Russian Company Towns Now Centers of Growth and Most Residents Don’t Want to Leave, Development Official Says

 Paul Goble

            Staunton, Dec. 21 – The 321 Russian cities built around a single industry have been in decline for so long that the latest news from them, that as a result of government programs, these monogorody have become centers of growth and the introduction of new technologies to the point that 70 percent of their residents say they don’t want to leave.

            These government programs centered around targeted aid and the offering of zero interest loans to private companies were introduced in 2014 and expanded in 2016. They are now coming to an end, but as of now, these programs have staunched the exodus of population from places where ten percent of Russians live (ng.ru/economics/2021-12-21/100_211221112.html).

            Irina Makiyeva, who oversees the company town programs for the Russian Development Corporation, reports this positive development and says that over the last seven years, the company towns have seen the number of new jobs rise by 406,000, attract 1.8 trillion rubles (25 billion US dollars), and carried out 1182 new infrastructure projects.

 

            Obviously, many company towns in Russia are still in trouble, with their aging factories either not working or producing things no one wants to buy. But this targeted program has helped at least some of them and thus helped the Russians there who had earlier been in despair of their future.

 

            From Moscow’s perspective, the fact that more than two-thirds of the residents of these places want to stay where they are rather than migrate to the megalopolises will reduce the strain on the latter and help hold the country together given that many company towns were originally located where they are for security purposes rather than out of economic rationality.

 

            But any optimism about the future of these places may be premature. As Makiyeva points out, the programs announced earlier are now being phased out, undoubtedly to save the federal budget money; and the disappointment many residents of these company towns may in the event of a new downturn be expressed in more radical ways than just outmigration.