key: cord-326519-1r3jdffu
authors: Orlova, Galina; Morris, Jeremy
title: City Archipelago: Mapping (post)lockdown Moscow through its heterogeneities
date: 2020-07-11
journal: City Soc (Wash)
DOI: 10.1111/ciso.12331
sha: 
doc_id: 326519
cord_uid: 1r3jdffu

nan

Online, people responded to the "fall of self-isolation" sarcastically, with an untranslatable pun on the words 'get well' (after the coronavirus) and 'amend' (the Russian Constitution): ("Strana poshla na popravki"). Public health concerns were replaced by a grim focus on the political regime's diseased mutation. In fact, Moscow's hybrid practices of biopolitical care -the domestication of "the great imprisonment", with biosecurity testing, buggy digital technologies augmented by direct police control, and interventions into urban rationalities in the spirit of Soviet nonconformist art -were abruptly curtailed by an autocrat's whim for his plebecite.

Epidemiologists and political experts agreed that the end of self-isolation in Moscow was due to Vladimir Putin's desire to push ahead a national vote on July 1.

The willed suspension of the pandemic in Moscow provides a moment for reflection on the (dis)appearing city in quarantine. Jeremy writes from afar; Galina from close-up, from an apartment in the "quiet center" of Moscow, which has shrunk for an inhabitant in lockdown to an island-quarter.

Covid-19 is an urban disease. In China, Wuhan put on the crown, in the USA -New York, in Spain -Barcelona, then in Russia, with its internal colonization and centripetal geography, predictably it was Moscow. In a metropolis where around 10% of the population lives, 40% of Russians with a diagnosis were infected at the end point of self-isolation. Whereas people arriving in the capital from at-risk countries faced 14-day quarantine, in the Russian regions those who arrived from Moscow were put in isolation.

To avoid an official 'state of emergency' which would have meant taking on a massive financial burden, City Hall adopted various heuristics to manage quarantine. From March 5, the Moscow had a high-alert mode, from the 26 th -self-isolation for those 65+, from the 30 th -self-isolation for all. The delegation of responsibility for their own health and well-being to citizens, after recent restrictions on freedoms, looked neoliberal. At the same time, the scope of quarantine education addressed to ignorant citizens and belief in its effectiveness, suggested the return of Soviet sanitary propaganda (Shok, Beliakova, 2020) . In conditions of lockdown uncertainty, the boundaries of self-isolation were delineated by rituals of taking out garbage, buying food and medicine, dog walking. From April 1, fines of 4,000-5,000 rubles were imposed for each violation. On April 15, quarantine met the control society with digital codes for trips around the city. Since May 12, wearing masks and gloves became mandatory in stores. minister asked the Moscow mayor "organizationally and methodically" to help colleagues "on the ground", Sobyanin became the face of the "virus federalism" and the capital's protocol "counteracting the spread of coronavirus infection" became a model to follow.

While the self-isolation regime is gone, the "glove-mask system" remains. Entering public transport or shops without PPE is prohibited. Disposable masks -medical blue, three-layeredare found far beyond pharmacies: at newspaper stands, at the ice cream kiosks, in cheap and expensive grocery chains. At the reopened farmfoods store, half-empty due to supply disruptions, masks are at a discount. In May, they cost from 29 to 70 rubles, in March-April -up to an extraorbitant 150 and you could buy them only on the Internet from resellers, thirty-times more expensive than in 2019. Prices began to rise in February. At the peak, the government tried to mandate them, but immediately abandoned this measure. The rhytym of the pandemic in Moscow was not only the appearance or absence of masks, but their price in(de)flation.

In the Russia that imported the bulk of masks from China before Covid-19 there were three domestic manufacturers. City Hall not only took ownership of the largest factory but removed its facilities from the city of Vladimir to the capital, turning the pandemic into a "Moscow state business". Two thirds of masks from the Moscow government (about 4 million items a week) were sold at cost to hospitals and communal services, 500,000 -for a "standardised price" of 30 rubles in the metro. The rest were put into a city administration reserve.

Compared to the free distribution of mask not only in the Paris metro, but on buses in Russia's Far East, Moscow's choices provoked discussion of the political economy of PPE. Vladimirites were disgusted by the capital's betrayal leaving them not only without protection, but one profitable business less. Their objections to internal colonialism were tempered with racist suggestions that the masks from Moscow -now produced by "immigrants from disadvantaged countries of the near abroad" -were now "less hygienic". Muscovites discussed the superprofit extracted by City Hall, and supposed that "since they bought the plant, the mask-regime will never end." Stuck between epidemiological citizenship and city-state paternalism, they claimed that the government had no moral right to demand wearing masks without free distribution.

Citizens made a hopeless diagnosis -"it's all capitalism and they don't give a shit" -and continued to buy masks.

The case reveals the complex nature of state-capital conjunctions in the Russian capital.

Appropriating profitable PPE businesses, strategically significant in an epidemic, City Hall enters the order of state capitalism. Obliging citizens to wear masks and offering them at commercial prices, they interpret civic responsibility in a neoliberal mode as a personal transaction according to the logic of capitalist realism that anathemizes any alternative to marketised relations (Fisher 2009 ).

Nonetheless the virus' acceleration of neoliberalism does not completely destroy the legacy of the Soviet social state, instead weakening and transforming it beyond recognition. By sending masks to hospitals at cost price, Moscow combines the logic of minimal profitability and sluggish paternalism. Opting to create a reserve fund instead of free distribution of masks, it reproduces a pattern of deformed care without expenditure, developed by the federal government via the Russian Reserve Fund. State capital accumulation has a perverse obsession with curtailing the circulation -of money, of civic potential, -we call this the political economy of "the untouchable reserve".

After the virus transformed the city into a host of hostile surfaces, the Sanitary Service enlightened Muscovites that the infection "can stay in the air for 3 hours, on copper -for 4 hours, up to 24 hours on pulp and paper surfaces (documents, envelopes, folders), for 3-4 days on plastic and metal." The developing corona-market offers a "cold fog" method of disinfection from 8 roubles per m 2 . An invitation to the wake of a neighbour dead from Covid, now includes: "Everything is disinfected."

Public spaces -sidewalks, underpasses, entry-ways -are treated at city expense. The deputy mayor first earmarked 3,500 units of tractor-street sprayers, deploys 4,500. The air hangs with a bleach smell from the long-forgotten Soviet sanitary aromascape while the yellow sanitisers in the metro whiff of the society of consumption and bananas. Muscovites happily use them and discuss whether the big disinfection is comparable to urban beautification programs famous for exorbitant expenses and corruption. And if there isn't much point in treating open surfaces, as epidemiologists say, should this be recognized as an urban antiviral ritual?

Our entrance-way, which according sanitary doctors remains the most "forgotten place in terms of anti-epidemic measures", is disinfected twice daily. Bumping into disinfectors in chemical protection suits with spray guns and getting coated by a dose, you realise the danger, and no longer go out without a mask. Someone repeatedly adds in pencil: "unsatisfactory" to the assessment in the disinfection schedule posted by the elevator. The repairman -tired, in a cotton mask slipping down -is also unhappy: the chemicals have damaged electrical contacts, and now the elevator serves only four floors out of twelve. This metonymizes the city in quarantine as an assemblage of relative safety, partial functionality, attempts to reprogram and restore lost connectivity.

Maintaining Moscow's reputation as a 'smart city', City Hall placed its bets on the rapid development of digital control over self-isolation. From April any non-hospitalized infected were obliged to stay at home and install a special mobile app -Social monitoring, developed by the city IT Department. From April 15, Muscovites needed sixteen-digit QR codes to make daily work trips, single emergency trips, and twice-weekly trips for personal and private needs. Police, taxi-drivers and transit workers mobilized to check codes using the Transit Department's Moscow Assistant app. Regimented timetables of walks were dictated via infographics interfaces.

Drones and quadcopters for tracking social distancing in re-opened restaurants were Moscow's moment to jump the shark.

Jung Won Sonn and colleagues, analyzing the effective use of technology to reduce the risks of a pandemic in South Korea with smart city technologies, conclude that Covid-19 is the first epidemic in history for which humanity living in cities has come up with a ready-made response system. Aggregating mobile operator data, geolocations of bank transactions and transport cards allows the precise contact tracing, avoiding major quarantine. The researchers regret that countries with developed digital infrastructure -with the exception of South Korea and Taiwanhave not made use of this advantage. (Sonn et al. 2020) .

Russia, where during crisis the development of a new platform and apps was preferred, entailing large upfront costs, is a special case. While Yandex -Russia's Google and the co-owner of popular taxi, delivery and mapping apps, -published a "self-isolation index" using its own digital infrastructure and aggregating big data, City Hall chose to develop apps from scratch.

Work requiring months was implemented in weeks with many bugs and inefficient decisions.

Lacking auto-verification, QR codes turned Moscow assistants into nurses for an infirm technology. Massive queues formed at metro entrances as policemen were forced to manually input codes to their devices. Technical faults were accompanied by social de(trans)formations, compensatory improvisations, and abuses. When Moscow Assistant could not cope with the flood of requests, QR encounters simulated governing. The cancelling of drivers' codes without explanation led to the use of "service position" and informal connections to obtain permissions.

Ordinary Muscovites with Covid-19 paid for geolocation failures, non-stop selfie requirements, multiple disconnections of the Social Monitoring, developed from fragments of code written in ten days for a pilot project to monitor the transport of domestic waste. Heavy fines, the denial of technical errors by City Hall forced the victims of smart lockdown to unite in the FB-community Fined for getting sick and to complain about the app in court and to Google Play.

Techno-political failures of Moscow lockdown are full of heterogeneities. Repressive Social monitoring is the first manifestation of a biosecurity regime replacing biopolitics. While biopolitics featured authorities' concern with the life of population, biosecurity is built on the responsibility -including legal -of citizens for their health (Agamben 2020) . For Muscovites, fined for getting sick, buggy mobile apps became the real punishment. The incoherence of urban mobility monitoring destroyed the technological continuity of the society of control (Deleuze 1992 ). To check a QR-code through Moscow Assistant, you need a policeman or a taxi driver in person with a mobile citizen. Taxi drivers tell of the discomfort that arose performing these police duties. The mayor's office sees voluntary assistance and civic duty in them, but just in case, offers numerous sanctions for those who refuse to help. In a country where civil society is supposedly weak, the prosthetics of digital technologies during lockdown risk not so much strengthening the police state but accelerating the emergence of a "police society".

A booklet from Ritual, the Moscow funeral service and operator of Moscow cemeteries, dropped into our postboxes on the eve of self-isolation for 65+. The use by a commercial firm of the state services' design suggests a newly cozy relationship between the traditionally shady funeral business and Russian stateness. Last summer, this convergence took the form of a corruption scandal, linked to the high-profile case of journalist Ivan Golunov, framed for his investigation of murky dealings between Moscow undertakers and state security organs. This spring Ritual prepared inhabitants for death and loss, warned against contacts with "black agents", informed about prices and social subsidies, also offering people something that in the extreme circumstances of pandemic they expected but did not receive from the state -care. Care, which remains for Russians one of the most important regimes of affective expectations in political communication with authorities, masks hierarchies and injustice (Bogdanova 2005) . Care certificates from Ritual guarantee the owners, if they died within a year of purchase, burial at the operator's expense. This offer had the side effect of interpellating tenants as potential victims of the virus. Yandex informed Muscovites about the preparedness of Ritual, that "will come in handy", for the pandemic: protective equipment and coffins in ready supply. The Ministry of Health published temporary recommendations -later rescinded -including a prescription to bury infected bodies in sealed coffins. WHO and Russian virologists confirmed that the virus is not transmitted from the dead to the living. Funeral services are not under the authority of the Health Ministry.

Nonetheless, the protocol was entrenched: coronavirus victims are sealed in bags, and not released to relatives. Ritual posted a "viral" Instagram burial video: a hazmatsuited funeral team, disinfectant poured into the grave, a clutch of relatives frozen in the distance, the pit fill with fir branches as a natural disinfectant and only completed. The union of ritual workers has spoken out against the use of garbage bags as destructive to the social order and turns funerals from care into disposal.

Refusing large-scale support for population and business, the authorities compiled lists for selective state aid. The presidential one featured a child allowance. Moscow -supported the newly unemployed. The government made two lists -for 642 system-critical firms (including bookmakers!) along with a dozen industries extremely vulnerable to the effects of the epidemic.

The Chair of the Chamber of Commerce proposed including outdoor ads, which would lose up to 70% of revenue in deserted cities, in the second list. Simultaneously, he emphasized the critical role of billboards in informing people about virus protection, the WWII anniversary, and the upcoming plebiscite. Was this transition from the affected to having critical significance a transition from commercial advertising to propaganda? Did this discursive merging tell us more about saving the industry at the expense of state orders? Even in the small section of my selfisolation route, billboard changes perform the symbolic dynamics of quarantine. 

When Le Village magazine asked sergeant Kurakin, who was checking QR codes at the metro, why people disobey quarantine -the answer was 'to work'. Closure and opening of quarantine both draw a labor division. Mobilized doctors, taxi drivers, grocery and utility workers, couriers, bus drivers -these high-risk occupations, deemed essential, were never locked down. 'Partisan' hairdressers worked clandestinely. Switching to 'distance working', people were faced with the hardships of endless digital labor and its invasion of privacy, small and medium business -with the need to pay salaries in the absence of revenue and state support.

Moscow closed more comprehensively than other Russian cities. Reopening, formally based on the topological 'safety' ranking of occupations, was multi-step. 12 May -the same time as mandating obligatory masks in shops -construction sites and industry restarted. May 26 government service centres (by appointment) and car-sharing services (partially) returned. Other services were divided into three stages in June, visualized in infographics: first hairdressers and cemeteries, then café verandas and dental clinics, and finally, kindergartens, fitness clubs and restaurants. The city reopening was asynchronous and incomplete, in turn affecting the political and economic in complex and unpredictable ways. But we learn nothing from them about changes in the life of the city or its inhabitants.

To think of a large city in quarantine as archipelago is to problematize the qualitative changes in urban life during self-isolation, mapping the diffusion of sociality and following heterogeneities of (non)actualized presence. The implosion of urban imagination, the narrowing of vision and atrophied habitus -all of what creates so much discomfort and inconvenience for city-dwellerscan open new analytical perspectives in how to deal with impoverished forms of dwelling and not be afraid of attending to its fragmentation. The playground taped off. Footpaths along which friends walk their puppy. I wave to them from my balcony. Rubbish containers next to the dovecote "Love and doves" that emptied during quarantine. 2. Wine Island, where the store consultant week to week talks about wine from more and more distance. 3. The Island of a closed house museum of Pushkin's uncle and food, delivered from May with no charge by taxi firm. 4. Island with more cheap food, water and hardcore disinfection. Here I bought my second pack of masks (the first were from the internet at a crazy price). Here my friends live. All springtime we would have drinks and read poetry on Fridays in Whatsapp.5. The far post-office island, 600 meters from home. I went there a couple of times at the end of selfisolation. 6. The far bank island at a distance of 1km from home. 7. The phantom island of work. Humanities campus of "Vyshka", where I have not been since the middle of March, working at a distance. Colleagues in fb don't believe in its existence. I see the building every day from my window and do not believe either. 8. Billboards from our photos. 9. The island-building of ailments, visible from my window, where all April ambulances -the dominant vehicle in the empty city -came time after time. 10. Moscow City, a group of skyscrapers on the horizon, visible with unprecedented sharpness. Usually -and now once again -they are smoggy. Image by Galina Orlova.

Sovetskaya traditsiya pravovoj zashhity, ili V ozhidanii zaboty [The Soviet tradition of legal protection or Awaiting care

Postscript on the Societies of Control

Capitalist realism: Is there no alternative?

Kartografirovanie ostryx socialnyx problem trebuet ostorozhnosti [Mapping acute social issues requires caution

How Soviet Legacies Shape Russia's Response to the Pandemic: Ethical Consequences of a Culture of Non-Disclosure

Smart city technologies for pandemic control without lockdown

At the end of March, the dismantling of outdoor ads from the frozen centre of Moscow gave way to mobilization. From billboards, placed every 15-20 meters, well-known Moscow doctors urged Muscovites to stay home, wear masks and not touch their faces. After April, this template was adapted to enhance affective solidarity and the formation of quarantine communities. Doctors are no longer given voice, they are thanked. And young people are hailed as volunteers. Closer to the Garden Ring sanitary enlightenment is interspersed with posters for Victory Day. In early summer, commercial advertising has returned as a (post)quarantine hybrid -McDonald's with both hands voting for hand washing. The epidemiological safety and the upcoming voting in this austere carnival of signs do not leave room for Bigmacs yet.The Moscow government justified priority reopening of industry as 'least dangerous' because of the absence of direct contact between producers and consumers. However, no one hid that the resumption of construction work -masked, with a reduction in shift and brigade work -was due to the shared economic interest of lobbying developers and City Hall, and the problems of labour migrants. According to mobile operator data, up to 2.5 million people from Russian regions left Moscow during quarantine. But citizens from the CIS countries, mainly engaged in construction, were locked up in the capital without a livelihood. Moscow officials saw criminal risk in migrants without work, reifying care about them as an interface of profit and biopolitical inequalities.If the resumption of construction strengthened socio-economic marginalizations existing before quarantine, the partial opening of car sharing produced new inequalities. At the end of May, the renewed service only allowed five-day-plus leases, unaffordable to most. As for mandatory disinfection of the cabin before returning the car, this was another materialization of sharing as a "new dangerous".

Several years ago, 'Le Monde Diplomatique' published an imaginary Palestine map. The occupied territories were represented as the sea; the Authority-controlled ones -as islands of an archipelago. Numerous maps of the pandemic, regularly described in military metaphors, depict the Covid-19 occupation in a different way -not framed through absent space but as more or less filling it, and pushing out of frame alternatives of resistance, coping and co-existence. From maps of pandemic Moscow we can see how the concentration of the virus shifts from the prosperous centre and South-West, where the epidemic began, to the northern, eastern and south-
