27 Percent of Russia’s Creative Workers Concentrated in Moscow

Paul Goble

            Staunton, August 15 – Even though the population of the Russian capital is less than 10 percent of the country’s as a whole, the city is where 27 percent of the 376,400 members of the creative professions are employed, meaning that in the rest of the country where 90 percent of Russians live, only 73 percent of such people are to be found, a new HSE study finds.

            Using the British classification system of creative professions, the HSE Institute for Statistical Research and the Economy of Knowledge has released a report, The Creative Economy of Moscow in Statistics (in Russian; Moscow: HSE, 2021) (measurecreativity.hse.ru/ reviewed at iq.hse.ru/news/484646227.html).

            Many countries display similar concentrations of creative people in a relatively few cities or even in their capitals; but few have a greater concentration of political and economic power together with a concentration of intellectual and academic power. The Russian pattern in that regard is very different even from most centralized countries.

            And it has consequences: when the political and intellectual elites are in the same city, their relations and the ability of the latter to pursue its work independently and even at odds with the government is much reduced, while in countries where the political and intellectual centers are separated, there are more opportunities for that, regardless of the government involved.