Moscow

Moscow is a spider at the center of a web. Every rail line, pipeline, highway, and political decision in Russia radiates from or converges on this single node—a hub-spoke network so extreme that Saint Petersburg functions as an appendage rather than a counterweight. The capital contains 90 billionaires, processes nearly all foreign investment, and concentrates so much wealth that only Moscow's incomes rose 11% in a recent year while Siberian regions managed 2%. Russia doesn't have a capital. Russia has a capital and everything else.

This hypercentralization predates the Russian state. Moscow emerged in the 12th century as a minor fortress, but its position near the headwaters of four major river systems draining European Russia gave it logistical advantages that compounded with each century. Ivan III declared Moscow the "Third Rome" after Constantinople fell in 1453, inheriting Byzantine imperial ideology. Peter the Great moved the capital to Saint Petersburg in 1712, but Moscow recaptured it in 1918 when the Bolsheviks retreated from the German advance—permanent because the rail network already centered on Moscow.

The Soviet system intensified the topology. Central planning required central control, and central control required physical proximity—every ministry, planning bureau, and intelligence agency clustered within the Garden Ring like an octopus whose arms cannot function without constant signals from the central brain. Post-Soviet privatization didn't decentralize; it transferred the web's assets to oligarchs who stayed near the Kremlin because proximity to state power determined who got what. Moscow's GDP reaches roughly $400 billion, but the real metric is flow: 67 of Russia's 89 regions ran severe budget deficits in the first half of 2025, while Moscow accumulated surplus.

The Ukraine war has tested Moscow's capacity for autophagy—consuming Russia's reserves the way a starving organism digests its own muscle to keep the brain alive. The National Wealth Fund has lost 60% of its liquid assets since 2022, gold reserves dropped from 405 to 173 tonnes, and defense spending hit an estimated $198 billion (7.3% of GDP). GDP growth crashed from 4% to under 1% in 2025, with only four of twenty manufacturing sectors growing—three of them military. Like a polar bear burning fat through an Arctic winter, Moscow is metabolically flexible enough to survive prolonged siege, but the question is how many winters the reserves can fund.

Moscow's survival strategy is biological: concentrate resources at the center, let the periphery atrophy, hope the web holds. A spider that stops repairing outer strands to protect the hub—functional until the first strong wind tears the structure from the outside in.