Countryside as an element of the territory's supporting frame

The issue of effective spatial organization of Russia as a country with great unexploited potential for development has been one of the key issues for many years. And if the territorial characteristics are irremovable and lightly managed, the space has a unique quality of a managed transformation. At the same time, the remaining problems and negative trends in the development of rural territories of Russia (the permanent population of which in 2018 made up 25.5% of the population of the country) reduce the quality of its space on the whole, shaping breaks and poor environment with patchy and piecewise development. Thus, the author of the article attempts to reveal the specificity of the countryside as an important element of the supporting frame of the territory and therefore the economic space that requires attention of the scientific community and government agencies. The article aims to identify the role of rural territories in the system of the supporting frame and the limits of their development in the case of the Vologda Oblast. The author justifies that the rural territories included in the various socioeconomic relations, chains of valueadded creation, migration and information flows, form a local supporting frame, performing important socioeconomic functions; it is necessary to pay attention to the intraregional spatial development. By the example of the Vologda Oblast it is identified that in addition to the differences of the countryside from the city there is space heterogeneity of the rural territories of the regions. The author used general scientific research methods in the work (abstractlogical and systemic approaches, generalization, monographs, etc.), economicstatistical method and the graphic and tabular methods of data visualization. The significance of the study lies in the possibility to use them by state authorities in order to improve regional policy. The next stages of work on this topic supposes to analyze the exoand endogenous factors spatial transformation of rural territories, and socioeconomic linkages of the rural territories with the urban ones.