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bne April 2021 Eastern Europe I 59
Life has improved in about a third of Russia's regions and the most successful are attracting their residents home again after they had left for Moscow, where wages are six times higher.
Slow changes in Russia’s regional quality of life rating, but big inequalities remain
Okrug as the only comfortable region that is not in the European part of Russia.
Right at the very bottom of the list are the regions in very depths of Russia grouped around Lake Baikal, although Irkutsk, the capital of the Siberian region, is a lot better off, ranked at
55 in the list with a score of 41,786.
The other regions in this neck of the woods are far poorer. All of Tuva, Altai Republic, Transbaikal and the Republic of Buryatia near the Mongolian border have scores of under 30,000 and are the poorest in the Federation. The Jewish Autonomous Region in Russia’s Far Eastern interior also stands out as especially poor with a score 28,118 and used to be a favourite end station for internal exiles.
The next group up from the bottom of the ranking contains several regions from the Caucasus, with Karachay- Cherkess Republic as the very poorest with a score of 27,693, according to
Ria Novosti. But the group of regions with a score between 30,000 and 40,000 is also scattered over the hinterland east of the Ural mountains. Chechnya is also in this group but does better than many of its neighbours, ranked at 74 with
a score of 36,754.
Internal migration
The old duality of “good in Moscow, bad elsewhere” doesn't work as well as it used to. After three decades many
of the regions have been investing into local infrastructure and services and the standard of living has improved dramatically.
Other regions offer a much easier life due to their climate. On a trip to Norilsk on the coast in Russia’s Far North, local pensioners told bne IntelliNews their dream was to buy a small dacha in Bryansk on the Ukrainian border, as
the weather was pleasant and they could live almost all year round from produce from the garden.
Incomes in the capital remain as much as six times higher than in the Caucasus and are on a par with most western
Ben Aris in Berlin
For two decades it used to be said that there were two Russias: Moscow and everywhere else. The difference between the quality of life in Russia’s capital and in the other 84 far flung regions was enormous.
In 2020, the quality of life in most Russian regions remained practically unchanged, according to a quality of life survey carried out by the state news agency Ria Novosti.
The rating found that the best places to live, as in the previous year, remain
Moscow, St. Petersburg and the Moscow region, which comes as no surprise, and they have scores of over 80,000 out of
a possible total index score of 85,000
In the second tier, with scores of over 60,000, are many familiar names, led by Kazan in the Republic of Tatarstan, Belgorod near the Ukrainian border, Krasnodar in the balmy southern
part of the country, Leningrad that surrounds St Petersburg, the agricultural powerhouse of Voronezh in the black earth regions and the oil-rich West Siberian Khanty-Mansi Autonomous
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