October 1917 saw more savage street fighting in Moscow than in St Petersburg. The Bolsheviks occupied, lost and retook the Kremlin over an eight-day period. In 1918 the government moved the capital back to Moscow after two centuries' absence, fearing that St Petersburg (then Petrograd) might come under German attack. Moscow became the epicentre of the country's total re-organisation. Under Stalin, one of the world's first comprehensive urban plans was devised for Moscow. The first line of the metro was completed in 1935. In 1941 Hitler broke the nonaggression pact he had signed with Stalin and German troops came within 40km (25mi) of the Kremlin. As with Napoleon's army, they were halted by the cruel Russian winter, Moscow's best defence. After WWII, huge housing estates grew up round the outskirts.

Moscow had been in the forefront of political change, and a thorn in the flesh of the national leaders, since the first whispers of glasnost (public frankness and accountability) in the mid-1980s. Boris Yeltsin, made the city's new Communist Party chief in 1985, became hugely popular as he sacked hundreds of corrupt and inept commercial managers, set up new food markets and permitted demonstrations. This last move was too much for the communist old guard and led to Yeltsin's resignation in 1987; however, his time at the centre of Russian political life was by no means done. It was the rallying of Muscovites behind Yeltsin at Moscow's 'White House', seat of the new parliament of the Russian Republic, that foiled the old-guard coup in 1991 and precipitated the ultimate collapse of the Soviet Union.

By the mid-1990s Moscow was very much the vanguard of the 'New Russia', filling up with all the things Russians had expected capitalism to bring but which had barely begun to percolate down to the provinces: banks, stock exchanges, casinos, advertising, BMWs, new shops, hotels, restaurants and nightlife - money. And with it, a wave of organised crime and the 'oligarchs' (big-business tycoons), who had become fabulously wealthy when Yeltsin sold them state enterprises for a song.

Vladimir Putin, who replaced Yeltsin as Russian president at the end of the millennium, seems determined to firm up state control of Moscow's business dealings, as well as its social scene. The last decade has seen a flurry of building activity promoted by populist mayor Yury Luzhkov. Outside the garishly wealthy scene of the 'New Russians', though, many people are doing it hard, with education and health underfunded and many older Russians begging and scrimping at the margins of Moscow's new marketplace. Still, Moscow is one place where the new, burgeoning middle class is making its mark. The younger generation especially is revelling in its new-found freedoms and increasing wealth. Moscow remains the most free-wheeling city in Russia; for the cynics there are no surprises, and for the ambitious and connected there are no limits.