PRIMORSKY KRAI’S URBAN POPULATION: STRUCTURAL AND DEMOGRAPHIC DYNAMICS IN 1989–2020

The purpose of the article is to analyze the main demographic and structural indicators that characterize the results of the Soviet urbanization of Primorsky Krai, and the development of the network of urban settlements in the region during the 1990s nationwide crisis and the period of modernization of the country in 2000–2020. The study is based on the materials of the 1989–2020 population censuses of the USSR and Russian Federation, the 2002–2020 annual statistical surveys of the region, federal and regional regulations. The author shows that Primorsky Krai had more noticeable main urbanization indicators among other regions of the Far East by the end of the 1980s. 12 cities, including Vladivostok, 48 urban-type settlements, including 10 with a population of more than 12 000 people, a high proportion of the urban population (77,5 %) — according to these and other figures in a total, the region was considered one of the leaders of the urbanization process in Russia’s East. However, the urban population of the region decreased by slightly over than 300 thousand people (17 %) as a result of natural population decline and migration, the reorganization of some urban settlements into rural ones in the 1990s–2010s. In the structure of urban settlements, the main changes affected urban-type settlements, the total number of which decreased from 48 to 26. The gradual growth of the urban population in the Vladivostok agglomeration was accompanied by a demographic crisis in small and medium-sized cities, which was generally similar to the general trends in the movement of the urban population in the Russian Far East in the post-Soviet period.