“New” Rural Settlements – Former Urban-Type Settlements

Abstract

Since the 1920s, when the notion of “urban-type settlement” (UTS) was introduced in Russia, and until the 1980s the number of UTSs was constantly increasing. But since the 1990s, their rapid decline began, and by 2019 more than a third of them were transformed into rural settlements. In this article, the authors try to find out what the “new villages”  – the former UTSs are; where they are located; what their functions (largely lost) are, and what the specific features of their population are. From 1989 to 2010, the processes of transformation of UTSs into rural settlements administratively increased rural population of Russia by 2.4 mln people and held back the growth of the urban population share, which increased only slightly from 73.4 to 73.7%. When comparing the census data of 1989 and 2010 in many regions, the “administrative ruralization” radically changed the dynamics of the population: instead of a real decrease in the number of rural residents, Census-2010 showed the increase of rural population. Former UTSs are losing population more rapidly than the rural areas of their municipal districts, and the most intensive outflow is in logging settlements, centers of construction and colonies-settlements. The average population size of the former UTSs is minimal in the North of European Russia and the Far North, and maximum in the European South and in the Ural-Volga area, where the former UTSsdistrict centers are mostly concentrated, in which change of their status was purely formal.