Megacity Moscow
The post-industrialized world is a depopulated wasteland.
Within it lies a city. Outside the boundary walls, the blight and the cursed villages. Inside the walls, the cursed city. Stretching from ____ . An unbroken concrete landscape. ___ million people living in the ruin of the old world. And the megastructures of the new one. Megablocks. Megahighways. Megacity Moscow.
Convulsing. Choking. Breaking under its own weight.
Citizens in fear of the chinovnik. The gopnik. The Georgian gang.
Only one thing fighting for order in the chaos.
The bloggers. The Telegram channels. Some dudes on YouTube.
**
Russia’s Megacity is getting bigger and this is a catastrophe long in the making.
Using the latest census data provided above, a fellow Telegram buddy of mine made the following analysis:
The population of Москвы according to the census:
1989 - 8 769 117
2002 - 10 382 754
2010 - 11 503 501
2021 - 13 010 112
Мособласть (Moscow region):
1989 - 6 693 623
2002 - 6 618 538
2010 - 7 095 120
2021 - 8 524 665
Moscow the city and Moscow the region together:
1989 - 15 462 740
2002 - 17 001 292
2010 - 18 598 621
2021 - 21 534 777
Total growth:
1989 - 2002: +1 538 552
2002 - 2010: +1 597 329
2010 - 2021: +2 936 156
Т.е. по мере увеличения благосостояния РФ прирост не только не снижается, а даже нарастает, однако в отличие от других мировых гигаполисов процент русских остаётся стабильно выше 90, вроде даже подрос по сравнению с СССР.
(The percent of Russians as opposed to non-Russians remains higher than 90% - better than it was in the USSR)
Кроме того, все эти числа не учитывают ещё и маятниковую миграцию из русских областей на вахту и мигрантов из-за рубежа, так что к реально находящимся в Москве людям можно смело прибавлять ещё миллионов 5 населения, что в общей сложности даёт 26-28млн.
(Taking into account other factors, it is possible to calculate that the real number of people working in and around Megacity Moscow is 26-28 million.)
А если сюда приплюсовать центры соседних областей (Тверь, Ярославль, Владимир, Рязань, Тула, Калуга) со своими агломерациями, между которыми и Москвой также очень сильны экономико-демографические связи, то там уже за 30млн человек лезет.
(If we expand our conceptualization of the economic net that surrounds Moscow like the cities of Tver, Vladimir, Ryazan, Tula, Kaluga, then we’re talking about 30 million people living in Megacity Moscow.)
Wow.
But what is driving this cancerous growth? Well, different periods have different drivers of growth. During the USSR period, the Communists waged war on the countryside and destroyed the village system. This is similar to what happened in England centuries earlier during the push for industrialization. The dispossessed peasants were either forced onto the collective farms or they were herded into the cities where overcrowding resulted.
Then, after the second world war, another effort to move people into the cities and into factories was undertaken in the USSR. Temporary housing was hastily constructed and the depressing commieblocks are the result of this effort. To be fair, some peasants liked their new commieblocks, but this was likely because the countryside had been so devastated prior to the second urbanization effort and city life had always been romanticized by those who had no experience of it. Soon after though, the authorities tried to stop people from moving into the cities, but the countryside was so unappealing at that point that even with the internal migration passport controls, people did everything they could to escape the communal farms.
But what about now?
Russia’s north-west is not doing well.
What is driving the migration to the cities when the factories are largely shut down in most of the post-industrial world?
Well, in the case of Russia, there is a lot of city-to-city movement that has to be considered as well. Soviet-era forge worlds built around mono-industries are abandoned and larger cities with other industries are being moved into. Russia has a large rustbelt just like America does. So, most of the migration isn’t from the countryside to the cities but from third-tier blown-out rustbelt cities and towns to second-tier cities and from there to first-tier cities like Moscow and St. Petersburg.
The countryside, the aquifer of Slavic souls, however, is falling apart faster and faster.
There are, of course, rural communities in Russia that consciously promote a “return to the land” lifestyle. For example, Father Joseph helps Westerners move to Rostov and live in an Orthodox community there. His comments are disabled, otherwise I’d ask him for an interview. Hit me up, Father Joe!
So, what is to be done, you ask?
Well, we have an emerging interconnected city-state government paradigm emerging all over the world. The cities have always been concentrations of power, money and Liberalism, but now far more so than before. People in the cities don’t breed - they just vlog and get hooked to anti-depressants. Liberal peer-pressure converts the mealy-minded into SJWs. You see this phenomenon literally everywhere. Technology has driven the push to centralize far more than we were ever able to before and was the driving force of city growth in the past.
Technology, however, does have the potential to help us de-centralize as well. Blockchain DeFi tech, the internet in general, and DIY-enabling tech enable small communities to become more and more self-sufficient. But most people who decide to go off and homestead are more interested in growing potatoes than creating a scalable model for rural repopulation.
Cities are necessary, but only if they are managed and kept to scale. However, the temptation to lower wages, secure new housing contracts and increase the consumer base is too tempting and cities grow exponentially as a result.
As we can see for ourselves, the emerging city-state governments will be totalitarian QR code controlled environment bug-eating hellholes at the rate that things are going. Worse, the disconnected loonies living in the center of Megacity Moscow are dictating more and more policy for the entirety of Russia as the populist rural bloc continues to shrivel and die.
The basic situation is more-or-less the same everywhere.
The very rich have some kids, while the middle-class has next to none. Poorer people have more kids, but rural people seem to have the most children. Religious people also have more kids than non-religious people and tend to be more rural as well. So long as people keep moving to the cities, prices on housing will continue climbing and further depress reproduction and force people to work more for less. If the trend of people moving to cities is arrested, then the population of the cities will fall. The dynamic since ancient times has been that countryside provides population surpluses and the cities provide deficits.
Also, there is reason to believe that the benefits that scale brings start to peter out once a certain threshold is crossed. That number is hard to calculate, but some people say that, with our current level of city-planning and tech, that the number is around 3 million. After that, Megacities start suffering from inefficiency.
But so long as the countryside remains blighted, people will continue flocking to Megacity Moscow.
You have raised important points. The demographic deficit is hitting all nations, but less so in Africa and Latin America. Russia is suffering from it greatly, but all Western nations are grappling with the problem and rather unsuccessfully.
The BRICS nations recognize the economic fault lines but they too need to address the problem of population replacement levels being insufficient for their nations to remain viable entities in the future. People seem to have little hope and little confidence in their own future, and so cannot commit or will not commit to fullfilling their primary human obligation which is to reproduce. The WEF is pushing for depopulation in all kinds of manner - pandemic, Great Reset, wars, food shortages, energy shocks, inflation, unemployment, digital identity, cashless societies, etc etc. Most people do not care. They don't give a fig. The urbanization concentration in Russia and depopulation of the countryside plays into this scenario even there.
Thanks for the intelligent post.
Worldwide, cities have become cesspools. 17 years ago I took a river tour of the Yangtze just as the Three Gorges Dam was being completed. Thousands of people who had been farmers were forced by the government to move from their traditional homelands into Chongqing - where they would be hated minorities. The systems established during the Enlightenment can no longer succeed in the 21st century.