Moscow

Russian  Moskva city, capital of Russia. It is located in the western part of the country, about 400 miles (640 kilometres) southeast of St. Petersburg and 600 miles (970 kilometres) east of the Polish border.

Since it was first mentioned in chronicles of 1147, Moscow has played a vital role in Russian history; indeed the history of the city and of the Russian nation are closely interlinked. Today Moscow is not only the political centre of Russia but also the country's leading city in population, in industrial output, and in cultural, scientific, and educational importance. For more than 600 years Moscow has been the spiritual centre of the Russian Orthodox Church.

The capital of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.) until its dissolution in 1991, Moscow attracted world attention as a centre of Communist power; the name of the seat of the former Soviet government and successor Russian government, the Kremlin (Russian Kreml), became a synonym for Soviet authority. The dissolution of the U.S.S.R. brought economic and political change, along with a degree of uncertainty over the future, to the city.

Moscow covers an area of about 386 square miles (1,000 square kilometres), its outer limit being roughly delineated by the Moscow Ring Road. Most of the area beyond this highway has been designated as a Forest-Park Zone, or greenbelt.

Physical and human geography The landscape Site and relief

Moscow stands on the Moskva River, a tributary of the Oka and thus of the Volga, in the centre of the vast plain of European Russia. The city and its surrounding area, the Moscow oblast (administrative region), lie in the northwest corner of the most highly developed and densely populated part of Russia. Moscow lies in the broad, extremely shallow valley of the Moskva and its tributaries. The valley itself overlies a deep syncline of the Russian Platform of very ancient crystalline rocks, a granitic basement more than a mile below the present-day surface. The trough in the platform has been filled through long geologic time by sedimentary rocks, mostly of Devonian and Carboniferous age, with Jurassic series and some Cretaceous rocks nearest the surface. Hardly anywhere is the bedrock exposed on the surface.

The advances and retreats of Pleistocene glaciers deposited a thick mantle of boulder clays and morainic sands and gravels into which the sinuous Moskva River cut its wide valley in successive stages, marked by four corresponding levels. Geologically recent alluvial deposits cover their surfaces. Beside the river itself is a narrow belt of floodplain; a few feet above this is the first terrace, which yields to the successively higher second and third levels. The last of these terraces, rising up to 100–115 feet (30–35 metres) above the river, is the most extensive, and much of Moscow is built on it. Northward the third terrace merges imperceptibly with a plain of clays and sands, which slopes up very gradually to the Klin-Dmitrov morainic ridge some 40 miles (64 kilometres) north of the city. Eastward and southeastward the surface equally gradually merges into the vast, almost completely flat and very swampy clay plain of the Meshchera Lowland, which extends far beyond the city limits.

Almost everywhere surface relief is minor. The legend that Moscow is built on seven hills is an exaggeration, although there are a few small hills in and around the city centre. Only in the southwest of the city is there an upland area on Cretaceous rocks, covered by glacial morainic material. This is the Teplostanskaya Upland, which rises more than 400 feet above the Moskva River and on which is the highest elevation within Moscow's limits, 830 feet above sea level. One of the sweeping bends of the Moskva has cut into the edge of the Teplostanskaya Upland a steep cliff, the Lenin Hills (also known as the Sparrow Hills), from the top of which there are fine panoramic views of the city.

The human imprint

Long occupation has extensively altered the natural setting. The “cultural layer,” consisting of debris of buildings demolished long ago and of other materials deposited by humans, is up to 50 feet deep in some parts of central Moscow. Almost all the small rivers and streams that once flowed into the Moskva through the city area have now been put into underground conduits or filled in. The only tributaries still visible are the Yauza on the left (northern) bank and, on the right bank, the Gorodnya and Kotlovka. The Yauza, the largest of these, and the Moskva itself are controlled by stone embankments for most of their winding courses through the city. The Moskva has been diverted in places, with cuts made through the necks of its loops, and it has also been both widened and deepened; in places it is 800 feet wide. In the past the river was icebound from November to April, but a channel is now kept open throughout the winter. The Yauza receives additional water from the Volga, by way of the Moscow Canal and its branch, the Likhobory Canal. Two dams on its lower course have raised the level of the Yauza and made the lower reaches navigable.

Part of Moscow's water supply comes from some 1,000 deep bores in the city that tap the artesian water of the underlying Carboniferous beds. Overuse has greatly lowered the levels of these underground waters, and most water needs are now met by surface sources, from the reservoirs north of the city built in connection with the Moscow Canal, in particular the Ucha Reservoir. Water is also drawn from the Moskva and pumped into underground storage reservoirs. The discharge of untreated sewage and industrial effluents had polluted the Moskva and the adjacent groundwater until in the mid-1960s a major effort to correct it by heavy investment in antipollution and water purification measures brought great improvement. Slow but steady progress has also been made in controlling the discharge of industrial effluents into the river and into bore wells, and the discharge of untreated sewage has ended.