Before the Revolution of 1917, Moscow’s population was one of the fastest growing in Europe, having increased to about 1.6 million in 1917. (Smith, 1994). Moscow was developing factories and an indigenous nascent proletariat, as well as migrant peasant populations searching for employment. Like London and Paris, other centers of the West which served as loci for the rise of industrial capitalism, Moscow developed, at the turn of the century, greater geographical intra-city inequalities in living standards, social and spatial stratification.