About 200 thousand Russians leave the countryside for the city every year

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

About 200 thousand Russians leave the countryside for the cities every year. The lifeless space of the country is expanding, the Vedomosti newspaper writes with reference to the study "Migration of the Rural Population and the Dynamics of Agricultural Employment in Russian Regions" by Tatyana Nefedova from the Institute of Geography of the Russian Academy of Sciences and Nikita Mkrtchyan from the Institute of Demography at the Higher School of Economics.

The rural population of the country today is declining everywhere, except for the suburbs of large cities, the authors of the study write. This process is most intensive in the Far East, Eastern Siberia and the European North, where the rural population is declining by 1.5-3% annually.

Now, probably, the outflow is even increasing, Mkrtchyan suggests, but statistics do not capture this. Now there are 37.8 million rural residents (26% of the total population); in fact, much less people live in the villages, notes Nefedova.

Most often, young and active people leave the village - graduates of rural schools go to universities or look for work in cities in order to stay there. This is a vicious circle, the researchers emphasize: in the Non-Black Earth Region, the relocation of young people leads to the degradation of the social environment, which worsens the state of agriculture and pushes the population to cities even more. There remain those who have nothing to buy housing in the city with, and those who are over 40, since their knowledge and skills are not particularly needed in the city.

From 7 to 20% of the able-bodied population of villages do not work on the ground - these are the so-called otkhodniki who travel hundreds and thousands of kilometers to large cities to work on a rotational basis.

In Central Russia, the Volga region, in the North-West, the share of migrant workers is higher, and in the zone of attraction of Moscow - in the Tula, Kaluga, Yaroslavl, Vladimir regions - about 30-40% of the able-bodied rural population works in the capital and the Moscow region.

In the east of the country, with its sparse network of large cities, this phenomenon is less represented: here people most often leave the village for good.

The reasons for relocation vary. In the north and east of Russia, in the non-chernozem regions, the village is degenerating for natural reasons. In unfavorable climatic conditions, state and collective farms die and this pushes into the cities even those who, perhaps, would like to live in the countryside. In the south, agriculture has emerged from the crisis, but labor-intensive animal husbandry is being supplanted by crop production, it needs fewer workers.