Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
the redistribution of housing space, as scores of thousands of workers upgraded to the dis-
possessed digs of the bourgeoisie.
The revolution and ensuing civil war, however, took its toll on Moscow. Political turmoil
fostered an economic crisis. In 1921 the city's factories were operating at only 10% of their
prewar levels of production. Food and fuel were in short supply. Hunger and disease stalked
the darkened city. The population dropped precipitously from two million in 1917 to just
one million in 1920. Wearied workers returned to their villages in search of respite, while
the old elite packed up its belongings and moved beyond the reach of a vengeful new re-
gime.
Stalin's Moscow
In May 1922 Lenin suffered the first of a series of paralysing strokes that removed him from
effective control of the Party and government. He died, aged 53, in January 1924. His em-
balmed remains were put on display in Moscow, St Petersburg was renamed Leningrad in
his honour, and a personality cult was built around him - all orchestrated by Josef Stalin.
The most unlikely of successors, Stalin outwitted his rivals and manoeuvred himself into
the top post of the Communist Party. Ever-paranoid, Stalin later launched a reign of terror
against his former party rivals, which eventually consumed nearly the entire first generation
of Soviet officialdom. Hundreds of thousands of Muscovites were systematically executed
and secretly interred on the ancient grounds of the old monasteries.
In the early 1930s, Stalin launched Soviet Russia on a hell-bent industrialisation cam-
paign. The campaign cost millions of lives, but by 1939 only the USA and Germany had
higher levels of industrial output. Moscow set the pace for this rapid development. Political
prisoners became slave labourers. The building of the Moscow-Volga Canal was overseen
by the secret police, who forced several hundred thousand 'class enemies' to dig the 125km-
long ditch.
The brutal tactics employed by the state to collectivise the countryside created a new
wave of peasant immigrants who flooded into Moscow. Around the city, work camps and
bare barracks were erected to shelter the huddling hordes who shouldered Stalin's industrial
revolution. At the other end, Moscow also became a centre of a heavily subsidised military
industry, whose engineers and technicians enjoyed a larger slice of the proletarian pie. The
party elite, meanwhile, moved into new spacious accommodation such as the Dom na
Naberezhnoy, on the embankment opposite the Kremlin.
