Modern contrasts in Russia’s interregional migration

Abstract

A seven-cluster model of Russia’s regional migration structure, which uses ten classical migration indices, makes it possible to visualize the outcomes of the interregional battle for a unique deficient resource: human capital in Russia’s migratory space. The database comprises materials from the Federal State Statistics Service. The authors show that their devised structural composition of regional cluster migration, which has a somewhat patchwork quality in the geographic space, is full of deep, temporally stable migration contrasts and dissonances, which on the whole confirm that the dangerous migration trend of the previous three decades continues today: interregional migrations have a powerful centripetal orientation, emptying out Russia’s eastern and northern frontiers and barely responding at all to modest governmental attempts to correct the situation. We show that Russia’s migration space is “self-organized” and hierarchically structured. The most successful cluster I is at the top, the magnetic pole of migration that is strongly pulling in the population. At the bottom is cluster of “migratory disaster and catastrophe” (VII), suffering of irreplaceable losses of human resources against a background of seething migratory turnover that destabilizes the economic and sociocultural environment of affected regions.