[aix1]

As someone who grew up in the Soviet Union (during a later period), I found it really interesting to look at this photographs.

One thing worth pointing out: Moscow was very different from the rest of the country. It had better housing and infrastructure, the shops were stocked far better than elsewhere in the country, it had more grandiose architecture and richer cultural life and so on.

In many is ways it was the country's showcase city.

[sherr]

Nothing has changed in that regard. Moscow still receives much more monetary attention than any other city in Russia.

[nephihaha]

Moscow plus Leningrad plus Vladivostok. The rest fought for the crumbs.

[konart]

>The rest

Not exactly. While it is true that Moscow had (has) more than any other city in the union - capitals of the republics had more that russian province, for example.

You'd rather live in Dushanbe (where I was born) rather then in russian city of the same population.

[SoftTalker]

So, the same as any big urban center anywhere has better infrastructure and cultural life compared to villages and rural areas? Or was it particularly pronounced in the USSR?

[anovikov]

It's very different, varies country by country. In UK everything is concentrated in London, in France most is concentrated in Paris but to a lower degree, there is no pronounced hyper-center of everything in Spain - Madrid is top #1 but Barcelona is close 2nd and there is a lot of business and a lot of stuff going on in Santander, Valencia, Alicante, and so on. In Italy Rome and Milan are about equal. In Germany there is totally nothing resembling a dominating city at all. In US it's mostly coasts vs flyover states, hyper-centers do exist by they specialise by industry - everything about tech is in the Valley, everything about pharma is in Philadelphia, and so on - but in Russia, Moscow is a hyper-center of everything, of every industry.

If you are in software startup field and not in the Valley you don't know what you are doing.

If you are in Russia and not in Moscow, you don't know what you are doing - regardless of what exactly are you trying to do.

[ido]

Not just the USSR, Warsaw Pact countries in general (e.g. Prague was disproportionally well funded in Czechoslovakia in comparison to other cities - even accounting for its size and population) and probably authoritarian countries in general tend towards it. Of course in general the biggest cities/capital cities tend to be richer than smaller/less important cities but the comment was about the magnitude of the phenomenon in the USSR.

[bediger4000]

In the USA, we tend to hear a lot about "urban/rural divides". There's always a lot of calls to narrow or erase that divide. The efforts are usually directed towards increasing rural access (to anything, broadband, healthcare, schooling, etc), rather than making improvements for both urban and rural problems.

[IAmBroom]

So a Potemkin capital, as it were?

[Insimwytim]

"Potemkin village" - a fake propaganda narrative, created by Saxony's embassy clerk Helbig. He conveniently told that story in Hamburg, a decade later after the trip (which he wasn't a part of).

Charles-Joseph de Ligne (who has been part of said journey) regarded such tales as preposterous.

[tokai]

No, cause it wasn't a fake facade. Moscow was (and is) petter on most parameters than the rest of the country.

[PaulHoule]

(1) Most countries have a lot of concentration of population, power, wealth in a capital city, for instance Tokyo, Paris, London, etc. In the 1970s it was generally understood that this causes political instability and increases vulnerability to thermonuclear weapons, see

https://books.google.com/books/about/Dispersing_Population.h...

By the 1990s it was a forgotten cause: countries weren't willing to give up a few points of efficiency facing the fierce competition and the cold war was over.

(2) Russia was particularly extreme at that time because, under Communism, Russia was transforming from a mostly agrarian country with spots of advanced thinking (Russian Futurists, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky) to an industrial powerhouse that could challenge the United States. Ironically if there was anything about the Stalin years it was that Russia was highly successful at capital accumulation and around that time many "non-aligned" and less developed countries like India were hoping the USSR could help them do the same.

Karl Marx was mainly interested in the advanced industrial "core" but Lenin was more interested in "peripheral" countries that were exploited by the "core". The USSR was more about winning the international competition than it was about advancing the working class and the military threat from Germany, US and other countries meant the USSR had to develop as rapidly as possible so it reproduced an imperialist system internally with a division of labor that advanced industry around Moscow and a few other centers at the expense of the countryside, see

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kulak#Dekulakization

If you're interested in the spatial division of the world you really need to read

https://www.amazon.com/Modern-World-System-I-Immanuel-Waller...

and the rest of the four volume set it is a part of.

[shrubble]

I read or was told that 60% of the Russian economy flows through Moscow in one way or another.