RURAL-URBAN MIGRATION IN THE URALS ACCORDING TO THE 1970 ALL-UNION POPULATION CENSUS

Abstract

In Russia, migration processes have always played a huge political and socio-economic role. The 20th century passed for the country under the sign of industrialization and urbanization, which, on the one hand, determined the strategic direction of modernization, and on the other hand, acted as the main coordinates that determined the movement of the population. It is common knowledge that migration from rural to urban areas was the main migration trend of modern Russian history, reflecting the accelerated development of the country’s urbanization processes. The most important source of data on migration is population censuses, which allow supplementing and clarifying the materials of the current statistical observation. A special place among them is occupied by the 1970 All-Union population census as the first post-war census, which program included questions about migration. The article aims at identifying regional specifics of rural-urban migration of the Urals population based on the materials of the 1970 census — determining the size and ratio of the flows that made up this migration, as well as assessing the intermediate results of its impact on the dynamics of the region’s population composition by the beginning of the 1970s. It is shown that even in the most urbanized regions of the Urals, villagers arriving in urban settlements constituted about a third of the total migration flow, while 23 times more than the number of migrants heading in the opposite direction, from city to village. Almost the same difference characterized the differences between the relative indicators of the migration intensity of the urban and rural population of the region.