Urban system of Volgograd region: demographic trends of the last third of the 20th and early 21st centuries

The steady demographic growth of Volgograd region’s urban system was recorded until the end of the Soviet period. The central role in this process belonged to migration, which in the 1970s and 1980s was primarily intraregional. The maximum growth rates in these decades were recorded in the cityof Volzhskiy. Its creation contributed to the development of Volgograd agglomeration, in which more than half of the region’s population and 2/3 of its citydwellers lived in the late 1980s. Since the mid 1990s, in the dynamics of the urban system of the region began the depopulation period, characterized by a gradual increase in demographic losses. In 1989-2021, the number of urban residents decreased in the region by 3.2% (from 1962.3 thousand to 1899.2 thousand people). At the same time, the urban system of the region was distinctly divided into two parts. The Volgograd agglomeration and a number of other centers located in the south of the region retained or increased their demographic potential. All other cities showed demographic decline, and in nine of them it exceeded 10% of the population. The central positions of the Volgograd agglomeration in the urban system of the region in the post-Soviet period were strengthened due to the process of complicated parent countryphilosophy of regional society. The share of agglomeration residents in the total population of the region in 1989-2021 increased from 52% to 57.3%, and among its urban population it grew from 68.5% to 74.2%. In the demographic dynamics of the agglomeration itself, the outpacing growth of Volzhskiy city, which occurred both in the Soviet decades and the post-Soviet period, was clearly recorded. In the 1950s and 1980s, the accelerated industrial growth of Volzhskiy city played a central role in this process, and since the 1990s, the central role belonged to the service sector, which received maximum development within the regional agglomeration.