The word ‘‘casino’’ has already been removed from gambling halls on a Moscow street.

By CLIFFORD J.LEVY


MOSCOW - One of the largest mass layoffs in recent Russian history occurred on July 1, and the Kremlin itself decreed it, economic crisis or not.

The government shut down every last legal casino and slot-machine parlor across the land, under an antivice plan promoted by Vladimir V.Putin that just a few months ago was widely perceived as far-fetched. But the result was hundreds of thousands of people thrown out of work.

And in a move that at times seems to have taken on almost farcical overtones, the Kremlin has offered the gambling industry only one option for survival: relocate to four regions in remote areas of Russia, as many as 6,400 kilometers from the capital. The potential marketing slogans - Come to the Las Vegas of Siberia! Have a Ball near the North Korean Border! - may not sound inviting, but that is in part what the government envisions.

All the same, none of the four regions are prepared for the transfer, and no casino is expected to reopen for several years. As of July 1, not even two decades after casinos began proliferating here in the free-forall post-Soviet era, the industry’s workers were out on the street.

“This is shaking my life to the core - such a blow for me and my family,” said Irina Mysachka, 32, a single mother who is a supervisor at the Shangri-La Casino in Moscow.

“The authorities are taking this step without thinking at all,” she said. “They have not considered what this decision means for the workers. With the crisis, it is going to be very difficult for us.”

Unable to find a job in Moscow, she said she was going to leave her 5-year-old son, Yegor, with her mother and venture abroad.

Aleksandr Osin, 24, who has been at Shangri- La for five years, said he would try his luck in the insurance business, but was not hopeful. “We all thought that this was some kind of government thing that would not happen,” he said. “But now we know.”

The law that started the whole process was introduced in 2006 by Mr.Putin, then the president and now the prime minister, who spoke of the perils of the blackjack tables and slot machines, of disreputable characters having a grip on the industry.

The casinos have repeatedly asked for a reprieve, proposing a regulatory body to cut down on abuses, and lately pointing out that the ban would create hardships for workers during the crisis. The industry has also said it pays more than $1 billion a year in taxes. But Mr.Putin and his protege, President Dmitri A.Medvedev, have not yielded.

The gambling industry says the ban will leave more than 400,000 people without work in Russia, at a time when it has been hard hit by the economic downturn: the World Bank predicts the economy will contract by 7.9 percent this year. The government has put the figure at 60,000 people, though industry analysts say that is absurdly low.

Putin’s plan was announced during a spy scandal between Russia and its neighbor Georgia, and the timing suggested that Mr.Putin was in part seeking to wound the Georgian diaspora here, which is said to have an influential role in the industry.

It seemed to have dawned on the gamblers themselves only a few days before July 1 that the casinos were closing. “It is going to be strange, and even now, it’s hard to believe,” said Aleksei Ustinenko, 29, a construction executive who was playing at Shangri-La.

“Here we are, in one of the biggest, most beautiful, most expensive cities in the world,” he said. “And yet other people can decide that I cannot gamble if I want to.”