Nature and modalities of Russian spatial development program

In his Address to the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation on March 01, 2018, the President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin has repeatedly considered the issues of spatial development as a condition for the solution of the priority future tasks of the country and set the goal “to expand a large-scale program of Russia's spatial development”. However, the views on the specific nature of the policy that is designed to draw maximum benefit from the spatial factor in economic growth have not been fully developed. The paper proves that the “spatial unit” of the state economic policy in modern conditions has a systemic nature, which includes not only purely economic problems (“deployment of productive forces”) but also a wide range of institutional changes. All these items should be a focus of the Spatial Development Strategy of the Russian Federation and implemented through a system of institutions and instruments of the federal policy on regional development. There is still an inextricable link between the key trends in the country's spatial development and strengthening the economic and legal foundations of federative relations, refocusing the priorities of the federal regional development policy on the intensification of the “self-development” mechanism of Russian regions.