The magnitude of Mr Yevgeny Primakov's task as Russia's Prime Minister is in direct ratio to the magnitude of the Russian Federation itself.
Nowhere in Moscow portrays this vastness better than Komsomolskaya Square, where three of the city's nine mainline rail stations decant thousands of passengers daily.
The Leningradsky station links Moscow with St Petersburg, the Baltics and Finland; from the Yaroslavsky Station trains run north to Arkhangelsk and east to Vladivostok and Beijing; while across the road at the Kazan station the lines run to the exotic destinations of Central Asia with trains to Tashkent and links from there to Samarkand and Bokhara.
A straw poll in the square showed younger Russians wary of Mr Primakov as a member of "the old guard" but older people more likely to accept him as the new Prime Minister.
Outside the Kazan station Sergei Borodin, a Muscovite in his 30s, was not sure what would happen.
"Primakov has been foreign minister. He has no concrete experience on the ground here. He is not like Yury Luzhkov, the mayor of Moscow, who has committed himself to a specific place and to a specific people."
Ilya (28) and his wife, Natasha (21), stood outside the railway workers' club near the Kazan station with their 2 1/2-year-old son, Artyom.
They had arrived from the Urals where Ilya's sister lived and were astounded at how bad things were there.
"My sister's husband works in a factory there and they haven't seen money for six months. They're being paid in potatoes and macaroni from the company store. I don't see Yevgeny Maksimovich changing much of this."
Zinaida Miroshkina (60) was selling hot meat pies and the Georgian breadand-cheese dish Khatchapuri outside the Moskvosky department store further along the street and said: "Primakov is the perfect man for this situation. He is a professional politician. He will sort things out. It is difficult to stand here selling food and then have barely enough wages after the day's work to go out and buy food for yourself. I am sure he will do things for us."
Over at the Yaroslavsky station as the 4.30 from Ulan Ude was arriving after its long journey over the steppes from Buryatia, Alexander Yenesko (32) was in the middle of the typical bureaucratic mess in which Russian citizens can find themselves from time to time.
He had brought his car in from Ukraine. It had been impounded by the customs and brought to Tver about 100 miles north of Moscow. He wanted it cleared so he could get back to work in the diamond mines of Yakutia in the depths of Siberia. He was told that the paperwork needed to free his car would take 20 days. Not surprisingly he was in bad form.
"The communists should be brought back," he said. "These democrats have destroyed our life here. Look what they did to Kiriyenko; he did his best to bring in market reforms but they just threw him out. Primakov is one of the old guard. We know he will look after his own people."