Ethno-social consequences of the depopulation of mountain regions: Dagestan and North Ossetia

Abstract

In contrast to the mountainous ecosystems of Europe (Alps) with high rates of population density and the integration of the rural economy into the regional and world markets, most of the mountainous regions of the constituent entities of the Russian Federation are characterized by the stability of traditional forms of nature management and life support, the preservation of traditional social institutions that are based on family ties. On the example of Dagestan and North Ossetia, general trends and local features of migration of residents of mountainous regions to the plain are traced. The author notes that in Dagestan in the Soviet era, the resettlement of the highlanders to the plains was carried out in a semi-coercive, but still planned manner and with a very solid for a country that survived the 1917 revolution, two world wars and the Civil War, social, financial and economic support, while in the post-Soviet era the migration from mountainous areas both in the North Caucasus as a whole and in North Ossetia and Dagestan acquired a massive, and in several highland regions, irreversible character. The conclusion is drawn from the fact that the prospects of ethno-social dynamics in these republics are determined not only by the factors of urbanization, the growth in the number and proportion of the population in the lowland, predominantly Russian-speaking settlements, the functional stagnation of local languages, but also by the demographic depression of the mountainous areas, which still ensure the reproduction in generations of ethno-linguistic and ethnocultural identity. The paper highlights the importance of regional and federal courses of social policy aimed at sustainable socio-economic and environmental development of mountainous regions, at preserving their demographic potential and ethnocultural traditions. In contrast to the central regions of Russia and Siberia, where depopulation processes were generally determined by a decrease in fertility rates, with an increase in mortality and migration activity, in the mountainous regions of the Caucasus, where both the system of intra-ethnic support and the main functions of the family remained, a change in the gender structure of the population is largely determined by labor migration.