A quick "I'm alive" post for my subscribers, and a short talk about the attacks in Moscow today from the point of view of an American Student studying there.
Some of my subscribers may know that I've been living in Moscow for the last year studying abroad. In light of the Metro Bombings today, I want to let everyone know that I'm ok. From what I can tell, it seems that none of my friends have been affected either, though I've heard rumors that some students in my school have been hurt. My prayers go out for the injured and their families.
I'm not much of a writer, but as one of the few Americans in the city, I thought it'd be good to post a couple thoughts.
Edit: My roommate, Parker Glynn-Adey, has a write up at his Moscow blog. To quote:
It seems natural and inevitable that these things would happen in Moscow. The city is not shaken to its core, there is no talk of retaliation. The only side effects are an increased police presence around metros and an eerie quietness in the subway. No one was selling trinkets to captive audiences aboard the metro today, no one was shouting into a cell phone, they were just going where they needed to go. Outside the my station the guards who usually drink tea and smoke were holding guns and batons while they drank tea and smoked. They didn’t seem too concerned.
Map of the Moscow metro, zoomed to the city. Orange circles show sites of the attack, both on the red line. The route from my dormitory to my school in the center of the city is shown in green.
It helps to understand the urban design of Moscow. The city's jobs and schools are mainly in the center, the metro-lines radially extend in every direction to ferry in workers and students from the outskirts where most of the population actually lives. As the lines get closer to the center, they fill up quickly.
A filled-up Metro train in Moscow
The entire map of the metro, showing the extent of the suburbs.
One of the soviet-era apartment clusters on the outskirts of the city, where most of the population live. On the same line as the one attacked today
The first station that was attacked, Lubyanka station in the center, was full of people coming into work from the outskirts. My university has a campus near-by, and I've heard rumors that a number of students on their way to school were hit.
The transfer from the Ring Line to the Red line on the station that was attacked.
The second station that was attacked, Park Kultury, is typically full of people heading in from the suburbs. It's also a common transfer point for people living in on the suburbs on the other lines looking to enter the city via the ring line.
The attack isn't likely to bolster support for the insurgency insurgency. Even the most liberal foreign educated students in the dorm are convinced that reports of Russian oppression are fabricated by the Western Media. Even though most people don't trust state-owned television, they trust western sources even less, and so even the cynics and western-sympathizers tend to subscribe to the Kremlin's set of facts.
The Metro seems to be about as full as usual, though the train I took was eerily quiet. On a short Metro ride into the center , I saw around 40 security officers, compared to a baseline of maybe 1 or 2.
But outside of the heightened security presence, the city is pretty much as it was before. As a whole, the residents of Moscow I've spoken to seem to be relatively unaffected. Nobody has expressed fear of taking the metro, nor anyone dreaming of retribution.
The scary thing is that there isn't really any way to prevent these sort of attacks. This is already the second bombing this decade. A huge portion of Moscow's population is undocumented, there is a wide and deep black market to buy explosive materials, and it serves millions of people a day. Faced with these fundamentals, I'm not sure how these attacks will stop without some political solution to Russia's problems with the south.