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CIAO DATE: 4/01
Social Sciences
Vol. 31, No. 4/2000
The Dialectics of Urbanization and Migration in Russia
By Alexander Akhiezer
Translated by Valery Yasinsky
The connection between urbanization and migration in Russia is complex and ambiguous. These two processes may coincide in their direction and may also oppose each other. The stable mass migration is in itself a changing element of the mode of living, a form of activity which realizes the values of a part of the population and its groups which are connected with a temporary or permanent change in the places of residence and work. We can also call migration a forceful resettlement of people (i.e. during serfdom Russian landlords possessed the right to sell peasants without land to other territories and in Soviet times the authorities forcefully moved the whole peoples). Migration can be enormous up to that limit that society per se may turn to be the result of resettlement of the whole peoples. Different periods of human history are characterized by essential differences in the scales, content and direction of migration, its role and place in the reproductive process. The formation of towns led to the emergence of migration which is determined by urbanization, the obtaining types of settlement, territorially fixed sociocultural differences in society which are significant to the mode of living and reproduction of human life. Urbanization is a factor of further migration, the result of the respective exploration of a territory, and the conversion of it into an attractive feature of the new mode of living and new forms of labor.
Colonization as a Migration
The historical process of Russia's "spreading" to the adjacent territories ran as spontaneous colonization of these territories by the population. But the colonization was effected also by the state which seized new lands. The state followed the migrants who were inclined to colonization activity and sometimes went ahead of them by populating the territories seized, often ousting or deporting the local population. The significance of these two components was changing in the country's history and gradually the state's role in expanding Russia's territory grew. Once mass and spontaneous, migration inspired a new life into the state's imperial policy. This policy on new territories differed by its duality and fragmentary nature, which manifested itself in particular in the dual, contradictory and split migration policy. One time the authorities supported migration to new lands, the other time they opposed it, often ignoring serious violations of their own prohibitions to migrate.
The scales of the territories involved in migration in Russia are so great that this undoubtedly played and play now an exceptional role in the formation of Russian society to such an extent as we see it today. It was forming as a nomadic one on the limitless expanses as a result of people's attempts to live if not in the process of permanent movement (and simultaneously the state's desire which was not effective but rigid enough to subordinate this process to the external power of the authorities), then attempting all the time to make such movement. Russia's history is characterized by mass expansion of the territories explored stemming from people's soil, by mass colonization in all directions where there were no fairly mighty natural and social obstacles.
The population of the Muskovy state formed as a result of decay of Kievan Rus, which caused resettlement from the mid-Dniper area to the south-west and north-east, that is, from the center of Kievan Rus to its outskirts. In the period of its maximum expansion the country exceeded almost 50 times its minimum dimensions which once existed. The process of colonization was in fact by its essence an instance of migration, too – colonization-migration. Its paradox in Siberia consisted in that it ran almost in the desert, in the inclement country. Since the end of the 16th century the territory of Siberia that had been joined over an odd century to Russia exceeded Europe 11 times. Mostly it was infertile land with rare settlements which were poorly populated. It embodied and consolidated the desire to nature that has set up in culture to the detriment of the desire to live in a state, in large communities, serving to consolidate the values of pre-state structures. This was the factor that promoted preservation of people's passive approach to traditional relationships, opposing the development of abilities to subordinate the particular relationships to the end effect, subordinate the structure to functions. And this is vitally important to the formation of new, more complex solutions and more intensive forms of labor.
As is known, back at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries and up to the First World War the limited size of the land fit for tillage served as a factor of migration of the peasantry to Siberia. However, one should not forget that we may speak about this limited nature only with certain reservations because this stemmed from the archaic form of land tillage. At that time the migrants were not the poorest peasants having little land, which make us think that there were rudiments of the forms of migration in this process which were aimed at qualitative shifts in the mode of living and labor. Nevertheless this tendency did not find its development.
Specialists point out to several reasons for colonization-migration. One of them consisted in that the whole territory, which made the historical nucleus of the Russian state, "was not quite fertile". 1 This stimulated migration of two types. Firstly, the hack system of land tillage (which could hardly be regarded as a "system of land tillage") required almost an annual change in plots of land cultivated and thus permanent migration. This led to periodic resettlement from the usual land. The mode of living which has set up historically and which was related with a special form of land tillage "was mobile and nomadic in character... Husbandry was 'transient' in character". 2 Secondly, at a certain stage migration was stimulated by the mighty pressure of agrarian overpopulation. If in the 1860s the land plot was 4.8 tithes per capita, it decreased in 1880 to 3.5 tithes and to 2.6 tithes in 1900. 3 It meant that the desire to expand the sphere of habitat might reach significant dimensions.
On the whole, however, migration processes ran in conditions of the population's low density. In the period of early medieval ages in Russia the density was about three to six times smaller than in the West. This indicator in European Russia was in the 16th century ten times smaller than that in Germany and 20 times smaller than that in France. 4 I think this is explained not only by the less favorable conditions of husbandry in Russia but also the desire to meet all problems by extensive solutions, which is so typical of Russian culture.
A mighty factor of migration resides in man's attempts to evade from the authorities and the state to embody the ideal of "free will", to migrate to remote "free lands" where he may encounter with utterly new ideal life the ideas of which have been cultivated in people's Utopias. The desires of embody these ideals often accepted the form of mass escape. It is particularly such an attitude toward the authorities at certain historical stages should possibly be regarded as the principal factor of colonization.
Thinkers and writers of Russia paid a special interest to this problem. Thus, Nikolai Berdiayev wrote: "Immense expanses which from all sides surround and jostle the Russian individual are not an outer, material factor of his life but an inner, spiritual one. These immense Russian expanses are within the Russian soul to have a great command over it... The greatness of Russian expanses did not promote the elaboration of self-discipline and self-activity in the Russian individual–it was rather diffused in space". 5 Thus, it emphasized the influence of the gigantic colonization-migration on the mentality and stereotypes of culture that were forming.
People did not retaliate their dissatisfaction with the authorities by their desire to change and improve power, and make themselves responsible for it, but by mass migration as a method of preservation and activization of pre-state archaic values in all spheres of human activity. The desire to leave the already inhabited lands consolidated the idea of the opportunity to have one's home anywhere, of land as a limitless resource and repository. As a result, productive decisions were made on the basis of involving in the extensive circulation ever greater masses of resources which seemed to them limitlessly abundant. Their local exhaustion was compensated for by migration of the "fluid element of Russian history", to use S. Solovyov's phrase, not only within the Earthly space but also within the whole of Universe. (One can see in this an important incentive of the philosophy of "Russian cosmism".)
This was a sort of result of the archaic forms of reproduction as well as the prerequisite of their preservation. L. Milov writes about the archaic conditions that reigned in agriculture in European Russia and which partly remained in the 19th century. 6 Even more, Russia appears to be an "archaic socium" which also retained "an archaic protective mechanism of communal land tillage". 7 V. Buldakov speaks about the archaic mass behavior already in the 20th century. According to him, we witnessed in the early 20th century not a breakthrough to the future but, on the contrary, an instance of archaization of the whole social structure, giving rise to the real tribal instincts; in fact, society came to the sacralization of the most archaic form of human being. As a result, the "social archaic" phenomena won the upper hand 8 which as usual were an element of everyday life.
The mechanism of conservation of archaic phenomena in Russia may be understood only with account that the limitless opportunities for colonization-migration were opened by mass resettlement in the form of numerous settlements, which seldom exceeded two or three farmsteads to be remote from each other. Cultural consequences of such a type of settlement were determined by the fact that there were no conditions created for improving the forms of communication and for cultivating this process as a specific value. 9 Such a sociocultural peculiarity of the mode of living did not create favorable opportunities to form new, better and more effective types of organization of all forms of activity and values which would raise its effectiveness above the value of historically traditional relationships. This impeded the overcoming of the dominance of extensive forms of reproduction and made more difficult the spread of constructive innovations as well as the use of other countries' and people's experience.
Migration as a form of reproduction of extensive forms of labor and making decisions led to that what could be called as insubstantial goals of migration, that is, to people's poor orientation to the search, through migration, of stable habitat and the place of work for many years, of forming a stable family and one's household, and to a desire of dialogue with one's surrounding. Evidently, a certain role was played here by frequent fires: Russian settlements up to the 20th century were made predominantly of wood. All this conserved the instability of everyday life, created objective conditions for mass construction sites using poorly qualified labor, and, in the long run, resulted in the wasteful use of human and other resources.
Urbanization as a Factor of Migration
The towns that emerged in ancient Rus were administrative centers, which were important for the protection of the territory. However, the prevalence of the administrative-military factors made the development of these towns one-sided, distinguishing them essentially from the towns of the West. This even allowed some specialists to negate the right to use the notion of urbanization in Russian conditions. Anyway, the towns in that period were not the centers of gravitation for essential migration flows which the towns might be – the centers of trade and production, spreading their influence to significant territories. The fates of these towns exposed important specifics of Russian society's development. In their essence they became conductors of the state policy. Urbanization was maintained on the basis of resources accumulated by the state and not on the mass activity of people who were inclined to indulge in business, the development of their habitat, settlements and towns. This also significantly distinguished Russian towns from European ones.
While forming the system of settlements in accordance with its own needs and interests, the state simultaneously stimulated the migration of people who were needed to implement certain goals. "People at government service and the clergy settled in Siberia at first were wholly on the state's dependence receiving money and boarding. Later, they usually received land and should produce grain themselves. But that was possible not everywhere and only after conquering people of other beliefs and establishing Russian dominance in Siberia. Owing to this, the state had to keep in Siberia large reserves of grain to hand it over to people at government service and the clergy. It was difficult to bring grain from European Russia even to Western Siberia, to say nothing of Eastern Siberia. Therefore, following the state servants and sometimes simultaneously with them, land-tilling peasants were also sent to Siberia. These peasants received a plot of land which they cultivated to their own avail and a tithe of arable land the harvest from which went to the sovereign's bins as their principal duty to be later handed over to the state servants and the clergy... Peasants were sent to Siberia like state servants either freely or by a ukase." 10 The serf state solved its problems by manipulating the serfs. Let us recall Chichikov from N. Gogol's famous poem The Dead Souls. He introduced himself as a landlord from Kherson who wanted to buy peasants without land. To put it another way, coercive migration of people who were not free was in the first half of the 19th century not something unusual but an accepted element of migration. This throws light on further Russian urbanization and migration. There was a vividly expressed desire to form them to realize a state policy. Hence the state coercion as a factor of such a policy of enslaving.
This tendency acquired many diverse forms in the Soviet period. As usual, migration existed to a large extent as coercive. There was formed a large system of GULAG (the Chief Department of Concentration Camps) which concentrated the major part of society, and in which simultaneously the "working people" perished in regions that were unfavorable for labor and life, doing a job which did not require qualification. Thus, this created not so much the material values as annihilated people did. (By the way, there were formed the so-called sharashkas in which attempt was made to use highly qualified labor in conditions of bonds. But this may be regarded as a step of self-negation of the Soviet system.) The deportation of whole peoples became the most important form of coercive migration. I cannot avoid mentioning the fact that big masses of people were moved to the occupied territories as occupation troops and administration.
At the same time, there was the reverse side of the development of towns and migration in the USSR. Whatever the direct factors of their development may be, Russian towns gradually became an attractive force for the growing mass of people and primarily for millions of real and potential victims of collectivization. Urbanization turned into a relatively comfortable factor of migration: the place of work, its new forms and opportunities to intensify labor. This brought about illusions about a new role of workers as a class – the bearer of the progressive form of labor and social creativity. Migration continued to carry in itself, one way or another, people's abilities to realize plans, needs and their desire to seek for more comfortable life.
When studying the processes of migration, one could trace the trends that proved the relative independence of migration flows of state strivings. For instance, L. Iofa wrote about the migration flows to the South and West that had existed for centuries and which proved that the authorities could never suppress fully the uncontrolled processes 11 . To a larger extent this referred to emigration. At the outcome of Soviet power the state ever more lost the opportunity to impede emigration from the country.
The vivid dual character of migration was expressed in that its flows differed drastically in its motives. Some, which were determined and stimulated by the state, were directed mostly to the North and East while others aimed to seek conditions of more comfortable life ran southwards and westwards. This split was the embryo of the collapse of the whole state policy of urbanization and migration.
The picture became more complicated as a result of mutual penetration of the opposite poles of these processes. For instance, the state tried to direct the flows of migrants in its own interests to realize ambitious, often Utopian, plans hinging on people's desire to find more comfortable conditions in towns. For that reason it introduced material stimulation, for instance, in the form of famous "northern premiums". The implementation of such a program required great expanses. However, as power became weaker and resources exhausted to be used to support its plans, the authorities more often addressed the youth and the population with ideological calls, which were supplemented, with various utilitarian promises. The authorities called to go to various construction sites, cultivate the virgin lands where complex problems were solved promptly given hard conditions and poor labor organization. Often this brought about destructive consequences. For instance, Khrushchev's cultivation of virgin lands produced instances of mass large-scale disorganization. In that case, the state rested on insubstantial values of migrants who solved their problems on the extensive basis, on the limited desire to explore and improve their territory. This may be regarded as a certain manifestation of culture that did not departed fully with the values of the nomadic way of life, with the weak desire to develop a well-organized everyday life. The inner dualism between urbanization and migration brought about general instability in society, inevitable dangerous catastrophic changes, and the emergence of various combinations of elements of this dualism.
The Crisis of Bonds between Urbanization and Migration
The state's opportunities to control the course of development of towns and the trend of migration were always limited by its own resources and the opportunities of administrative coercion. Either opportunities were not limitless contrary to mass illusions. What was taking place was quantitative and qualitative changes, catastrophic shifts, and growing inner contradiction of the whole of society. What was changing was the correlation between resources which could mobilize the state to realize its goals on the one hand, and the spontaneous mass processes, in particular, the mass desire to realize needs in the personal or group plans, on the other. The state's abilities to influence mass processes, react on the unfavorable factors and, in particular, the growing difficulties in colonization-migration became weaker and weaker.
The specifics of the migration that came from colonization-migration consisted historically in the predominance of centrifugal processes over centripetal ones. However, we witnessed a turn to the predominance of centripetal migration. This testified to the rupture with the tradition that has been forming over the whole history of Russia. "Since the second half of the 1970s the trend of migration has changed to the opposite–to Central Russia and to the East of the country from Southern republics and regions". The migration "expansion of Russians has changed by their re-emigration to their own republic". This ousting of Russians was like a "thunder in clear skies". 12 At the same time such a rupture with a tradition had deep historical roots. In 1979-1988 the process of re-emigration of Russians involved the majority of republics of the USSR. Then, it took the character of evacuation while it was really a run-away from the regions prone to ethnic conflicts. 13 What is evident is the qualitative breaking whose significance is yet to be comprehended. It seems that the endless process of "spreading" encountered certain external obstacles. Really, we talked about the change in the correlation of forces. On the one hand, when departing from historical centers we observed a relaxation of energy potential of colonization-migration and the general decrease in the volume of resources which society and the state could direct to its support. On the other hand, the growth in the self-consciousness of peoples and ethnoses led to the intensification of resistance to Russian colonization-migration.
Of course, even formerly we had evidence that the "spreading" acquired an unhealthy character. It could not go on without any limit. Already Russia's defeat in the Crimean War testified to the growing resistance to geopolitical changes, which accompanied this process. The selling of Alaska in 1867 became one of the consequences of that war. The reasons for this step resided in the comprehension that Russia was unable to digest remote gigantic territories. According to Great Prince Konstantin, Alaska required such expenses that Russia could not afford to defend it. The digestion of the Amyr basin, to his opinion, might bring the country more advantages. 14
The Soviet power tried to continue the policy of "spreading" of the territory, converting it wholly into a state monopoly. Already in this one can see the symptoms of the decay because it was an attempt to convert relatively peaceful people's colonization which was not directly prone to conflicts with local peoples into a direct state aggression. The Soviet time exposed the evident features of the historical exhaustion of the millennium-long process of expansion of the state, which tried to spread its influence abroad the country onto the whole of "socialist community". Possibly, the beginning of this process should be related to the fall-out of Josip Broz Tito's Yugoslavia from the single line of the countries of socialism. Evidently, the turning point is in the failure to subordinate Afghanistan. The disintegration of the USSR, the war in Chechnya, the tendency of East-European countries to relax their ties with Russia and intensify their contacts with the West may be regarded as consolidation of this turn, as a symptom of the growing pressure from the surrounding world (mostly from the South) on Russia, using peaceful means, and, in particular, the Chinese attempts to colonize the Far East. One cannot neglect the intensification of Islamic fundamentalism in the South which came to power in Iran, the existence of the dangerous aggressive regime in Iraq, and the forces which support these regimes in other states, including the CIS countries.
The termination of colonization, the change in the determining vector of migration processes coincided with the most important profound qualitative shifts in society. As A. Vishnevsky believes, our society has gone through the economic, urban and demographic revolutions. However, these processes were not led to the end which brings "society into contradiction with its initial, traditional and holistic principles" and this does not exclude an "opportunity of the totalitarian dictatorship" which hinges on the archaic phenomena of revanche. 15 To put it another way, the problem consists in that the turn of migration flows and the end of colonization beyond the official bounds of Russia may be understood as the most important element of deep changes which are inseparable from Russia's dynamics and its civilizational characteristic. This fact requires a radical change in society's self-consciousness.
What draws attention to itself is the fact that at a certain stage of Russian history the country was characterized by the gigantic rates of urbanization unseen in the world practice, an "urban explosion", the respective turn of the migration flows that literally engulfed the towns. 16 Among the reasons that brought about this process scholars usually name the policy of collectivization which inflicted a tremendous blow at the countryside, and industrialization pushing the state to "pump over" people who were capable of working from the countryside to town. However, there was yet another reason which appeared before 1917 and which received since some time the name of "peasant revolution" that, to my mind, does not correspond to the essence of the developments.
Until now, even some historians have a point of view that the territorial commune of the countryside began to disintegrate after 1861. This process really did take place at the beginning but then it was replaced by the growing process of rehabilitation of the commune, which only aggravated following the Stolypin reforms. The peasantry began to "creep" into the civil war, which commenced as a struggle against the landlords but gradually overgrew into the war between those who defended the maximum equalization and those who rejected this way. Gradually, the number of pogroms of rich peasant households began to exceed that of the pogroms of landlords. The number of dwellings burnt in the village in 1907-1909 belonging to landlords was about 70.9% while that of the dwellings belonging to peasants amounted to 29.1%. This correlation changed to the opposite in 1910-1913: the number of the burnt landlord estates equaled to 32.5% and the number of burnt peasant houses was 67.5%. 17 The struggle for equalization created unbearable conditions of life in the countryside and undermined the fundamentals of production, which testified to the disorganization of the village life yet before the collectivization. It seemed that the appearance of jobs in town opened opportunities to avoid the developing discomfort.
At first glance, migrants that ran to towns embodied in their movement the state's policy of industrialization, realizing simultaneously their personal plans. As it might seem, the duality of urbanization directed by the state and personal plans disappeared to give rise to the "moral and political unity of the Soviet people". Nevertheless, it was a mere instance according to historical measures. Town was filled with archaic labor, dozens of millions of unqualified people who essentially adhered to totemism and who strove to shift the burden of decision-making to the "totem–father–leader". This meant that the flows of migrants destroyed the attainments of urbanization of the past which consisted in the development of hotbeds (although not numerous) of urbanized culture. What took place was the agrarization of towns. 18 One may speak about urbanization in these conditions only with essential reservations. The urbanization that was focused on the formation of culture qualitatively new for society entered into contradiction with mass migration that was bringing to towns an archaic inundation.
The split between town (or, rather, urban functions, the cultivation and realization of urban values) and the countryside (or, rather, the functions which hinged on archaic values) continued to intensify. The end of the New Economic Policy turned to be a capitulation before the inability to solve the task of cultural and economic integration of town and the countryside. That was an ominous symptom of disintegration of urbanization and migration, the failure of the attempt to integrate the whole of economic and state order, and the inability to overcome the split.
The state's leadership believed that the mass archaic element might be used to form new society hinging on the administrative power, terror, ideological influence, inclusion of people into the rhythms of organization of production reduced mostly to technology. This subject could form only pseudoindustrialization, its technical aspect. Real industrialization should include a real mechanism of reproduction, that is, an opportunity to use market realization of commodities for permanent reproduction of production at ever higher technical and organizational level. In reality, what was created was a gigantic natural economy unseen in world history and deprived of the mechanism of effective reproduction.
Archaization weakened society, which in the long run resulted in relaxation of the energy of migration and almost in all-round decrease in the inflow of the population to towns. This process began yet in the USSR in 1979-1988 in the period between censuses. 19 A large group of republics appeared in which the outflow of the urban population predominated. Contrary to the Western regions of the former USSR, Central Asia, Southern and Central Kazakhstan, Armenia, Azerbadjan, the autonomies of the Northern Caucasus (except Kabardino-Balkaria) "appear to be a region which manifests stagnation in the development of urbanization. It is impossible to overcome the crisis situation given such a dynamics. The stagnation of towns consolidates the elements of conservativeness, patriarchal nature, national and ethnic apartness, thus 'fertilizing' the soil for national conflicts". 20
This spoke about the appearance of an anti-urban impulse which, in a number of the most important regions, acquired the character of stagnation and archaization of society. All this testified to the aggravation of polarization of regions of the former USSR. It promoted its disintegration, allowed us to speak about de-urbanization, and about the existence, at present and in the past, of pseudo-urbanization. Archaization is quite prominent if one begins to study the specifics of culture of the urban dweller. The results of study show that "urban (according to the statistical data) Russian society essentially has an agrarian mentality". 21 I can refer to its features also the priority of food self-sufficiency, the negative perception of social inequality and land selling, and the suspicious attitude to foreigners.
In such processes one can see an abstract model of colonialism, that is, the spread of one's activity onto the allegedly empty space which, however, gradually exposes its inner content and enters into conflict with colonialism. Those who argue whether Russia – both pre-Soviet and Soviet – was a colonial empire, as I can judge, ignore the fact that the country historically developed the attitude to itself as to a colony. And this is not a consequence of inimical concept but the result of the minimum level of mass reflection, the realized self-value of its own, which is not attained and which is necessary in the particular historical situation.
The building of towns and mass migration to them were called upon to ensure the needs of industrialization. But the very industrialization was understood as multiplication of the existing samples of hardware and technologies, in many instances it hinged on the purchase of Western equipment which depreciated as a result of the world crisis as well as on the archaic attitude towards labor. All this led the country to an economic catastrophe, to technical stagnation excluding relatively narrow sphere of production to which efforts of the scientific and technical elite and the respective resources were directed. As the result, the fall in migration and urbanization began and the country came to a national catastrophe both in the political (disintegration of the USSR) and the economic spheres. And today we have a general relaxation, exhaustion of the human resource, the collapse of the empire and the state as a subject of coercive urbanization and migration. What manifested itself was the inability of Russian society to effect comfortable migration and urbanization, which had the growth of human capital as their prerequisites and result. Today we all became witnesses, contemporaries and participants in the steep qualitative turn in the real policy of mastering space which destroys centuries-long rhythms and which speaks of the ineffectiveness of the historically formed mythology of space, including Soviet mythology, too.
On its immense territories the Russian statehood met with the weakness of the general cultural foundation which could intrinsically unite the whole diversity of the peoples of the country, confessions and regions. On the one hand, this threatened society with disintegration, and on the other, stimulated the central authorities to intensify organizational administrative integrators to the detriment of cultural ones. In fact, the emergence of the Soviet system can be regarded as an attempt to put forth the ideology of proletarian internationalism with the idea of equality of all peoples instead of the old cultural integrator which hinged on the idea of unity of "Orthodoxy, autocracy and the people's nature". However, this idea did not open a way to the formation of the basis consensus, a mighty layer of homogeneous culture, which could serve as a fairly stable integrator of the whole, which was proven by that circumstance that this idea needed to be complemented by terror. The central power, like the whole of society, appeared to be weak when we began to talk about organization of normal organic life within the whole of the country, and, in particular, of the effective economic digestion of the territory.
The reduction in the potential of urbanization meant the weakening of the opportunity to reproduce the obtaining infrastructure. This implied a serious menace to society, a menace of destruction the life of the great number of people. The infrastructure and, thus, the whole of life that was based on it, developed on the ephemeral basis of urbanization which was not capable of integrating society were superficial and unstable in character, not fulfilling its main sociocultural function – the formation of urbanistic culture which would aim the individual at the intensification of his own decisions.
Urbanization and Migration Today
The most important feature of the modern period consists in the reduction of the role of urbanization as a process of formation of hotbeds of development, centers of preserving the comfort and diversity of housing, the places of labor and recreation. In particular, the losses of the population's vital potential in towns in 1992 and 1994 was higher than that of the populations of the countryside, especially that of males. 22 The abatement of ties between settlements destroys the frame of the existing forms of settlement. The ties within agglomerations become weaker, the urbanization potential is retained only in limited points, primarily in capital cities.
The problem consists in that the weakness of urbanization motivated the formation of a specific mode of living related with the suburbianization of the country. In the known sense, a suburb is an "anti-town". "The Russian suburb accumulated forces in the shadow of the official quasi-town, expanding at the cost of the summer season in town construction sites". 23 It is of interest that with the decline of bolshevism in Brezhnev times the suburb significantly expanded its domain. "The suburb phenomenon necessarily meant a temporary phenomenon which was any moment ready to exile, destruction and movement and which was living only one day, being in principle alien and inimical to any shadow of stability, inheritance and something fundamental" 24 . This world may be regarded as a "negation of civilization".
The suburbianization is characterized by a retreat from Orthodox traditionalism and intensification of the influence of moderate and, possibly, developed utilitarianism. It is typical of comprehension of the values of the surrounding world as an endless set of real and potential means. Simultaneously, the mode of living which tends to utilitarianism is characterized by a definite merger of elements of the urban mode of living and that of the countryside, the elements of traditionalism and certain aspects of liberalism which are connected with scientific and technical progress. Such a mode of living is eclectic and hybridous in character to include opposite characteristics. On the one hand, the town remains a focus of society, the center of potential renaissance, on the other – the focus of consolidation of inseparate-syncretic mode of living opposite to urbanization. Urbanization that is going through the state of decay is not capable of duly cultivate and stimulate the development of highly qualified labor, and develop the labor potential. The weakness of urbanization is a major factor of reducing the quality of the country's labor potential.
Academician Yu. Yaremenko believed that big contingents of those employed in production worked in our country with elements of compulsory labor. In this connection, one should primarily recall the contingent of people permitted to live and work in Moscow within the limits of a certain quota. These people perceived labor as a compulsory act. The psychology and labor morals in our production are often the same as in prisons. Our production is characterized by active de-socialization, rather than socialization, the education of anti-social habits. An asocial type of man emerges." 25 As a rule, such people are prone to conflict, "they hardly cooperate with each other and the administration". 26 As a result, we observe the formation of the deeply disorganized individual who is organically connected with urbanization and migration which are disorganizing each other.
Coercive migration, like migration as a whole, has reduced drastically. Cases have been recorded when people refuse to leave even those regions in which their health is seriously threatened. The general reduction in migration, which is observed at present, may be regarded as a proof of society's decay and stagnation, impoverishment of people who lost any opportunity to move to a new place.
Nowadays, urbanization does not hinge on state capital investments, there are no new jobs, and the conditions of labor and leisure time deteriorate. That means a rupture with the Soviet tradition when the state had the burden of urbanization. Simultaneously, the opportunities of developing urbanization at the cost of private capital are negligible because of the weakness of private initiative. Thus, this process loses both of its locomotive forces.
The migration vector changes as regards the current scales of migration as it moves on. The termination of colonization leads exactly to the refusal from movement northwards and eastwards as well as to the movement to old industrial regions in the South and West, stimulating emigration. The abatement of the dependence of migration and the everyday life on urbanization in Russia's conditions signifies the relaxation of people's dependence on the state and relaxation of its support. Nevertheless, the decreasing level of migration shows that, given the conditions of the termination of colonization, we can observe with evidence the appearance in the foreground of those trends of migration which are mostly digested and which are simultaneously more favorable for life and health but which do not correspond to the state's historical traditions.
The reduction of migration over the whole territory of the former USSR in 1997 may be regarded as a breaking point within the scales of the CIS. These results may also be regarded as forerunner of a new crisis in Russia what did happen in 1998". 27 The financial and economic crisis reduced drastically citizens' income and resulted in the rise of the exploitation expenses for the housing fund, the increase in that share of expenses which is laid upon citizens. Simultaneously, we observe the drastic rise in the desire to merge the elements of urban life and that of the countryside, move one way or another to the ancient absence of differences between town and village, to exacerbation of the mass tendency which has never disappeared in Russia to make the town life similar to that of the countryside. At the same time, we can observe the intensification of the desire to form a mode of living which hinges on the existing housing fond, on the existing infrastructure, the system of transport and communication, on income which the job in town continued to give.
One can see in the modern mode of living attempts to combine these tendencies with the intensification of "agricultural sources of alimentation" in town dwellers at the cost of production of the natural agricultural produce by one's own family. Such subsidiary production has always occupied in the country a significant place. But the intensification of this tendency means that we observe practically a mass movement to the countryside, which is not fixed by statistical data because people in this case juridically remain in their urban apartments without losing the status of urban dwellers. What took place is seasonal movement of certain demographic groups to the countryside, primarily children and pensioners. It is recorded that people return to the practice of Tsarist times when industrial enterprises were closed for a period of agricultural work and workers left for the countryside. All these are proofs of mass attempts to subordinate the mode of living to the creation of maximum prerequisite for the survival on the basis of combining urban and country conditions, the use of urban infrastructure, including medicine, more broad opportunities to get pensions (the probability that they will be paid in time is greater in towns), the combination of getting monetary income for the work in town with growing the natural produce in subsidiary land plots. As a result, there appears a specific type of population, which is close to a suburban settlement, which, as many believe, creates prerequisites for the greatest stability in unstable society. Given such conditions, people usually are not inclined to migration. They feel greater fear of changes, which, in their opinion, may disturb the stability of their everyday life.
***
Today Russia is paying the many-century process of extensive exploration of territories which did not raise it to the qualitatively new level of development, did not intensify the potential that was needed to meet ever new challenges of history but, rather, pushed it to the unseen blowing-off of both human and natural resources. The country lurked in expectation of positive changes. There is a dominant belief that some concealed rhythms of creation will bring it back to welfare. Unfortunately, this belief came to us from archaic mythological times. Today, it acquired a form of expectation of a miracle, a charismatic leader who is capable of solving all for us. It seems that, given such conditions, the task of science consists in finding new positive tendencies which would lead to the dominance of more effective solutions, and, in particular, to the intensification of urbanization and migration.
Endnotes
Note 1: L.V. Milov. "The Natural Climatic Factor and the Specifics of the Russian Historical Process". Voprosy istorii, 1992, Nos. 4-5, pp. 39, 47. Back.
Note 2: V.S. Klyuchevsky. Works. Moscow, 1956, Vol. 1, pp. 309-310 (in Russian). Back.
Note 3: A. Akhiezer. "Why are We so Poor?" Znanie – sila, 1995, No. 4, p. 9. Back.
Note 4: A. Treivish. "Russian Geopolitics from Gostomysl to Our Days". Znanie – sila, 1995, No. 8, p. 9. Back.
Note 5: N.A. Berdyaev. Russia’s Fates. Moscow, 1990, pp. 63-64 (in Russian). Back.
Note 6: L.V. Milov. The Great Russian Ploughman and the Specifics of the Russian Historical Process. Moscow, 1998, p. 27 (in Russian). Back.
Note 8: V.P. Buldakov. The Red Riot. The Nature and Consequences of Revolutionary Violence. Moscow, 1997 (in Russian). Back.
Note 9: V.S. Klyuchevsky. Op. cit., p. 314. Back.
Note 10: M.K. Lyubavsky. A Review of the History of Russian Colonization Since Ancient Times Till the 20th Century. Moscow, 1996, p. 457 (in Russian). Back.
Note 11: L.E. Iofa. Towns of the Urals. Moscow, 1951, Part 1. Feudal Period (in Russian). Back.
Note 12: Zh.A. Zayonchkovskaya. "The Demographic Situation as a Factor of Emigration from the USSR". Migration of the Population, Moscow, 1992 (in Russian). Back.
Note 13: A. Vishnevsky, Zh. Zayonchkovskaya. Migration from the USSR: the Fourth Wave. Moscow, 1991 (in Russian). Back.
Note 14: E.V. Alekseeva. "Russian America: New Conceptions in English-Language Historiography". Istoria, filologia i filosofia, Novosibirsk, 1993, No. 1. Back.
Note 15: A.G. Vishnevsky. "Modernization of Russia: Behind or Ahead?" Where Is Russia Going?.. Alternatives of Social Development. Moscow, 1995 (in Russian). Back.
Note 16: A. Vishnevsky. The Sickle and the Ruble. Conservative Modernization in the USSR. Moscow, 1998 (in Russian). Back.
Note 17: "The Universal and the Specific in Russia’s History. A Roundtable of Scientists". Obshchestvennye nauki i sovremennost, 1999, No. 3. Back.
Note 18: A. Vishnevsky. The Sickle and the Ruble... Back.
Note 19: Zh.A. Zayonchkovskaya. Demographic Situation and Migration. Moscow, 1992, p. 76 (in Russian). Back.
Note 21: A.I. Alekseev, Yu.I. Simagin. "The Agrarian Character of the Russian Mentality and the Reforms in the Countryside of Russia". Russian Regions in New Economic Conditions. Moscow, 1996 (in Russian). Back.
Note 22: Yu.F. Florinskaya. Losses of the Vital Potential of the Population in Regions of Russia (Dissertation Abstract). Moscow, 1997 (in Russian). Back.
Note 23: V. Glazychev. "Suburbianization of the Country of Gardariki". Other. A Text Book of New Russian Self-Consciousness. Moscow, 1995, Vol. 1, p. 64 (in Russian). Back.
Note 25: Yu.V. Yaremenko. Economic Discussions. Moscow, 1998, pp. 257-258 (in Russian). Back.
Note 27: Zh.A. Zayonchkovskaya. "The CIS Through the Prism of Migration". Migration Situation in the CIS Countries. Moscow, 1999, p. 62 (in Russian). Back.