Settlement strategies of Caucasian expatriate communities in Volgograd region: final third of the 20th century - early 21st century

The purpose of this article is to study the geographic and demographic dynamics and the main settlement strategies of the leading Caucasian expatriate communities of Volgograd region. The study has found that the accelerated demographic growth of Caucasian communities of the region in the last third of the 20th century and in the early 21st century was primarily determined not by its natural dynamics, but by the arrival of migrants. The educational and labor migration of people born in the Caucasus into the region in the 1950s - 1960s formed small ethnic groups consisting mainly of men and their significant part concentrated in cities. The main reasons for the accelerated growth of regional expatriate communities of the peoples of the Southern Caucasus at the end of the Soviet period became social, economic problems and the growth of interethnic tension in the republics of Transcaucasia. The same factors contributed to a rapid demographic growth of these communities in the 1990s. The central driver of the quantitative growth of the number of North Caucasian expatriate communities in the 1970s - 1980s was the development of livestock husbandry in arid rural areas of the region. This economic niche significantly changed the settlement parameters, social and demographic characteristics of the North Caucasian communities. With a rapid increase of the number of communities, their level of urbanization significantly reduced, but at the same time the gender imbalance changed. The early 21st century for the majority of the Caucasian expatriate communities in the region became a time of quantitative stabilization and optimization of the already existing settlement areas.