Paul
Goble
Staunton, March 21 – The death of
Russian villages is already an old if very sad story, but that country’s
economic decline is now leading to the contraction of the population of many
small and mid-sized cities, a development that has received little attention
but that entails enormous social, economic and political problems.
In an article posted on Slon.ru,
Sergey Zakharov says that all of Moscow’s big talk about increasing the amount
of Russia’s housing stock largely ignores what he calls “an extremely
unpleasant problem,” the contraction in size of many of the smaller and
mid-sized cities of the county (slon.ru/economics/kak_vymiraet_rossiya_karta_opustevshikh_gorodov-920081.xhtml).
Moscow is continuing to grow despite
the country’s demographic problems, “but in a majority of other regions of the
country,” the population is falling and that in turn means that the challenge
for the authorities is not the construction of new housing but rather tearing
down existing stock so that it does not become a magnet for the homeless or the
criminal.
But such deconstruction entails many
things, including the elimination of infrastructure or its maintenance at
higher per capita costs because of fewer users along particular routes. As a result, many cities and regions are
cutting back on precisely that, and the result is the acceleration of
depopulation because residents no longer have access to needed services.
That in turn leads to “an inevitable
trend – the voluntary or forced concentration of the population and the
liquidation of settlements and villages which are left with few prospects,”
Zakharov suggests. And that creates serious problems even though at present,
they “practically are not discussed.”
The 2010 census, he writes, recorded “a
mass of settlements and [even] cities where the only thing that remained was
the name!” the journalist continues. “They exist [only] on paper as
administrative units, and many leaders at the district or even oblast level
command territories in which there are no people.”
The most recent enumeration,
Zakharov continues, found that 36 percent of the Russian Federation’s
153,124 villages now have fewer than ten residents each and that 15 percent of
the country’s cities and towns have
fewer than 3,000, figures that are much higher in the northwest and far east
than elsewhere.
The
villages are disappearing entirely, while smaller cities and settlements are
simply declining in size, sometimes in radical ways. And this isn’t happening only in the Russian
Far East, Zakharov says; it is taking place in oblasts just “200 to 300
kilometers from Moscow,” especially
where transportation into the bigger cities makes commuting impossible.
Residents of the two capitals rarely
see these places, but if one goes to areas just beyond their adjoining bedroom
communities, he or she will find disappearing oblasts such as Tver, where “high
mortality and low birthrates are leading to the depopulation of the region.”
And if one looks further afield, the situation is even worse.
In Siberia and the Russian Far East,
the problem is far advanced, the journalist points out. There, the cities and
towns that had existed along the Trans-Siberian are emptying out, “and around
them is a desert,” at least as far as population is concerned. In the future, Zakharov warns, the problems
this will create for the country as a whole “will only grow.”
This
raises a critical question that as yet has found no answer, he suggests. “How
can the social-economic and political integrity of the country be preserved
with such a system of settlement, with a hypertrophic capital at the head, with
a weakening body in the European part, and with too thin a skeleton beyond the
Urals?” 
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