Typology of settlements in a polyethnic region (on the example of Chuvashia)

Abstract

On the example of Chuvashia (Batyrevsky district), the author considers the stages and factors of the transformation of rural settlements in general and of particu-lar rural settlements in the pre-revolutionary, Soviet and post-Soviet periods. The author identifies a relationship of various transformation factors at different stages of the rural settlement development. In the pre-revolutionary period, this development was determined by the ecology of the territory and demographic resources, in the Soviet period — by the administrative-territorial transformations and “external shocks” (wars, famine, etc.), in the post-Soviet period — by the scale of the population outflow to large cities, institutional conditions and ethnic structure. The survey in rural areas of Chu-vashia revealed the differentiation of villages on the basis of their ethnic structure and other features. Based on the analysis of the statistical data and field observations, the author presents a typology of rural settlements in the multiethnic region, taking into ac-count a set of characteristics of the village as determined by the prevailing ethnos (the time of the settlement’s foundation, its administrative status, population dynamics in different periods, economic well-being, the development of social infrastructure, the scale of migration outflow, etc.). Examples of the selected types of settlements: Chuvash central villages, Chuvash villages — ‘local centers’, Chuvash ‘ordinary villages’, Tatar central villages, Russian villages with former industrial specialization, etc. In the post-Soviet period, transformations of different types of rural settlements were influ-enced by factors of internal and external nature in different proportions. Thus, the so-cial-economic situation in the Chuvash settlements is determined by a relatively high birth rate and employment opportunities in agriculture due to the preservation of the share distribution of land. In Tatar villages, the social-economic situation depends rath-er on the manifestation of ethnic-psychological features of the population — the most regulated, closed and cohesive societies are economically more successful and sustainable concerning external factors.