Big tasks – such as the inevitable renovation of apartment buildings – must be carried out differently in the rest of Russia than in Moscow.

Moscow and St. Petersburg can be compared not only by the amount of snow on the streets. When Moscow announced the renovation of residential buildings two years ago, the city already had the first renovation behind it, which began back in 1999 under Mayor Yuri Luzhkov. That program was carried out with the help of private investors who gave the city some apartments in new buildings – the city resettled people from demolished Khrushchev-era buildings into them. Everything was planned to be completed in 10 years, but the process dragged on almost twice as long. Due to changes in land legislation and a difficult economy, most private developers withdrew from the program, the city completed it using budget money, but eventually finished it. Almost 1,700 five-story buildings of early series were demolished, people moved.

Now, as we know, a second, even larger-scale renovation is underway – i.e. not renovation, but demolition and construction. Houses are already being designed, built, and some are already finished. According to the plan, by the end of 2018, apartments for 10,000 residents should have been ready for resettlement ( in just 15 years, more than 5,100 houses with an area of 16 million square meters should have been demolished).

In St. Petersburg, the program of demolishing five-story buildings and resettling people into new apartments was announced during the governorship of Valentina Matviyenko in 2008 and continued under Georgy Poltavchenko. The program was similar to Luzhkov's, because it was supposed to be implemented by private investors. It was planned to build millions of square meters and resettle millions of people. But the plans were fulfilled by either 1.5% or 2%. By the beginning of 2019, the city had received about 300 apartments from investors, and about 900 residents of old buildings had moved. As a result, the program was extended for another 10 years.

It is clear that St. Petersburg faced the same difficulties as Moscow and all other regions: the new Land Code prevented land from being allocated, investors did not keep their promises, there was corruption in the country, etc. To fulfill the plans, about 300 billion rubles were needed, experts calculated, but St. Petersburg did not have that much money. But Moscow did.

Does this mean that the quality of public administration in Moscow and St. Petersburg differs so radically? Perhaps there are some differences in favor of Moscow, but the gap is so great that the quality of administration alone is not enough to explain it. Moscow has hundreds of billions, but St. Petersburg does not, because Moscow's budget is 4 times larger. Moscow completed the first program and began the second, according to which 100 billion rubles per year are allocated from the budget for renovation.

Moscow is one such region. Petersburg is part of the rest of Russia, where there will never be such a concentration of resources, people and money as in Moscow. This means that big tasks – such as the inevitable renovation of apartment buildings, which are aging all over the country at the same time – must be carried out differently in the rest of Russia than in Moscow. Theoretically, a more European path of development would suit the greater Russia, in which residents, as in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, would participate in the financing of the reconstruction of their panel houses, and the state would guarantee loans for such financing. But for this, at the very least, it is necessary to recognize that Moscow and “not Moscow” are essentially different countries.

Moscow and St. Petersburg: two countries