On the “ethnic certainty” of the spatial development of modern Russia

Russia is a multi-ethnic country with a stable, multi-speed trend for individual regions and their municipalities to change the ethnic structure of the population, as well as the general predominance of mono-ethnic territories. The spatial development of the Russian Federation requires a focused consideration of ethnostructural and ethnoterritorial conditions and factors. In the article, they are considered and conceptualized as an "ethnic certainty" of spatial development, understood as a multicomponent conjugation of territorial, economic and residential dynamics with the reproduction of specific ethnic groups (in interaction with other ethnic groups) in the areas of their primary localization, and with the established ethno-territorial structure as a whole. The work focuses on the fact that this kind of "certainty" is due to the following reasons: specifics of ethnic geography (a combination of mono- and multiethnic areas); economic and cultural features of specific ethnic groups projected onto the economy, the scale of reproduction of traditional areas of management (ethnoeconomics) for ethnic communities; functioning of "national" subjects of the federation and "titular" municipalities in the central-peripheral residential and territorial-economic architecture of the country; asymmetric (multi-scale and multi-speed) spatial development in the "section" of the areas of predominance localization (concentration) of one or another ethnic group. Extensive municipal statistics (municipal districts and okrugs, urban okrugs, 2,297 units in total) show that economic activity is shifted to municipalities with Russian mono-ethnicity (1,696 units, including 485 urban okrugs), which is explained by the localization of the vast majority of regional capitals and their suburbs in these territories. A pronounced asymmetry in the scale and level of economic activity between poly- and monoethnic territories, as well as monoethnic areas (clusters of municipalities with a homogeneous ethnic structure of the population) with different "ethnic coloring" has been revealed (based on materials from the South of Russia). It is proved that neither poly-ethnicity nor mono-ethnicity directly affect economic activity, while the latter, being concentrated in the largest cities and their agglomerations, favors the growth of poly-ethnicity.