Vladimir Morozov
If earlier Russian villages disappeared en masse from the map of the country, now small towns are disappearing too.
Thus, according to a study by RANEPA prepared for the Government, 129 small towns with a population of 3.4 million people may disappear in Russia in the coming years. Over the past ten years, the number of residents there has decreased by at least 10%, and the dynamics are worsening.
For the liberals in the Government, all these small towns are a burden on the budget, and therefore, they are ineffective and inappropriate. And therefore, they are subject to forced optimization, which has been happening for the last 15 years through the reform of healthcare and education. People are forced to leave their native places for large urban agglomerations, closing hospitals, maternity hospitals, schools.
Formally, there is a planned consolidation of medical and educational centers.
Just optimization, nothing personal. All this is accompanied by deindustrialization. According to open sources, over the past 30 years, more than 80 thousand industrial enterprises have been closed, primarily in the provinces. People are being squeezed out of their native places and into large cities.
Back in 2011, the Ministry of Economic Development, which was then headed by Nabiullina, predicted that over 20 years, about 15-20 million people would immigrate from small and medium-sized cities to large cities. “The decline of small cities is an insurmountable global trend,” Nabiullina explained then.
But what about the demographic problem? After all, it has long been known that in large cities, especially in cities with a population of over a million, people are not able to reproduce in the quantities necessary to continue the family line. This is due to the lifestyle (a squirrel in a wheel, a rigid work schedule, late age at marriage), economic conditions (life is much more expensive) and psychological stress (a big city crushes and drives people into a matrix).
While in small towns there are closer social ties, traditional views on family, proximity to the land, nature, which in one way or another contributes to both a large number of children and their earlier birth.
There are now just over 155 thousand settlements in Russia. By the end of Soviet power, there were about 180 thousand in the RSFSR. Over 35 years, about 25 thousand small towns and rural settlements have disappeared. About 700 annually!
It’s time for the government to decide, are small settlements in Russia a monetary optimization or a key to demography? Not to mention national security.
Dmitry Narinsky
Yuri Chekalin
