EDITORIAL

It may seem like a trivial issue, but sidewalks can tell you a lot about the city you live in.

The hubbub surrounding the repaving of Moscow sidewalks plays into the city’s everyday concerns, politics and business practices.

Let’s call it the “Moscow Sidewalk Shuffle.” It’s when seemingly unconnected events get put together with the aid of a vivid imagination, Byzantine bureaucracy and opaque business practices about as clear as last summer’s smog. Soon a megaconspiracy theory takes shape.

The fact that lots of the city’s sidewalks seem to be churned up simultaneously has a lot of people, well, all churned up. We’re walking on the road, can’t use the underpass or stuck in yet another traffic jam.

And indeed, it seems like nothing can ever be done in this town without some kind of grand “Five Year Plan”-style bulldozer approach.

(Yes! Let’s do all the repaving at the same time. And create the maximum disruption for everyone.)

But then another thought catches hold of the popular consciousness: Hang on, wasn’t all this stuff supposed to end with the last mayor of Moscow, Yury Luzhkov, and his billionaire wife, Yelena Baturina?

And isn’t there some vague connection between the new mayor, Sergei Sobyanin, his wife, Irina, and some sidewalks paving company back in Siberia a few years ago?

And soon, in true Orwellian “1984” style, we’ve added two and two – and made six.

Of course, there’s no evidence linking the repaving work with Sobyanin’s wife – none at all. But it doesn’t stop people talking.

Sidewalks, like roads and even major highways, do get churned up here at a moment’s notice without a thought for ordinary citizens. And companies who win strangely formulated tenders to lay the new bricks lay a brick when you ask them where those bricks came from.

But none of it actually adds up to what a conspiracy theory. It’s just the Moscow Sidewalk Shuffle. Ordinary residents are the ones who get dodgy sidewalks laid by cheap labor, while contractors with unfathomable connections make a mint, then disappear as fast as, well, a mayor during a smog crisis.

It’s the system, not a conspiracy theory, that’s to blame here.