The 10 richest federal subjects of the Russian Federation – the two capitals and eight resource extraction locations – are all growing richer while the 10 poorest – consisting exclusively of non-Russian republics in the North Caucasus and southern Siberia – are all growing poorer, according to an Academy of Sciences study.

That pattern threatens to trigger conflicts between members of these two groups as well as to leaving much of the rest of the Russian Federation in stagnation and demographic decline as the population leaves for the better-off regions of the country, all of which are creating serious problems for the country, the study says.

(The study appears in the current issue of the Academy of Sciences journal Narodonaseleniye, and a full text is available online at journal-socjournal.ru/index.php/socjour/article/view/10974/10620. It is discussed in detail by Nakanune journalist Yevgeny Chernyshov at nakanune.ru/articles/124483/.).

Sergey Dokhonin and Mariya Vershina, researchers at the Federal Research Center of the Academy of Sciences, classified the more than 80 federal subjects........

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