size. The canal runs from the river, upstream of the city, northward to the Khimki and Ucha reservoirs and, continuing northward, through the Klin-Dmitrov Ridge to the Volga at Ivankovo. The Volga’s various canal links open up Moscow to all the seas bordering European Russia. The capital has three large river ports mainly for freight and a terminal for passengers.
Moscow is similarly the hub of the Russian airline network, and the number of passengers rises steadily each year. Sheremetyevo-2 to the north is the main airport for international flights, with direct links to many world capitals and other foreign cities. Domodedovo, 28 miles (45 km) to the south, the largest of Moscow’s airports, also handles international traffic. Sheremetyevo-1 handles mostly domestic flights, as does Vnukovo, 15 miles (24 km) to the southwest, and the much smaller Bykovo, 20 miles (32 km) to the southeast.
Compared with other large cities in most developed countries, Moscow historically had few privately owned cars; however, since the 1990s, private ownership of vehicles has increased dramatically, leading to significant traffic congestion. The situation is further complicated by the lack of parking facilities. As a result, mass transit has played and continues to play a crucial role in the lives of many Muscovites. The most important element in Moscow’s transportation system is the Metropolitan (Metro) subway. Begun in 1935, it is renowned for the elaborate architecture of its stations, especially the older ones, which are highly decorated with marble, stained glass, statuary, and chandeliers. Trains usually arrive at three-minute intervals, although the wait is even shorter during rush hours. The network copies the city street pattern, with a series of radial lines linked by a single ring subway. Although the lines extend to most parts of the city, the stations are spaced far apart, so that it is usually necessary to use them in conjunction with bus, trolley, and streetcar lines.
The inflexibility of fixed-line forms of transport has posed other problems. Although Moscow has, for the most part, a dense network of surface transport, new routes sometimes tend to lag behind housing construction, so that certain new suburbs are rather poorly served for some time after their completion. One solution has been to replace streetcar lines with bus routes. In the mid-2000s the city government responded to growing automobile traffic problems by approving a project to convert sections of inner city railway back to passenger service (the railway had stopped carrying passengers in the 1930s to solely transport freight) and to renovate the city’s tram lines. Fares on all forms of transport are similar to those in other major cities but are more expensive than they were under Soviet rule.
Moscow and St. Petersburg are the only cities in Russia whose administrations are detached from those of their respective oblasti (provinces). Therefore, Moscow’s city government is not hierarchically inferior to that of Moscow province. Under Soviet rule, the interests of the city took precedence, but since the 1990s the provincial government has become more involved. For example, in the early 2000s, more housing was commissioned in Moscow province than in the city for the first time.
In the period after the 1917 Revolution, Moscow was divided into 11 rayony (sectors). With the expansion of the municipal limits in 1960, the number of sectors increased to 17. The subsequent massive building program and redistribution of population from central areas to the suburbs necessitated the creation of new divisions in 1968 and again in 1976, when the number of sectors reached 30. As the city population increased, the number of sectors continued to grow. In the 1990s the municipal division changed yet again; this time Moscow was divided into 10 okruga (districts).
Although the centre of national government is the Kremlin, buildings of various ministries and government departments are scattered fairly widely across the inner city. The Duma, the state assembly, has its legislative chambers in the former Gosplan building at Okhotny Ryad. Several important ministries and federal agencies also have their headquarters in the White House, now the headquarters of the Russian government. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs is in a vysotka of the Stalin period on the Garden Ring. Several ministries are housed in tower buildings on Novyi Arbat Prospekt, and a number of foreign embassies have been transferred to the southwestern suburbs near the Vorobyëvy Hills, though many are still located in the city centre. Moscow also serves as headquarters of most national bodies and organizations.
The city suffers from a housing shortage, and regulations on construction and housing became stricter as the real estate market started reaching its peak in the late 1990s. Since the ’90s Moscow’s sanitation system has become more efficient, and the government has employed thousands of street cleaners and garbage collectors (mostly immigrants). Most waste is disposed of in the dozens of large landfills in outlying areas, but space in these landfills has been diminishing. In response, the city has passed legislation to limit the amount of waste produced by businesses. The amount of overall recycled waste in Moscow is low. Well-kept parks, manicured lawns, and flower beds dot the city.
The city’s police force is administered under the Russian Ministry of the Interior (Ministerstvo Vnutrennikh Del; MVD) and is responsible for maintaining public order. The MVD’s militia is used for neighbourhood law enforcement and crowd and traffic control. City officials and police have been known to accept bribes, especially in the enforcement of traffic regulations.
Moscow is fully equipped with the health services of a modern city. Although the quality of health care had deteriorated in the 1990s following the collapse of the Soviet Union, it had improved by the end of the decade as state budgets and salaries increased and new equipment was purchased. However, much of Moscow’s elite prefers private health care facilities or travels abroad for medical treatment. Hundreds of clinics in Moscow, both public and private, offer medical, dental, and maternity services. Medical care is also provided by specialty hospitals and medical research institutions. Perhaps the most prominent of the city’s hospitals is the Botkinskaya, founded in 1911. As in the rest of Russia, public health care facilities in Moscow are free.
Moscow has an exceptionally large concentration of educational establishments, and the number of universities increased in the 1990s. At the pre-university level, schools serving the city’s own population include those for handicapped children, special foreign language schools, and boarding schools. For children below school age (age 6 in Russia) there are nurseries and day care centers; some of them are attached to individual places of employment, which permits parents more freedom to work. Moscow’s higher educational institutions draw students from throughout the country.
Out of the dozens of universities in the city, Moscow State University (1755) and Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia (1960; formerly the Patrice Lumumba Peoples’ Friendship University) are the largest and best-known. Moscow State University’s student services were originally housed in the old buildings facing Manezhnaya Square, near the Kremlin; now its academic departments and administrative offices are located in the Vorobyëvy Hills in a complex of buildings dominated by a 34-story edifice in the Stalin-period style. This building houses the central administration, the Museum of Earth Science, and accommodations for thousands of students. In 1970–78 two other humanities buildings were constructed. Peoples’ Friendship University, with its main building southwest of the city centre, has a large international student population, as well as students from most ethnic groups of the former Soviet Union. A large percentage of its students are registered for correspondence courses.
Among the specialized higher educational institutions are the Moscow K.A. Timiryazev Agricultural Academy in northern Moscow and the Moscow P.I. Tchaikovsky Conservatory, where some of the world’s finest musicians have received their training. Also important are the Moscow D. Mendeleev Institute of Chemical Technology, the Moscow N.E. Bauman State Technical University, and the Russian Academy of Theatre Arts. Other notable institutions of higher learning include Moscow State Open University and Moscow University for the Humanities.
Moscow is home to a formidable array of highly specialized scientific research institutions. The Experimental Research Institute of Metal-Cutting Machine Tools is concerned with industrial research. The Moscow Institute of Aviation Technology, the Moscow Institute for Railway Engineers, and the Central Research Institute of Automobile Engineering produce specialists for those particular industries and are closely associated with Moscow’s local industry. Linked to the research bodies are many design bureaus, including an institute that designs hydroelectric power projects and an institute for the planning of metallurgical plants. One of the more prestigious institutions had been the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Presidium of which is located in a building on Leninsky Prospekt south of Gorky Park. Attempts are underway to restore its erstwhile reputation, which has suffered from lack of funds. In general, state funding for research has declined since the 1990s. As a result, a significant number of Moscow research personnel migrated to western Europe and North America. Many, however, continue to be officially affiliated with their home institutions.
Foremost among Moscow’s libraries is the Russian State Library (formerly the V.I. Lenin Library), one of the world’s largest. There are also a number of specialty libraries.