ISSN 1883-1656 Центр Российских Исследований RRC Working Paper Series No. 71 Demographic Situation and Its Perspectives in the Russian Far East: A Case of Chukotka Kazuhiro KUMO August 2017 RUSSIAN RESEARCH CENTER INSTITUTE OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH HITOTSUBASHI UNIVERSITY Kunitachi, Tokyo, JAPAN DEMOGRAPHIC SITUATION AND ITS PERSPECTIVES IN THE RUSSIAN FAR EAST: A CASE OF CHUKОТКА Kazuhiro KUMO 1. INTRODUCTION The purposes of the present study are, first of all, a general review of the population migration patterns in the Far East region of Russia following the demise of the Soviet Union; and secondly, a study of the situation that emerged in the developing regions as a result of the state policy of the Soviet period, using the example of the demographic trends in the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug as one of the most distal Russian territories with respect to the center of Russia. To date, several studies have been conducted on inter-regional migration in Russia; by the the author (Kumo, 1997, 2003) a comparative analysis of migration in the post-Soviet Russia was conducted and major changes taking place in the migration patterns were considered in the specified periods. Yu. Andrienko and S. Guriev (Andrienko and Guriev, 2002) performed a comparative analysis of inter-regional migration based on the gravity model and showed that the adoption of the migration decision by the population depended on the regional-economic variables. The results of the above-mentioned studies demonstrate that traditional means of analyzing migration patterns can be applied to Russia, which went through the change in the state system, and the authors conclude that migration flows are largely dependent on economic reasons. Although broadly supporting these statements, we must acknowledge that previous studies considered Russia as a whole. For instance, the studies that cited economic factors as the cause of migrant inflow to some region or unfavorable natural conditions as the cause of out-migration of population in a certain region (Kumo, 2007) had no purpose of analyzing a separate territory. It is impossible to imagine what goes on in a specific territory based on these studies and the peculiarities of each specific region require additional examination. These very tasks were the main target of the given work. The detailed analysis of migration trends in the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug – the region with the most dramatic reduction in population in the post-Soviet period – dramatically exemplifies the results of the state policy for regional development. 1 This paper is built in the following manner. The second section reviews the policy of regional development during the Soviet period; whereupon the main tendencies of inter-regional migration flows in Russia are determined from the 1990s to the 2000s — and their main differences are set apart in comparison with the Soviet period in section 3. Section 4 describes the migration flows in the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug as a whole, while the fifth section traces the processes of weakening and full closing of each separate populated locality. Although the sharp decline in population in the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug was often mentioned in various materials, few specific research has been conducted with the main aim of studying this problem. As is well known, most of the USSR population lived in the European part of the country. At the same time, managing new territories was conducted in a planned manner toward Siberian regions, despite being situated far from large European markets. Presumably, these were attempts to determine an effective return in the policy ignoring economic principles. The resulting “return“ of such state policy of regional management is shown by the present study. 2. GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION OF RESOURCES AND MARKETS IN THE SOVIET UNION 2.1. REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT POLICY IN THE USSR One of the apparent features of the Soviet Union was the clear inter-regional difference in various aspects. For instance, in 1980, the European part of Russia (to the west of the Ural mountains), though occupying only a quarter of its territory, produced more than 2/3 of Soviet industrial products (according to the official Rosstat data, Rossiiskii statisticheskii ezhegodnik). Moreover, despite the fact that the growth rate of production and the volumes of raw material production for separate regions varied slightly from year to year, the main tendency remained more or less unchanged throughout the Soviet period. As a whole, the western part of the federation is more developed than the eastern part and its population density is far higher. Nevertheless, it is the eastern, more sparsely populated regions of the country (Siberia and the Far East) in particular which are rich in oil, gas, tin and other natural resources, which were the main cause of irregular distribution of resources, capital and labor with which the central government of the USSR had to contend. Moreover, the same problem remains in the east of Russia where 2 the lion’s share of resources emerges in its least populated area — the so-called Far-North region, including the High Arctic Zone. Traditionally, this is the most sparsely populated area of the country, due to severe climatic conditions, making it difficult to retain manpower and keeping the price of regional development particularly high. In accordance with studies of E. Kapustin and N. Kuznetsova (Kapustin and Kuznetsova, 1972) the cost of living for one worker in the Sakhalin Oblast, which is rich in oil resources, was almost twice that of one worker in Central Asia and to justify the expenditure on employment and accommodation the state applied a corresponding allowance to workers’ wages. Nevertheless, the depletion in oil and coal resources in central (including Moscow) and North-Western (including nowadays St. Petersburg) regions of Russia caused the state to develop deposit fields in the Northern and the Far Eastern territories. For this very reason, starting with the 1960s, yields of Siberian coal and oil started rocketing. 2.2. CHANGES IN REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT POLICIES The planned economy, naturally, presupposes planning of decisions based on production facility arrangements. This was described in many studies, but generalized overall in the work of Yu. Saushkin, I. Nikol’sky and V. Korovitsyn (Saushkin, Nikol’sky and Korovitsyn, 1967). Such arrangement was performed in line with the following criteria: 1) evenness of production distribution; 2) industrial location in areas of raw material production and markets; 3) socialization of production = centralization; 4) spatial combination of production enterprises; 5) territorial specialization of production. Whether or not this policy was effective remains to be discussed from an economy perspective. Accordingly, the production specialization of regions influenced the extension of transportation networks. Certainly, for this country and its huge territory, although long transportation routes are inevitably problematic, in this case, intensive regional specialization exacerbated the situation. The Soviet government focused on this problem quite early and as early as after the Second World War, aimed to produce and consume products in Siberia, far from the European part of the country, to ease the extensive transportation burden. To attract and retain the workforce in the mineral resource production areas, meanwhile, a policy of regional wage increment and consumer privileges was employed (Mar’anskiy, 1969). This was the case of Siberia, Far East and the regions of the so-called Far-North. These politics continued in the 1960s; having become the determining principle for the even distribution of production throughout the regions. 3 Nevertheless, securing the workforce in territories developed “from scratch“ remained quite difficult and the continuously used regional allowances and privileges could not fully compensate for the substandard infrastructure. Moreover, the process of developing new lands under severe natural conditions remained quite expensive. Under these circumstances, the trend whereby the growth of infrastructure was ignored and workers were temporarily attracted only to earn high wages intensified (Milovanov, 1994). Initially, the USSR policy of regional delopment had the aim of mastering Central Asia and Siberia on the principle of even production distribution. Nevertheless, gradually based on effectiveness considerations the policy began to lean toward developing the mineral resources of the Urals and Siberia with more intensive use of the already populated central economic region, centered in Moscow. 3. MIGRATION FLOWS IN TRANSITIONAL PERIOD IN RUSSIA The decay of the USSR triggered large-scale changes, not only of the economic system, but also in the structure of migration flows inside the country. Many studies have been dedicated to this topic (Kumo, 1997, 2003, 2007; Andrienko and Guriev, 2002), the main results will be explained below. 3.1. MIGRATION FLOWS AMONG RUSSIAN REGIONS When comparing the inter-regional migration flows of the former USSR and the post-Soviet Russia, the following changes vividly emerged: 1) large-scale out-migration of the population from the Far North (from areas of the Polar Region); 2) increasing population in-migration toward regions with developed industries and a warm and favorable climate for agriculture. Starting since the 1970s — the era of quietness from large-scale regional developments — and up to the end of the 1980s, a transition policy of regional development strategy emerged toward a policy of enriching already accumulated agglomeration (Kumo, 2003). Though the reasons for the Far North development, the concentration of raw materials, remained valid, work to create new industrial regions stopped; workers were accommodated in barracks and their labor was used only seasonally (Milovanov, 1994). Such method was used to attract the inflow of labor to the regions of Siberia, the Far East and Far North of Russia up to the end of the 1980s (Figure 1). 4 Nevertheless, the decay of the USSR turned the situation upside down. From 1991, a sharp outflow of migrants emerged from the cold regions of Siberia and the Far East to what were already well-populated territories (Figure 1).
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