Paul
Goble
Staunton, April 8 – Slightly more than one in
every six Russians– some 24.5 million people—lives in a company town facing serious economic and
demographic decline, with 68 of these 799 places rated as being high risk of
complete depopulation unless a new five-year government program can reverse that
trend, something that most Moscow specialists judge unlikely.
In an article on the “Svobodnaya
pressa” portal yesterday, Vitaly Slovetsky says that Moscow has divided these
company towns, known in Russian as “monogorody” into three categories: red for
the most endangers, yellow, and green.
Sixty-eight of them fall into the highest risk group (svpressa.ru/society/article/66459/).
He
cites the findings of the Moscow Center for Problem Analysis and State-Administration
Projections (rusrand.ru/mission/result/result_806.html)
that unemployment in many of these places is about 30 percent, four times the
level of the country as a whole, a reflection of the general “economic
degradation of contemporary Russia.”
In
some of these company towns, unemployment is much higher: In one, Yarovoye in
Altay kray, no one has a job; in others, such a Fokino in Bryansk oblast, the
number of working-age adults outnumbers available positions by almost three to
one, forcing those who can to leave to find employment elsewhere.
After
the popular protests in Pikalevo, Moscow announced that it would assist these
company towns to overcome their reliance on a single factory. Initially, the
central government said it would help 335 of these places. Later, it cut that
figure to 200. And more recently, the Regional Development Ministry said that
assistance had gone to only three.
Given
that track record, experts with whom Slovetsky spoke are very skeptical that
the problems of Russian company towns will be solved by the new five year plan.
Indeed,Yevgeny Gontmakher of IMEMO said that most people in these company towns
will depart and like many villages already, such places will “gradually
disappear from the map of Russia.”
That
is just one of the internal migration flows that is affecting Russia’s largest
cities. In addition to the movement of people south and west, reversing the
pattern of the late Soviet period, ever more Russians are moving from one city
to another, most intriguingly from Moscow to St. Petersburg.
That reversal of fortune is
described in a recent issue of “Obshchaya gazeta” which notes that over the
past two years alone, Rosstat has found, some 100,000 Russians have moved
into the northern capital, many of them directly from the southern one,
Moscow (og.ru/articles/2013/03/28/33694.shtml).
Indeed, in each of the last two
years, more people have moved to St. Petersburg than to Moscow, something
that many Russians and many specialists on Russia would have found hard to
believe only a few years ago, especially so since almost a third of the
immigrants to Petersburg are from Moscow.
Among the reasons Muscovites are
choosing to relocate to Petersburg is that rents are lower in the latter
city, its workforce is growing, its population is less hostile to those
coming from elsewhere. As one transplanted Muscovite said, “Moscow is a city
where those who have come from elsewhere do not like others who have done the
same.”
Moreover, and in sharp contrast to Moscow, he added, St. Petersburgers
because of their geographical location close to Finland can go abroad “literally
on weekends,” something that Muscovites cannot and is a reason why some in
the capital city envy those in St. Petersburg and others choose to relocate
there.
There are many reasons why Moscow is
unlikely to be able to solve the problems of the company towns or be able to limit
the influx of people from them and elsewhere to the major cities, but one of the
most serious is the continuing collapse of Russia’s rail system, both
inter-city and suburban.
In a detailed article,
commentator Dmitry Verkhoturov notes that Russians face ever greater limits
on their ability to travel by train or to ship raw materials or finished
goods beyond the place where they live.
As a result of this policy, he suggests, Russians have little choice
but to try to live as close as possible to major markets (zapad24.ru/articles/rakurs/16771-minfin-lishaet-nas-poezdov.html).
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