Paul
Goble
Staunton, January 17 – Moscow lacks
the funds to support the 2.5 million people living in hard to reach villages in
the Far North, but it also lacks the money that would be needed to shut down
these settlements and move their residents to cities, not to speak of the opposition
if would face from the villagers if it were to try.
At a time when ever more Russians
are urging the promotion of further urbanization – see windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2017/01/could-russia-of-15-megalopolises-emerge.html
– Moscow faces a serious problem with the millions of Russians who live in
small villages that are increasingly isolated because of disintegrating transportation
infrastructure.
According to the 2010 census, Russia
has some 153,000 villages, of which 60,000 have fewer than 100 residents. The ones far removed from the regular
transportation grid are dying especially quickly, and targeted interventions
such as the one by Vladimir Putin after his press conference for the village of
Serebryanka in Sverdlovsk oblast are doing little to slow the pace.
In dealing with these communities,
Moscow faces two major problems: The costs of maintaining and supplying these
villages are high, rising and unpopular in the cities, and a significant share
of the population of these villages has little or no interest in moving away from
where they call home to the cities.
As a result of the first, “Komsomolskaya
Pravda” reports today, Moscow has been carrying out what it calls “optimization”
which involves closing hospitals, schools and kindergartens in distant villages
and not building or repairing the roads connecting them with the outside (kp.ru/daily/26630/3649576/).
But this hasn’t
solved the problem, experts say. According to Nikolay Mironov of the Moscow
Center for Economic and Political Reforms, “the rural population views [what
Moscow is doing] as a signal that the state isn’t interested in how people live
in the villages,” a signal that can’t help the Kremlin which has long relied on
rural voters to support it.
And at
the same time, despite complaints by urban residents, Moscow has discovered
that it does not have the funds to support these villages or to close them
down. At present, some 10.5 million Russians in villages in the North depend on
Moscow subsidies which amount to 500 billion rubles (8.5 million US dollars) a
year and regional ones that add to that total.
But the
costs of shutting down villages are prohibitive as well. The Russian Academy
for Economics and State Service establishes that it would take at least 150
million rubles (2.5 million US dollars) to close down a village and 1.2 million
rubles (20,000 US dollars) to move each worker.
And the
Academy’s experts say that it would take three trillion rubles (50 billion US
dollars) to move all 2.5 million Russian citizens living in hard to reach
villages in the Far North alone. Closing down all the villages as some advocate
would cost many multiples of that, their findings suggest.
Vladimir
Klimanov of the Moscow Institute for Social Sciences points out that even if
the money were available, “there are not so many successful cases of forced liquidation
of settlements.” It would cost less ultimately to close the villages than to
maintain them. But cost alone is not the only criterion.
“The task
of the state,” he says, “is to develop territory. If we throw over some land,
at one instance we may discover that they no longer belong to us.” And consequently, the regime needs to “stimulate”
both the development of population centers in these regions and the voluntary
movement of people out of them.
But that is
where the problems really begin. As Deputy Prime Minister Yury Trutnyev put it
recently, “when people like living in the village, this is a sign of economic
development” because “it isn’t normal that all be urbanized and live in big
cities.” Moscow needs to help the
villagers rather than ignore them or talk about shutting down where they live.
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