Sociospatial Differentiation in Stalinist Moscow

In 1917, the Bolsheviks took power in Russia under the banner of equality. Within the city, their aspiration to eliminate the core‐periphery sociospatial disparities resulted in dividing Moscow's privileged historic centre among its peripheral districts. This attempt to design districts of similar socio‐economic composition was short‐lived. Already in the 1930s, corresponding with the rise of the Stalinist state, the city centre partially re‐appeared in the form of the newly established smaller sectorial districts that were eliminated only after Stalin's death. Utilizing previously classified archival data of the 1939 population census, this paper sheds light on the sociospatial differentiation of Stalinist Moscow by comparing its central districts to the rest of the city as well as to the Bolshevik zoning of the 1920s. This analysis posits that the Bolshevik ideal of territorial equality was not achieved: politically, ethnically and socially, Stalinist Moscow in the late 1930s remained spatially unequal.