Window on Eurasia

Rural Share of Russian Population on the Rise

 

Paul Goble

Vienna, August 31, 2006 – The percentage of Russians living in rural areas is on the increase -- but not because of an increase in the birthrate
there or the return of urban residents to the countryside. Instead, it
reflects continuing population declines in Russian cities and the
reclassification of some small cities that have lost population as
rural areas.

Throughout the world, “Kommersant” reports today, the percentage of
people living in urban areas has been increasing and will increase in
the future as well. But in Russia, according to government statistics,
the situation is very different and likely to remain so
[http://www.kommersant.ru/doc.html?DocID=701368&IssueId=30187].

There, the Russian State Statistics Committee says, the number of rural
residents has been declining very slowly – from 38.93 million in 1990
to 38.76 million in 2005 – and over the last year, there has even
been “a certain increase in the number of rural residents.”

(Over the next two or three decades, this statistical anomaly may
ultimately change: the number of rural residents in most parts of
Russia will continue to decline, and the rate of natural population increase
in the cities is likely to accelerate, according to the Statistics
Committee.)

The reasons for this unusual pattern are two-fold, “Kommersant”
says reporting on the findings of the Moscow Center for Demography and Human
Ecology. On the one hand, most Russian cities – the megalopolises of
Moscow and St. Petersburg are exceptions -- have not seen the growth
typical of other countries.

And on the other, this unexpected trend is the product of government
actions. Over the last 15 years, the Moscow paper reports, several
cities and “settlements of an urban type” have been reclassified as
villages because of economic and/or demographic declines – and their
residents, formerly counted as urban, are now said to be rural.

The last major reclassification of this kind, “Kommersant” notes,
took place in 2004, when several cities were reclassified and suddenly
700,000 people who had viewed themselves and been viewed by
statisticians as urban suddenly found themselves in the position of
rural residents.

Indeed, it was this administrative change that accounted for the
upsurge in the rural population of the Russian Federation in that year by
400,000. Had it not taken place, rural Russia would have seen a decline
in that year of at least 300,000 people, the Moscow experts said.

“As a rule,” the Moscow paper says, “the new rural residents are
residents of depressed small cities from which enterprises and people
have fled. Many of them in recent times really had come to resemble
peasants, surviving only by using the products of their garden
plots.”

This pattern is now “particularly characteristic” of the situation
in the Urals and Siberia, where “the rate of growth of industry is
lower than all-Russian averages.” (In the current “Demoscope
Weekly,” there is an entire article devoted to this pattern of
development
[http://www.demoscope.ru/weekly/2006/0253/tema06.php].

Indeed, specialists at the Moscow Institute of Demography and Human
Ecology point out, “in Russia there is only one region where the
increase of the rural population is taking place primarily for natural
reasons – the Southern Federal District,” which is heavily Islamic.

Between 1989 and 2002, the number of rural residents in that region
increased more than 1.5 million, and as of today “a quarter of all
the peasants of Russian live” there. That represents a sharp contrast
with the more heavily ethnic Russian regions of the Central Federal District
and even the ethnically and religiously mixed Volga one.

Summing up, the paper said “in the center of Russia and the Middle
Volga, natural processes of urbanization are continuing. In the
climatically favorable south, number of villagers who supply the food
industry is growing, while in Siberia and the Urals there is
de-urbanization and de-industrialization with the collapse of small
cities.”

Latest Window on Eurasia stories | Religion Archive | Islam in Russia and CIS Archive | Orthodox Church in Russia and CIS Archive | All Window on Eurasia Stories Archive |