I am grateful to Mark D. Steinberg, the authors of the articles, the anonymous reviewers of the manuscripts, and the editorial team at Slavic Review for all their efforts in bringing this thematic cluster to fruition. The articles featured here were first presented at an international conference, “Moscow: A Global City,” held in November 2010 at the University of Leeds. This conference marked the inception of a research theme “Russia(n) in the Global Context” for the newly founded interdisciplinary Leeds Russian Centre. All the papers presented at the conference and the discussion thereof, as well as the views expressed at the subsequent roundtable debate, “Putin’s Russia and Globalization,” in March 2012, have had a part to play in developing my understanding of this rich subject, and I am grateful to all the participants for their enlightening contributions. I am particularly indebted to Vlad Strukov, co-organizer of the “Moscow: A Global City” conference and co-founder of the Leeds Russian Centre, for his support and inspiration, and to Helena Goscilo, whose visit to Leeds in 2010 funded by the Leverhulme Trust, ignited this project.

1. Friedmann, John, “The World City Hypothesis,” Development and Change 17, no. 1 (January 1986): 69–83 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sassen, Saskia, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (Princeton, 1991).Google Scholar

2. Taylor, Peter J., World City Network: A Global Urban Analysis (London, 2004)Google Scholar. According to Taylor, Moscow is mentioned as a global city in only four out of fifteen significant studies of global city theory. Taylor's book contains interesting quantitative data on Moscow regarding its ranking in terms of various networks of connectivity, such as banking, media, and nongovernmental organizations.

3. Brade, Isolde and Rudolf, Robert, “Moscow, The Global City? The Position of the Russian Capital within the European System of Metropolitan Areas,” Area 36, no. 1 (March 2004): 69–80 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kolossov, Vladimir and O'Loughlin, John, “How Moscow Is Becoming a Capitalist Mega-City,” International Social Science Journal 56, no. 181 (September 2004): 413–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4. Brade and Rudolph, “Moscow, the Global City?” 69,74. The pioneers of global city theory may not have intended for the predominant focus to be limited to economics. John Friedmann and Goetz Wolff initially described the “world city approach” as “in the first instance, a methodology, a point of departure, an initial hypothesis. It is a way of asking questions and of bringing footloose facts into relation.” See Friedmann, John and Wolff, Goetz, “World City Formation: An Agenda for Research and Action,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 6, no. 3 (September 1982): 320 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5. Eade, John, Living the Global City: Globalization as a Local Process (London, 1997), 2 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6. Kolossov and O'Loughlin, “How Moscow Is Becoming a Capitalist Mega-City,” 414. Emphasis added.

7. Eade, , Living the Global City, 3–4.Google Scholar

8. King, Anthony D., “World Cities: Global? Postcolonial? Postimperial? Or Just the Result of Happenstance? Some Cultural Comments,” in Brenner, Neil and Keil, Roger, eds., The Global Cities Reader (Abingdon, Eng., 2006), 320.Google Scholar

9. Brenner, Neil and Keil, Roger, “Introduction to Part Six,” in Brenner, and Keil, , eds., Global Cities Reader, 307 Google Scholar.

10. Ibid., 309.

11. King, , “World Cities,” 319.Google Scholar

12. See, for example, Moore, David Chioni, “Is the Post- in Postcolonial the Post- in Post-Soviet? Toward a Global Postcolonial Critique,” PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 116, no. 1 (January 2001): 111–28Google Scholar; Kyst, Jon, “Russia and the Problem oflnternal Colonization,” Ulbandus: The Slavic Review of Columbia University 7 (2003): 26–31 Google Scholar; Chernetsky, Vitaly, Mapping Postcommunist Cultures: Russia and Ukraine in the Context of Globalization (Montreal, 2007)Google Scholar; Mignolo, Walter D. and Tlostanova, Madina, “The Logic of Coloniality and the Limits of Postcoloniality,” in Krishnaswamy, Revathi and Hawley, John C., eds., The Postcolonial and the Global (Minneapolis, 2008), 109–23Google Scholar; Buckler, Julie A., “What Comes after ‘Post-Soviet in Russian Studies?” PMLA: Publications of the Modem Language Association of America 124, no. 1 (January 2009): 251–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13. Clowes, Edith W., Russia on the Edge: Imagined Geographies and Post-Soviet Identity (Ithaca, 2011), 5–6 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Clowes is another scholar who has observed the resonances between postcommunism and postcolonialism.

14. Ibid., xi. Emphasis in the original

15. Kendall, Gavin, Woodward, Ian, and Skrbis, Zlatko, The Sociology of Cosmopolitanism: Globalization, Identity, Culture and Government (Basingstoke, Eng., 2009), 124–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16. Eade, , Living the Global City, 3 Google Scholar.