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Soviet Union [USSR] Decreasing Social Differences
In the late 1980s, rural depopulation and modernization were
eroding those aspects of rural society that distinguished it from
its urban counterpart. Depopulation resulted from the migration of
young people to the city to study and acquire a trade. This
migration was especially apparent in the European part of the
Russian Republic and in the Lithuanian, Latvian, and Estonian
republics, where annually 2 to 3 percent of the rural population
moved from the countryside to the city. (In Soviet Central Asia,
the reverse was true; the rural population continued to increase
because of high birthrates and a reluctance to move out of the
countryside.) The loss of young people made rural society older,
and because of the loss of males in World War II, the older agegroups were predominantly female
(see
fig. 8).
Concurrent with the increased flight from rural areas was the
urbanization of members of the rural areas themselves. The
government, for example, merged many villages to form urban-style
centers for rural areas. Farming itself had become more
professional, requiring a higher level of education or training
obtainable only in cities. Additionally, in the late 1980s farming
became more industrialized as rural processing industries were
developed, as stock breeding become more industrialized, and as
more agro-industrial organizations were formed. The modernization
of rural areas developed unevenly, however; modernization was more
evident in the Baltic area and the fertile northwest Caucasus and
less evident in the southeast Caucasus and Central Asia. Rural
areas also experienced a constant influx of urbanites: people who
had moved to the cities but returned to visit, urban residents
vacationing in the countryside, and seasonal workers and students
mobilized for the harvest. During each harvest, the government
organized about 900,000 city dwellers and 400,000 to 600,000
students to assist in gathering crops. All of these factors
lessened the decreasing, although still profound, distinction
between urban and rural society.
The reverse process--the "ruralization" of urban society--has
not occurred in the Soviet Union, despite the rural origin of many
unskilled urban laborers. The percentage of rural-born unskilled
workers in the urban work force was declining in the 1980s as more
urban-born workers reached working age. This process also was
occurring in industry, where the percentage of urban workers with
peasant backgrounds was greater among older workers. Workers in
skilled industrial positions generally had urban backgrounds.
Data as of May 1989
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