MUSCOVITES awoke last week to scenes of destruction. Shops and cafés lay in ruins. The perpetrators were not terrorists, but the city government, which dispatched excavators to destroy nearly 100 buildings that allegedly posed a danger to the public. For shopkeepers like Stanislav, who had manned a flower shop near a metro station in central Moscow, the demolition came as a shock: “Our owners called at lunch and said, ‘Gather your things, they’re coming tonight’.” Locals dubbed it the “Night of the Long Scoops”. A city government gazette, perhaps not spotting the Hitler reference, used the phrase in a headline.
Moscow’s mayor, Sergei Sobyanin, wants to cleanse the city of street vendors. “One cannot hide behind property papers,” he says. He claims that the businesses had obtained their title documents illegally. The owners deny that; many had successfully appealed to Moscow’s courts to recognize their leases as legitimate. The city had even allowed them to hook up to utility grids. “For 25 years, nothing, then suddenly this,” says Marzhana Gadzhieva, a saleswoman at a bakery slated for demolition…