The digital divide in rural Russia: the COVID-19 pandemic consequences

Introduction: over the past two decades, the digital divide has been gradually narrowing, but rural areas still lag urban areas in the use of digital technologies and the Internet. At the same time, new challenges can only exacerbate the digital inequality of the territories, which can create risks for the future socio-economic development of the country. One of the biggest risks in recent years has been the COVID-19 pandemic, which was indeed strongly associated with the digitalization of various society areas due to self-isolation. The issue of how this factor affected the digital inequality of urban and rural areas in the Russian Federation has been poorly studied, but it remains extremely relevant from the point of view of analyzing the consequences of the pandemic itself, with the new waves arising again and again, as well as looking into a separate, occurring suddenly, situational factor influencing the digital divide. Objectives: to determine the degree of the pandemic impact on the digital inequality of the rural population in the Russian Federation, as well as to identify risk groups among rural residents for whom COVID-19 has only exacerbated the problem of the digital divide and potential limitations in quality and standards of living. Methods: calculating logistic regression (building logit models), which makes it possible to establish the degree of relationship between individual factors and predict the outcome when they occur. Results: the study demonstrates that the peak of the pandemic in 2020–2021 and the self-isolation period did not stimulate certain categories of rural residents for more active use of the Internet, but, on the contrary, only increased the risks of digital inequality and limited access to various services and opportunities. This puts on the agenda the issue of strengthening and improving the targeting of further work focused on the development of digital literacy of rural residents in the Russian Federation. Conclusions: based on logit models, the article identified individual factors, the presence of which increases the risk of digital lag for certain categories of the rural population during a pandemic or the emergence of its new waves.