Paul
Goble
Staunton, December 13 – Two studies
about how residents of Russia’s cities feel about where they live and identify
themselves suggest that the residents of Russian cities away from the core of
the country are ever less focused on Moscow as the center of their lives and
identify instead either with their own cities and region or with larger spaces
such as Europe.
The first, conducted by Yekaterina
Dyba, Yegor Kotov, Anton Gorodnichev and Arina Miksyuk of Moscow’s Higher
School of Economics, explored popular attitudes and identities in more than 60 capitals
of republics, krays, and oblasts as well as Moscow and St. Petersburg (opec.ru/1772945.html).
The
researchers found that “in Russia there are many cities in which people live
just as a full a life as in the two capitals” and some in which the human
potential index is as higher or higher as in Moscow and St. Petersburg. But one striking characteristic of those
cities which are doing well is that they are far from the capitals.
(The
human potential index the authors employed involved per capita incomes,
demography and health, educational opportunities and attainment, and cost of
living relative to income.)
Those
nearby often find their lives sucked out of them by the two biggest cities,
whereas those from the Middle Volga to the east and from the Black Earth region
to the south are more likely to have the urban infrastructure, quality of
services, business opportunities, and social capital that make them attractive
centers for their populations.
A
second study, by Igor Okunyev and Aleksey Domanov of the same institution
focused on the extent to which residents of St. Petersburg now identify as
Europeans or as Petersburgers rather than as Russians in the first instance and
compared their responses with residents in nearby Kronshtadt and Vyborg (opec.ru/1773274.html).
They interviewed 185 people in
all. Only about four percent of the
respondents in each of the cities chose to identify themselves as Europeans in
response to an open-ended question, but 64.5 percent did so when asked
directly, “do you consider yourself a European?”
In order to get a better idea about
what that identity means, the two researchers also asked about the foreign
travel preferences of the residents. Only 31 percent of people in Kronshtadt
said they would like to visit Europe, while the corresponding figure was 50
percent in Vyborg and 61.3 percent in St. Petersburg itself, a pattern
reflecting history, geography and economics.
Of those in the three cities who
said they considered themselves to be Europeans, 61.3 percent purchased Russian
products while 87.5 percent bought European ones. But at the same time, the researchers found
that those who identified in the first instance as residents of their cities
also had a preference for European products relative to Russian ones.
“It is possible,” Domanov, one of the
authors of the study, said, “that the more life connects people with Europe abroad,
the more they feel themselves separated from Russia and therefore their main
identity becomes if not European then local.” But two other correlations are
certain.
On the one hand, those with more
education are more likely to identify as Europeans. And on the other, those who
knew when their city had been absorbed by Russia were also more likely to
identify as Europeans than were those who did not know that detail from the
past, a pattern that raises intriguing questions about what greater attention
to history might lead to.
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