I received a link to a short article by Till Mostowlansky today on ‘Moscow provisioning’ (moskovskoe obespechenie), a phenomenon that Till also explores in his remarkable dissertation on the Trans-Pamir highway (‘Azan on the Moon’).  In it, he makes the important point that ‘Moscow provisioning’ was qualitatively different from the other forms of additional payments that workers in particularly remote, cold or high-altitude regions of the Soviet Union received. It signalled a particular form of social, material and aesthetic connection too, in which Moscow literally ‘multiplied’. As Till says there:
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