Crime and No Punishment: Money, Violence and the Neoliberal Transformation of Moscow

Abstract

Over the last two decades, mostly under the mayorship of Yurii Mikhailovich Luzhkov but also more recently under the administration of Sergei Semenovich Sobianin, Moscow has been subjected to a deep and often merciless transformation, comparable only to Stalin’s sweeping modernization program of the city during the 1930s. Until very recently the centre of the Soviet world, the Russian capital today remains, in different ways, the seat of a highly authoritarian and corrupt political and economic system. After the great (and brutal) transformations of the 1990s, today’s Moscow is the urban setting of a Wild West variant of neoliberal capitalism, a space of extreme social tensions and inequalities and the hub for myriad criminal groups with far-reaching and extensive ties to the international political economy. Moscow, the historical home of several empires, is today a capital of billionaires and paupers, of a growing but still frail middle class whose living conditions mark a sharp contrast to those of the rest of the country, a key centre of international investment and one of the world’s main sources of dirty money ready to be to be laundered in Lichtenstein, Switzerland, London or Cyprus (though these days, Cyprus is admittedly a less attractive haven for Russian funds).