but the mayor has the power to submit bills as well as to veto legislation to which he objects. The city’s citizens elect the City Duma in direct elections for a four-year term. It comprises thirty-five members elected from Moscow’s electoral districts.
Not only is Moscow the country’s political capital, it is also the country’s major intellectual and cultural center, boasting numerous theaters and playhouses. Its attractions include the world-renowned Bolshoi Theater, Moscow State University, the Academy of Sciences, the Tretyakov Art Gallery, and the Lenin Library. Only St. Petersburg rivals it architecturally.
Not surprisingly, given its political and cultural importance, Moscow is Russia’s economic capital as well, attracting a substantial portion of foreign investment. The city is the country’s primary business center, accounting for 5.7 percent of industrial production. More importantly, it serves as the home for most of Russia’s export-import industry as well as a major hub for international and national trade routes. As a consequence, the standard of living of Muscovites is well above that of the rest of the country. All of this owes in large part to the substantial degree of economic restructuring that has occurred in the city since 1991 in response to the introduction of a market economy. There has been particularly strong growth in finance and wholesale and retail trade.
The growth of Moscow’s economy has not come without problems. Muscovites are increasingly concerned about crime as well as the plight of pensioners and the poor. They are also concerned about the strain being placed on the city’s transportation system, increasing environmental pollution caused by the increased use of automobiles, and the degradation of the city’s infrastructure, including its schools and health care system. See also: ACADEMY OF SCIENCES; ARCHITECTURE; BOLSHOI THEATER; KREMLIN; LUZHKOV, YURI MIKHAILOVICH; MOSCOW ART THEATER; MUSCOVY; ST. PETERSBURG; YURY VLADIMIROVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Colton, Timothy J. (1995). Moscow: Governing the Socialist Metropolis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Government of the City of Moscow. (2002). “Information Memorandum: City of Moscow.” «http://www. moscowdebt.ru/eng/city/memorandum».
A voluntary association chartered in 1819, the Moscow Agricultural Society was a forum for discussing agricultural policy. Its membership came mainly from the serf-owning nobility and included prominent Slavophiles of the 1850s. In the 1830s Finance Minister Egor Kankrin provided a small financial subsidy, but the society’s main support came from its members. Its meetings, exhibitions, and publications were devoted to issues of agricultural innovation, such as new crops and species of livestock and new methods of crop rotation. Its earliest activities included a model farm (khutor) near Moscow and an agricultural school. After the end of serfdom in 1861, the society’s focus turned to economic and administrative questions: taxation, the agricultural role of the new zemstvo organs of local government, the provision of agricultural credit, the creation of a Ministry of Agriculture. It cooperated with the Free Economic Society and other organizations in a multivolume study of handicraft trades (1879-1887), advocated expansion of grain exports through the construction of railroad lines and storage facilities, and promoted the mechanization of agriculture. The Moscow Agricultural Society corresponded with agricultural societies in other countries, and with local affiliates in various parts of Russia. At the beginning of the twentieth century some of its members advocated abolition of the peasant commune and the encouragement of private land ownership and a market economy. Others helped create the All-Russian Peasant Union in 1905, and later the moderate League of Agrarian Reform. The organization was dissolved after 1917, but its library was preserved in the Central State Agricultural Library of the All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences. See also: AGRICULTURE; FREE ECONOMIC SOCIETY; PEASANTRY; SLAVOPHILES; ZEMSTVO
ROBERT E. JOHNSON
Celebrating its centennial anniversary in 1998, The Moscow Art Theater (MAT) represents a twentieth- century bastion of theatrical art. MAT insured the dramatic career of Anton Chekhov, introduced European trends in stage realism to Russia, and solidified the role of the director as the artistic force behind dramatic interpretation and the united efforts of designers. MAT also significantly reformed the procedures by which plays were rehearsed and set new standards for ensemble acting that ultimately influenced theaters around the world. The majority of its productions created realistic illusions, replete with sound effects, architectural details, and archeologically researched costumes and sets.
Following the 1882 repeal of the 1737 Licensing Act, which had made Russian theater an imperial monopoly, playwright Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko (head of Moscow’s acting school, the Moscow Philharmonic Society) and actor Konstan-tin Stanislavsky (founder of the renowned theater club, The Society of Art and Literature) founded MAT as a shareholding company. Nemirovich instigated their first legendary meeting in 1897. The enterprise opened in 1898 as The Moscow Publicly Accessible Art Theater, its name embracing the founders’ idealistic hopes of providing classic Russian and foreign plays at prices that the working class could afford and fostering drama that educated the community. The first company comprised thirty-nine actors-Nemirovich’s most talented students, notably Olga Knipper, later Chekhov’s wife; Vsevolod Meyerhold, the future theatricalist director; and Ivan Moskvin, who still performed his popular 1898 role of Tsar Fyodor on his seventieth birthday in 1944-joined with Stanislavsky’s most successful amateurs, including his wife Maria Lilina and Maria Andreyeva, the future Bolshevik and wife to Maxim Gorky.
Within a few seasons, financial difficulties and lack of governmental funding forced the founders to raise ticket prices, to drop “Publicly Accessible” from their name, and reluctantly to accept the patronage of the wealthy merchant Savva Morozov. In 1902 Morozov financed the construction of their permanent theater in the art nouveau style and equipped it with the latest lighting technology and a revolving stage.
Following the 1917 revolution, MAT’s realistic productions attracted support from the liberal Commissar of Enlightenment, playwright Anatoly Lunacharsky, and Lenin (who was said to have especially admired Stanislavsky’s performance as the fussy Famusov in Alexander Griboyedov’s Woe from Wit). In 1920, MAT became The Moscow Academic Art Theater, its new adjective betokening state support. At this time, Lunacharsky also intervened on behalf of the destitute Stanislavsky in order to secure for him and his family a house with two rooms for rehearsals.
MOSCOW ART THEATER
During the 1930s, Stanislavsky strenuously objected to the appointment of Mikhail Geits (1929) as MAT’s political watchdog and to governmental pressure to stage productions with insufficient rehearsal. Believing in Stalin’s good intentions, Stanislavsky naively appealed to the Soviet leader, winning a pyrrhic victory. Stalin placed MAT under direct governmental supervision in 1931, changing its name to The Gorky Moscow Academic Art Theater one year later, despite the fact that none of Maksim Gorky’s plays had been staged since 1905. Under Stalinism, MAT received special privileges denied other artists, in return for public proof of political loyalty. Because of its past dedication to realism, MAT’s history could easily be seen as constituting the vanguard of Socialist Realism. Stalin thus turned the company into the single most visible model for Soviet theater, and Stanislavsky’s system of actor training, purged of its spiritual and symbolist components, into the sole curriculum for all dramatic schools. Press campaigns ensured this interpretation of MAT’s work, even as Stanislavsky’s continuing evolution as an artist threatened the view. Given Stanislavsky’s international renown, Stalin could not afford the public scandal that would result from his arrest. Instead, Stalin “isolated” Stanislavsky from his public image, maintaining the ailing old man in his house, the site of his internal exile (1934-1938).
Nemirovich and Stanislavsky administered the theater jointly from its inception until 1911 when Stanislavsky’s experimental stance toward acting and his growing interest in symbolist plays created unbearable hostility between them. Thereafter, Ne-mirovich managed the theater until his death in 1943, and Stanislavsky moved his experiments into a series of adjunct studios, some of which later became independent theaters. Stanislavsky continued to act for MAT until a heart attack in 1928, to direct until his death in 1938, and to influence MAT from the sidelines, as he had in 1931. He administered MAT only in Nemirovich’s absence, most notably in 1926 and 1927, when Nemirovich toured in the United States. Among the theater’s subsequent administrators, actor and director Oleg Yefremov (1927-2000) had the greatest impact on the company. He had studied with Nemirovich at the Moscow Art Theater’s
