Intraregional Population Migration in Russia: Suburbs Outperform Capitals

Regional Research of Russia. 2021. Vol. 11. No. 1. P. 48–60.

Karachurina L. B., Mkrtchyan N. V.

Intraregional migration in modern Russia plays a crucial role in the realization of people’s life
plans and contributes to a change in the configuration of space. Every second registered resettlement within
Russia occurs within federal subjects. However, apart from the general scale and role in changing the population
size of individual municipalities, nothing is known about intraregional migration. The authors collected
statistical information on long-term intraregional migration in 1265 municipalities of 39 federal subjects
(51.4% of the country’s population) for 2017, which made it possible to form arrival, departure, and net
migration matrices for each region. This made it possible to analyze population flows and redistribution in
intraregional movements between regional centers, suburban municipalities, and the regional periphery. The
analysis revealed that the quantitative parameters of redistribution of the population between centers, their
suburbs and other municipalities in all intraregional migration approximately correspond to their share in the
population, and all classes of municipalities are equally involved in migration. There is intensive migration
exchange between regional centers and their suburbs. The centers are not only inferior to the suburbs in terms
of the intensity of migration growth, 80% of the centers are losing population in the migration exchange with
their own suburbs. In general, the redistribution of the population in intraregional migration in almost all
studied federal subjects contributes to an increased concentration of population in the agglomeration zone
formed by regional center and its suburbs. In some federal subjects, another zone of population congestion,
as a rule, of a much smaller size, are subcenters, represented by large cities a considerable distance from the
regional center. They form their own migration gravity zones from the nearest peripheral municipalities. In
most cases, this migration only allows subcenters to compensate for migration outflow to other regions or to
their regional center.

Keywords: periphery, municipalities, migration flows, suburbs, regional centers, rural–urban migration, near-capital territories

Publication based on the results of: Demographic and migration potentials of Russia in the 21st century (2021)