Issues Of Population Migration In Practice Of Urban Self-Government Bodies

Abstract

Migrations of the population in the last quarter of the XIX - early XX centuries were the result of the separation of industry from agriculture, the presence of relative overpopulation, the ruin of the peasants and the emergence of the unemployed. In the regions of arrival of migrants, arrangements were made for their placement. Migrations were both natural and organized by the state. The state in 1932 established a strict passport regime and residence permit. The observance of the passport regime was monitored by the municipal authorities. Prior to the collapse of the USSR, the administrative commissions of the city executive committees resolved issues of the further stay of people in cities. This function of the executive committee of the city council was enshrined in law. The city executive committee was closer to the problems of the population, which allowed its members to clarify the circumstances. Based on this, the decision of the city executive committee was made: to send or leave the violator of the passport regime in the city. The pace of migration from villages to cities accelerated markedly after the lifting of passport restrictions. Every year tens and hundreds of thousands of rural residents rushed to the cities, which resulted in the formation of million-plus cities. Large-scale migrations along with positive consequences had negative ones. They caused the exacerbation of a number of social problems, the solution of which lay with the state, which through central ministries and departments allocated funds distributed to departmental industrial enterprises.

Keywords: Migrationurban populationSouth Uralself-government

Introduction

At present, population migrations serve as a powerful tool of influence and determine the vector of geopolitical, economic, and socio-cultural development. By migration is meant a set of relocations, that is, territorial movements of people associated directly with the change of their places of residence. Migrations of the population in the last quarter of the XIX - early XX centuries. were the result of the separation of industry from agriculture, the presence of relative overpopulation, the ruin of the peasants and the emergence of the unemployed. One of the factors that stimulated migration in the Southern Urals was railway construction. In this regard, in the regions of arrival of migrants, measures were launched to accommodate migrants, in which city councils took direct part, and after the revolution of 1917, city councils. They were called upon to create evacuation centers in the periods of World War I, the Civil War and the Great Patriotic War, to organize food and the provision of primary medical care to the newcomers, to keep their records.

Problem Statement

Migrations of the population became one of the factors of urbanization and had both positive and negative consequences. Elimination of their negative consequences and regulation became the basis of the state’s policy, which along with the state and city self-government bodies were the conductor of local policies.

Research Questions

Population migration.

Purpose of the Study

Investigate issues of migration in the practice of urban self-government bodies of the Southern Urals.

Research Methods

The research methods are historical-comparative, statistical, critical-analytical, problem-chronological, descriptive.

Findings

In the Russian Empire from the middle of the XIX century. until 1897, the proportion of citizens grew by 3% (RosStat, 1931). During this period, the urban population increased from 18.4 million in 1897 to 28.5 million in 1913, mainly due to the migration of the rural population to the cities, although the growth of the rural population during these years was higher than 16, 6 million people (RosStat, 1931). The country remained predominantly agrarian, 82% of the population were peasants (RosStat, 1989). During the period of World War, I, the Civil War and the devastation of the post-war period, the cities were not only not replenished, but also could not keep the indigenous population. This was connected both with the losses on the war fronts and with the migration of a part of the townspeople to the villages where it was easier to feed themselves. In 1920, the urban population in the country declined compared with 1913 by 30.0% (RosStat, 1989). In 1921, the restoration of industry and commerce began, the introduction of NEP, which led to the return migration from the villages to the cities. As a result, by 1923 compared to 1920, the urban population increased by 8.7% (Turovsky, 2007). In the structure of the population, there was a noticeable share of the unemployed, which was replenished due to the influx of the population from the areas affected by hunger, first of all, the Volga region.

A noticeable increase in the urban population in 1926 was associated with the recovery of industry, which attracted labor from the villages to the cities. About 75% of rural otkhodniki were sent during this period to the cities (RosStat, 1931). The urban population of the USSR increased from 26.3 million people in 1926 to 56.1 million people in 1939, 100 million people in 1959, and 136 million people in 1970 (Kolosov & Polyan, 2009). More than half of the increase in the urban population due to migration from the village falls on decades before the start of World War II, in the second half of the 1940s - 1959. - slightly less than half the increase. The state limited the mobility of the population after 1929 by introducing a system of social control and repression laid down in the early years of Soviet power (Muan, 2009). Voluntary planned labor migrations were organized. They resembled the implementation of the Stolypin agrarian reform, but in a slightly different context. P.A. Stolypin (2003) marked a course for the economic liberation of the communal peasants, and the status of labor migrants by organizational selection tended to enslave them and to a certain isolation from their environment. The freedom of such migrants was limited both by registration and the conditions for concluding contracts with the state, which were based on the maximum consolidation of the workforce for industrial enterprises. So, in the 1931–1932 fiscal year, labor was recruited at the Magnitogorsk Metallurgical Combine. A total of 56052 people was mobilized, including from the Ural Region, the Tatar Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, the Bashkir Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, the Middle Volga Territory and a number of other regions of the USSR (Lukin & Yakunin, 2018). When organizing taken into account production experience, age, with preference given to young people under 25 years old, educational level, social background, membership in a party or Komsomol. Be sure to consider the qualitative composition of persons sent as managers, and engineering and technical workers. The status of labor migrants by orbnoboru noticeably tightened in the late 1930s. and especially during the Great Patriotic War. For rural migrants, life in a city, especially a large one, was considered a privilege, since it opened up great employment opportunities, more comfortable living conditions, etc.

Cities in the USSR, as a result of the concentration of the working class, were to become the social support of the party. It was assumed that in the cities yesterday's peasants could turn into real proletarians. However, a huge influx of rural migrants to Soviet cities led to an exacerbation of the housing problem, a shortage of social infrastructure, etc. There was an acute problem of supplying cities, the former villagers themselves provided themselves with food. In this regard, in 1932, the state established a strict passport regime and residence permit, thereby trying to artificially slow down urbanization, especially the growth of large cities. The introduction of the passport regime by the state has become a necessary measure against the influx of a huge mass of starving peasants into the cities (Muan, 2009).

City government monitored compliance with restrictions on the passport regime. A citizen without a permanent or temporary residence permit was an offender under current Soviet law and could receive a real prison sentence. Registration is a very tough social tool through which the state attached a person to a specific place of residence. For example, in order to change the place of residence, even in one city when changing apartments or moving to another city, locality, etc. grounds were required in the form of a referral to work, study, or in connection with a change in marital status. A stamp in the passport of registration is a guarantee of social benefits: food cards in terms of the normalized supply of the population, fuel for heating, education and medical care. The fate of citizens, the question of their stay in a particular city, as a rule, was decided by local authorities. First of all, the police and, to a greater extent, the executive committees of the city councils. Prior to the collapse of the USSR, the administrative commissions of the city executive committees resolved issues of the further stay of people in cities, detained without a passport and a stamp in it about permanent or temporary registration. This function of the executive committee of the city council was enshrined in law: maintaining public order, organizing public control and social security of the population. The city executive committee was closer to the problems of the population, which allowed its members to clarify the circumstances and the degree of public danger of citizens caught without registration. Based on this, the decision of the city executive committee was made to send or leave the violator of the passport regime in the city. For example, on January 14, 1942, a commission of the executive committee of the Magnitogorsk city council was formed to evict persons who were not related to work at the Magnitogorsk Metallurgical Plant and other institutions and organizations from the city limits (Turovsky, 2007).

Thus, in accordance with the principles of the planned state distribution of labor, the population was assigned to the place of residence. All life, activities and life of citizens had to be changed in order to correspond to the tasks of building socialism (Kolosov & Polyan, 2009). The life was arranged on the basis of collectivism, so that the citizens maximally laid out in production. In accordance with this, housing was built in such a way as to exclude petty-bourgeois elements of life. Encouraged accommodation in hostels and communal apartments. As a result, cities became settlements at industrial enterprises. The customer for the construction has always been the state represented by the ministries that owned the enterprises.

One of the types of migration is the migration of rural residents immediately before the transformation of rural settlements into cities. In some cases, this type of migration preceded this conversion. After World War II, urbanization proceeded more difficult than in the prewar period. Under the influence of evacuation, the population of several eastern regions of the country, including the Southern Urals, has greatly increased (Turovsky, 2007). First, the distribution of production depending on the favorable geographical and economically determined position, availability of qualified personnel and material and technical base affected the migration of the population. The growth of the urban population due to rural migration to the cities was the highest in the RSFSR. In the Southern Urals, only an average of 5 to 6 people out of 100 migrants to the cities increased their urban population. The population mobility in the region was higher than the national average. Such a ratio of arrivals and departures of migrants indicates the systematic migration. At the same time the leading role was played by the departure of immigrants from the places of influx of population.

The equation in rights to obtain a passport by peasants, legalized in the 1970s, to a certain extent eased social and economic tensions (Muan, 2009). At the same time, this was a powerful factor facilitating migration processes.

By the end of the 1980s - the beginning of the 1990s. Three cities of the Southern Urals: Sverdlovsk, Ufa and Chelyabinsk, reached a population of 1 million and even exceeded it. According to the modern classification, such cities are called megacities - compounds of agglomerations of vast territories covered by urbanization and non-integrated entities within which the main daily and weekly life cycles of the population take place (Kolosov & Polyan, 2009). During the Soviet period, there was a steady opinion that large cities were attractive to various groups of the population. However, when considering the map of the attractiveness of the cities of the USSR, experts identified a “desert” in the vast internal territory of the country - these are the regions of the Volga region, the Urals and Siberia. Despite the presence of millionaire cities in the designated regions. So, the affiliation of Sverdlovsk to the zones of non-urban attraction was designated (Turovsky, 2007).

In the Soviet period, the so-called wave migration spread, when primary rural migration took place in small and medium-sized cities, and secondary migration moved rural migrants as residents of small and medium-sized cities to large cities. At the same time, the indigenous inhabitants of large cities rarely moved to small ones. The main contingent of migrants (from villages to cities and from small towns to larger ones) were young men. Single ones are more mobile than family ones. Young people have more motivation to migrate. The predominance of young people and unmarried men among migrants is also explained by the fact that cities during the Soviet period required not only replenishment of labor resources, but also personnel with certain qualifications. It was in the cities that migrants got the opportunity to get an average and highest qualification or improve their qualifications (Bednarikova, Bavorova, & Ponkina, 2016). One of the forms of youth migration was settling in the cities of rural residents after the end of military service.

Consideration of the age of migrants in different types of cities revealed certain specifics. In small and medium-sized cities, young people under the age of 29 accounted for more than half of all migrants. In million-plus cities, migrants of this age accounted for 2/3 of the total number of migrants, in large and large cities there were already almost ¾ (Bednarikova et al., 2016).

The results of the concentration of citizens are two processes: the actual growth of the urban population and the transition of cities, as they grow, into the next largest groups of cities.

Cities with a significant share in the industrial structure of the manufacturing industries are growing faster than cities, whose industries are based on extractive industries.

The latter began to «lose» the population, starting in the 1980s. In the southern Urals, small and, medium-sized cities are numerous. Their industry is based on the extractive industries. This factor caused a slowdown in the growth of cities in the region. Comparing the growth rate of the urban population in different groups of cities, it should be noted that in 1959-1970. Population growth in large cities due to migration was higher than in small and medium cities

The accelerated growth rates of the urban population reflected the state’s desire to create a military economy in peacetime (Eby & Jmolnar, 2019). In this regard, a huge mass of rural residents went to the old urban centers and to the newly created cities. The latter were, in many respects, inorganic settlements, they resembled hostels or “sleeping cars” at industrial enterprises. This is one of the specific features of the domestic urbanization of the Soviet period. The result of this evolution was the preservation of the urban character of cities, including large cities, and the lack of a developed urban environment. ZATO had a special status. They were created as elite settlements, which were distinguished by a carefully selected population, a high level of industrial and social infrastructure, a privileged supply, and increased standards of material and everyday support (Muan, 2009). One of the features of the development of the Southern Urals of this period was the social inequality of the regions that constituted it. This factor led to migration within the Southern Urals, as well as external - to other “more prosperous” regions of the RSFSR and the USSR. In 1973 - 1988 the share of the urban population increased from 51.7% to 64.8% in the Bashkir ASSR, from 56.8% to 65.1% in the Orenburg Region, from 83.0% to 86.8% in the Sverdlovsk Region, from 80.0 % to 82.3% in the Chelyabinsk region. At the same time, population growth rates in the Bashkir ASSR were 74.5% in 1973 and 128.3% in 1988, in the Orenburg region - 85.7% and 121.6%, respectively, in the Sverdlovsk region - 84.5% and 114.5% respectively, in the Chelyabinsk region - 95.0% and 111.9% respectively. The average rate of population growth in the South Urals in 1973 - 1988. amounted to 1.42 times (RosStat, 1989). One of the methods of leveling up intraregional development and raising the standard of living of the population of the Southern Urals was to artificially restrict the migration of population to administrative centers and major cities in the Bashkir Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, where 19.1% of the population of the region was concentrated, in the Sverdlovsk region - 23.9% and Chelyabinsk region - 18.1% (RosStat, 1989). It was determined that the population growth in these areas of the Southern Urals in the 1970s - early 1990s. amounted to 1/5 of the figures of 1946 - 1960s, with half of the growth was due to migration.

Migrations of the 1970s – 1980s were mainly from rural to urban areas. In 1989 Rural able-bodied population who migrated to the cities of the Southern Urals amounted to 25.0 % The highest rates of decline in the rural population were in the Bashkir ASSR.

Conclusion

Migrations were both natural and organized by the state. The first type of migration is associated with objective reasons: large-scale resettlements during World War I, the Civil War, the famine of the period of “war communism” and the collectivization of agriculture. This type of migration determined the vector of urbanization development, with its predominantly urbanization. The second type of population migration was a part of the implementation of the plan for the construction of socialism in emergency conditions: organizational sets for housing and building industrial enterprises, as well as the unprecedented evacuation of the population to the rear of the western regions of the USSR during the Great Patriotic War. The pace of migration from villages to cities accelerated markedly after the lifting of passport restrictions. Every year tens and hundreds of thousands of rural residents rushed into the cities, mostly large ones, the result of this process was, for example, in the Southern Urals, the formation of million-plus cities. Large-scale migrations along with positive consequences had negative ones. They caused the exacerbation of several social problems, the solution of which lay with the state, which through central ministries and departments allocated funds distributed to departmental industrial enterprises. Together with city councils and party committees, they were responsible for optimal spending.

Acknowledgments

State program: "Cities and urban population of the Southern Urals in the XVI - XX centuries: history, source study, historiography", code number SRSTI 60.30.204, state registration number 200004581.

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