География населения России по Петр Эбэрхардт (review)

534 Рецензии/Reviews Oktay TANRISEVER Петр Эбэрхардт. География на- селения России / Пер. с польского. Санкт-Петербург: “Невский про- стор”, 2003. 304 с. Список лите- ратуры, список рисунков, список таблиц. ISBN: 5-94716-032-3. One of the dramatic changes in Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 has been the sharp decline in its population. In 1991, Russia’s population was about 148,543,000. Ten years later, as cited in Piotr Eberhardt’s book, Geografiia naseleniia Rossii, it declined to 145,174,000 (P. 36). According to these figures, Russia’s population has declined by approximately 3 percent in the post-Soviet era. The decline in Russia’s post-Soviet population is even more severe than the population decline during the civil war period between 1917 and 1920, when Russia’s population declined by 2.7 million. It should be noted that such a dramatic decline in population has not been witnessed elsewhere in peacetime. Due to the dramatic nature of this demographic change, many academic books and articles on Russia ’s demographic trends have been published in recent years. These academic works have focused on the composition of and the trends in Russia’s post-Soviet population. There has been still a need for an ским кодом”. Раскрыть его – зна- чит ответить на вопросы о том, что и как визуализировалось в Россий- ской империи. Например, каковы были онтологический статус изо- бражения, ресурс его достовер- ности и, наконец, что скрывалось за намерением художественной передачи реальности? Каким был эстетический канон в Московском государстве XVI-XVII вв., и как он изменился в XVIII-XIX столетиях? Какие приемы стилизации и обоб- щения использовали художники, и как их творения прочитывали современники? Позволяет ли коллекция Нью-Йоркской библио- теки судить о визуальных поисках идентификации россиян? Отсутствие данного сюжета в рассматриваемой книге по- буждает воспринимать текст как научное сопровождение-коммен- тарий к юбилейной экспозиции, изысканный вариант экскурсии, вместо того, чтобы воспринимать выставку как основу и повод к исследованию. Конечно, подня- тые вопросы могут показаться в данном случае излишними, но к публикациям выдающихся руси- стов, привлеченных к работе над данным изданием в одном коллек- тиве, мы привыкли относиться как к прорывам, открывающим новые области для исследований, поэто- му читательские ожидания в от- ношении материалов, выходящих из-под их пера, всегда завышены. 535 Ab Imperio, 2/2005 updated and comprehensive work focusing on Russia’s demographic trends in the Tsarist and Soviet periods as well as the post-Soviet period. The publication of the Russian translation of Piotr Eberhardt’s latest book, originally published in Polish in 2002, is a very welcome contribution to the existing literature on Russia’s population dynamics. Prof. Eberhardt has been affiliated with the Stanisław Leszczycki Institute of Geography and Spatial Organization of the Polish Academy of Sciences since 1960. He is one of the leading experts on geographic and demographic issues in Central and Eastern European countries. Eberhardt’s book is structured into ten chapters. The first two chapters examine the general dynamics of Russia’s population growth. The following two chapters analyze Russia’s population by looking at its territorial distribution and ethnic composition. Chapters 5 and 6 deal with the process of urbanization and the depopulation of Russia’s rural areas . Chapter 7 analyzes the changes in Russia’s demographic structure. The next chapter discusses migration trends, while chapter 9 explores the Russian diaspora in the post-Soviet states. The book concludes with some forecasts for Russia’s future demographic development. Throughout his book, Eberhardt seeks to show that Russia is experiencing a very serious demographic crisis. He substantiates his analysis by examining statistical data on Russia ’s population in urban and rural areas, as well as migration trends in the post-Soviet era. This analysis leads Eberhardt to reach several conclusions about post-Soviet population dynamics. In the first two chapters, Eberhardt points out that the decline in Russia’s population resulted from the collapse of the birth rate and a catastrophic increase in the death rate (P. 50). Although one could quite easily accept this conclusion, readers expect a more thorough analysis of the causes of this decline. In fact, what makes the Russian case unique is that although the decline in birth rate is very common in many advanced industrial countries, the scale of the increase in Russia’s death rate is not visible in developed and many developing countries. In the following four chapters (from 3 to 6), Eberhardt explores Russia’s population dynamics by looking at the changes in Russia’s 89 regions and in the population’s ethnic, linguistic, and religious identification , as well as at the processes of urbanization and depopulation in rural areas. Concerning these trends, Eberhardt concludes that since the post-Soviet economic crisis hit the industries in the northern and eastern parts of Russia, there has been a migration trend from these regions to the central and southern parts 536 Рецензии/Reviews of the country (P. 85). However, as Eberhardt shows in chapter 4, these central and southern parts of the country are populated by nonRussians , who, like ethnic Russians themselves, tend to retain their distinctive ethnic, linguistic, and religious identities. Therefore, the impact of internal migration trends on interethnic relations deserves to be examined in this book in a more detailed manner. Eberhardt’s conclusions in chapter 7 concerning the changes in...