I’ve recently come back from an exchange semester in Moscow. I spent four months studying at the Higher School of Economics (HSE), arguably Russia’s premier university. It was a pretty cool experience, especially since I’ve had a russophilic streak for most of my short life. It is true that recent years have shattered any lingering illusions I had about the state of the country, which, despite some substantial positive trends in recent decades, is spiralling into yet another doomed experiment in the importation of Western ideology. A century ago it was communism, now it is rightoid delusion. There is no use in extensively rehashing the arguments of Anatoly Karlin and like-minded (former) Russian nationalists (probably the most notorious psychological casualties of Putinism’s descent into idiocracy), so I’ll just stick to what I saw and my thoughts on living in Moscow. Do note that I spent virtually the entirety of my stay in there, only visiting Sergiyev Posad one short Saturday. I also booked tickets to Tula, intending to pay homage to Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana, but personal reasons compelled me to stay in Moscow the day my train departed. Planned outings to Petersburg and (probably) Kazan were likewise derailed by indecision, laziness, fear of the unknown, and the above-mentioned personal reasons.1
That being said…
By pretty much any metric, Moscow is a world-class city. It is safe, clean, rich, beautiful, enormous, easily transitable without a car, and substantially more technologically advanced than most metropolises. People versed in architecture can enjoy the enormous diversity of styles present in the city’s buildings. Pick and choose: late nineteenth-century beauties, Soviet modernism, Stalinist fanfare… The museums are excellent and plentiful; the local collections suffice to impress most art appreciators. The classical music scene is superlative. There’s many parks and a few are enormous; Moscow is a surprisingly green city, at least during the warm months.
On that same note, Moscow’s worst attribute is, in my opinion, its lack of sunlight. It is not too hard to get used to the cold, but the constant greyness of much of the year is very hard to bear.
It was once one of the most expensive cities on Earth, but exchange-rate shenanigans, the outflow of the once-substantial expat community, and years of sluggish economic growth have done much to make it cheaper. Russian friends and I agree that Mexico City is somewhat more expensive nowadays.
The lack of Westerners is odd, easy to notice. I was smoking outside a party, chatting with a friend in English, when a middle-aged Russian woman approached us and excitedly related how wonderful it was to hear English in Russia again. She spent a large amount of her time in the West and bemoaned her country’s descent into illiberalism. She explained that she was there to attend a sort of Russian version of Burning Man, at the party taking place next door. “It’s not the real thing, but…” It was cringy, but, in the grand scheme of things, scaring away annoying liberals is not conducive to empire-building.
Setting up a bank account was easy. Tinkoff, a local, fully-digital bank, delivered a debit card to my dormitory a day or two after I signed up on their website. I imagine that the nature of my stay made it easier for them to set me up, but I can’t actually remember the paperwork they asked for. Once you are set up with a local bank account, transfering funds from the rest of the world is easy via P2P crypto transactions. Russia is not a very cash-friendly country, so this step is more or less obligatory if you are staying for a while.
Economic life, outside of international transactions, goes on normally. There was no meltdown: the shops are well-stocked, inflation is, at most, in the middle teens, and unemployment is at an all-time low. A friend of mine works a consulting job at what used to be a big Western firm that left the country in 2022 and was taken over by the local management, a typical story. The economy is running dangerously hot and its medium and long-term prospects are obviously disheartening, but Russia has proven surprisingly relisient to international sanctions.
Much of the country, probably most Moscovites, sort of pretend the war in Ukraine is not happening. This is not a mobilized polity. Military propaganda and recruitment posters are easy to spot, but they aren’t omnipresent. Adam Tooze says its a society as militarized as Wilhelmine Germany or Belle Époque France; this sounds about right. Men in fatigues are reasonably rare. I believe the first time I heard someone refer to the war explicitly occurred well into my stay, when I was sharing a hospital room with an older man whose main source of entertainment was watching the news on his smartphone.This is indicative of broader trends. A close, young friend asked if I considered Crimea or the Donbass parts of Russia, which she didn’t, but reported that her dad seriously considered serving as a volunteer at the front (her mother forbid him to). I heard few references to the war at the university; none of them had a patriotic tinge. Young people are either apathetic or directly against the “special military operation.” Attitudes towards Putinism behave in a similar way.
Moscovites are temporarily embarassed Westerners, by and large. The Russian language is full of recently-imported English terms, there’s Black Friday sales, minor Halloween celebrations, and very widespread use of Instagram. English-language music is commonly heard in taxis and supermarkets; Western fashion trends are well-represented. Whatever China’s economic heft, Chinese soft power is hard to spot, outside of some signs in Chinese for the tourists’ benefit and a very small population of exchange students. Anime seems to be a big deal, however.
International tourism is virtually non-existent. After doing conventional tourism in Turkey, it felt like venturing into terra nullius. Agreeably, you feel less sheepish. Disagreeably, everything is harder to do, as an international arrival, when few people share your predicament.
Moscow is around 70% white, although Russians do look more oriental than the average European. Something like 30% of menial labour is done by immigrants, who mostly hail, as far as I understand it, from Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Taijikistan. Maybe 1% of Moscow is black; their main occupation is handing out flyers.
The composition of my student dormitory reflected Russia’s doomed geopolitical bets. Large population of Africans and Arabs, a sizeable South Asian group, smaller Latin American and East Asian contingents, and almost no Europeans. I gather this wasn’t the case before 2022 (2014?), as the building had a small library with titles in French and German. Amusingly enough, there was an American kid doing his master’s in Russia studies living at my floor. There was one single European kid doing an undergrad exchange semester at HSE: a Hungarian kid, son of a reasonably important Fidesz politician.2
Russian women do make a higher-than-average effort to look beautiful, but Russian men aren’t particularly masculine. I saw more androgynous types at HSE than at my home university.
People do smile less, but I got used to it rather quickly.
People do smoke more.
The Russian fetish for bureaucracy made me despair a couple times. It’s an ugly scar from the nightmare of the twentieth century.
The Higher School of Economics is somewhat more academically demanding than my university, but not very much so. Mathematical formalism and a (not misplaced) enthusiasm for programming languages sets it apart, but getting good grades isn’t impossible.
I spent a week at a Russian public hospital, after being diagnosed with an urgent case of pneumonia. It wasn’t a particularly new building, nor was it located in a great zone of the city, so I imagine I had a more or less average experience, for Moscow.3 I shared room with two other people, in a floor full of old, coughing people. The food was mostly edible (although rations were rather small) and the staff mostly treated me, a clueless 20-something who couldn’t speak Russian, with kindness. I was treated well and free of charge, as the parademics determined my case was an emergency. Struggling under a very severe cold, a friend tried to contact an ambulance some months later, but the system was so clogged during the winter months that she was told to wait a couple days for treatment.
Moscovites are a relatively brainy bunch. The selection on offer at the average bookshop is pretty decent, Russian translations of good books are not hard to find at all.4 That is not to say midwit fare is uncommon, but people on the metro and parks do read canonical pieces of literature more often than elsewhere. I attended a good number of classical music performances, as Moscow offers great variety and price/quality ratios. The performances weren’t packed but there were many of them and all had reasonably-sized audiences. I had a chance to see Gergiev, Berezovsky, and the Bolshoi ballet live.5 They were absolutely worth it.
That being said, it’s still a relatively normal European city of the twenty-first century. Obviously, pop culture, often of a very trashy variety, dominates high culture.
I shall end this little assortment of thoughts with Peter Hitchens’ moving eulogy to “the Russia we have lost”, for I feel and think much the same way as he does. In my heart, I believe he is too pessimistic and that I’ll come back to this country, perhaps relatively soon, to see it back on the path to normalcy.
What if after a few years of recovery and reconstruction, the lost glories of the city’s hundreds of churches could be restored, and Russia, the most moving place I ever visited or lived in, might at last become the free, happy, prosperous society it was on the edge of becoming before war and Bolshevism wrecked everything for seven long decades? So few people understand now that Lenin’s putsch of 1917 did not overthrow the Czar, who was already gone. It overthrew a new-born democracy which in the middle of a terrible war had managed to conduct the only free, fair election in Russian history.
I so wanted Russia to be given the chance to find law and liberty again. I could see, as the years went trundling past, that it could not be a simple restoration, the filth cleared away, the grime scrubbed off, the old beauties restored. The Bolshevik damage was far deeper than that. The new Russia, after seventy years of sneering official scorn for God and His angels, was often coarse and greedy. Its attempts at proper government were clumsy and frequently actually stupid. The new wealth flowed into the hands of crude and tasteless persons, rather than to gentle men and women who loved books and concerts. But even so, this was the unsurprising result of a society damaged very deep down by Communism. Given time, given exposure to the freedom of others, given the chance to rekindle the flame of Christian belief, it might yet work. The young Russians who had grown up since the end of Bolshevism often seemed to me to be admirably untouched by the horrible past, and full of possibilities. There were people with genuine civil courage.
In the meantime, I would try to put in a good word for Russia when others would not. People in the West did not know what its sufferings and sorrows had been, or how reasonably concerned its people were about their security, so many times invaded, massacred, burned, starved and destroyed. They allowed anti-Russian prejudice to close their minds to the undoubted virtues of a brave and stoical people. My time there had utterly changed my life, and for the better, made me a fuller, more adult person than I could ever otherwise have been. It would never leave me. The least I could do was to urge that we keep our channels of communication open, and not make everything worse by treating the whole country as a fearful pariah. I noticed as I made this case that nobody was listening. Even so, I felt it was a case worth making. I still do. If anyone had listened to me and the others who made these warnings, this might not have happened.
But a few days ago, I put away all these hopes. By invading Ukraine, Vladimir Putin confirmed all the worst anti-Russian prejudices in the world. He condemned his country to a new dingy period of isolation, censorship, and institutional stupidity. He showed that those who believed he had ultimately been shaped in the iniquity of Soviet malice were right. If a recovery is to come, it will not come in his time, or thanks to him. It probably will not come at all. The Russia we have lost turns out to be even more lost than it was. The curse placed on the land by Lenin and Stalin will turn out not to have been lifted after all as I fondly hoped it had been thirty years ago. For me, therefore, this is a time of temporal despair. Every morning is gray, as I wake to the realization that one of the most important desires of my life will now definitely never come true. I had hoped to make perhaps two or three more visits to Moscow to see life improving and civilization returning. Now I don’t think I shall ever go there again.
Yes, yes, I know very well that these small and insignificant personal disappointments are nothing compared to the griefs of those now under Russian bombardment, and of those in Russia now realizing that their state has destroyed their future. We need, once again, the Consolation of All Sorrows, and as usual it will not come from any temporal source.
What else is there to say?
An adventurous mindset is a great thing for a youth to have, but it doesn’t come naturally for many. Try to cultivate it.
A very cursory Google search threw up at least one accusation of corruption. Rightoids will be rightoids.
Friends reported that the public healthcare system was much worse in the regions, which sounds true.
Not that its a towering work of literature, but copies of 1984 were omnipresent. Grimly amusing, although it would of course be inaccurate to call the Russian state totalitarian (an actual totalitarian Russia would have crushed Ukraine in a few days).
Matsuev and Lugansky also had performances, but they conflicted with my schedule and were quite expensive, although in all likelihood worth every penny.
Thanks for your report. How lucky you were to study there.
I don't understand Hicthens' attack on Putin though. Why is the West so anti-Russian to begin with? My guess is they are anti-gay pride, anti-feminist and against 3rd world migration or multiculturalism. So, why would a professed conservitive want that in Russia (which he apparently wants to preserve)? Does he want race and sex quotas in Russian ballet or military? Or hate crime industry? Does he want George Floyd worship-riots, insane crime and Kneeling Nancy? LOL.