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41
Eldar ELDAROV
D.Sc. (Geography), professor at the Department of Economic Management,
Daghestani State University (Makhachkala, Russian Federation).
DEVELOPMENT OF DAGHESTAN'S RURAL POPULATION SETTLEMENT SYSTEM IN THE POST-SOVIET PERIOD
Abstract
This article takes a look at the main prerequisites and conditions for developing Daghestan’s rural population settlement system in the post-Soviet period. The author based his analysis on the statistics of the last two population censuses of 19891 and 2002.2
1 See: Osnovnye itogi Vsesoiuznoi perepesi nasele-nia 1989 goda na territorii Dagestanskoi ASSR, Makhachkala, 1990, 35 pages.
2 See: Demograficheskiy ezhegodnik. 2002 god. Statisticheskiy sbornik, ed. by S.V. Iliashenko, Daghestani State Statistics Board, Makhachkala, 2003, 192 pages.
I n t r o d u c t i o n
Daghestan is primarily distinguished among the Russian regions by its rural type of population settlement. The statistics show that 57.1% of Daghestan’s population lives in rural areas, while this figure constitutes 26.7% throughout Russia as a whole, and 44.5% in the Northern Caucasus. The only region of the Russian Federation that is more rural than Daghestan is the Republic of Altai and several northern autonomous districts with small populations. Today, Daghestan’s rural population settlement system is transforming sporadically and requires scientific correction taking into account the need to optimize natural-economic relations and raise the population’s standard of living.
Natural-Environmental Factors
Daghestan’s altitudinal zonality, which differentiates population dispersal into two zones— highland and lowland, is usually considered the main natural factor in the evolution of its rural population settlement. Most of Daghestan (56%) is occupied by mountains, while the rest of its territory (44%) consists of flatland. The absolute altitudes in Daghestan fluctuate from between 26 meters below sea level (the present-day coast of the Caspian Sea) to 4,466 m above sea level (Bazardiuzi Mountain). The republic’s mountainous part is characterized by frequent and large variations in altitude, a difference of thousands of meters in some places—the grandiose Sulak Canyon is one of the deepest in the world. Such variations in altitude in the mountainous littoral region give rise to an exceptionally high diversity in the republic’s landscape. Its lowland is represented by flat plains where elevation changes are no greater than 80 m.
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Rivers and river basins have had a noticeable impact on the configuration of the network of both highland and lowland settlements. Sources of underground water play an important role in the settlement of Daghestan’s arid northern regions. In the 20th century, as oil and gas exploration was carried out in the Caspian Lowland, numerous wells were drilled which were subsequently used as artesian sources of fresh water. A large number of free-range livestock breeding settlements arose next to them. These are known as kutans, where the families of shepherds who have households in the mountains live seasonally or all year round.
The size of population settlements in the Country of Mountains often depends on the area of garden plots suitable for farming. So the largest rural settlements are currently concentrated in the republic’s lowland.
Dangerous natural processes, such as earthquakes, landslides, mudflows, mountain avalanches, flooding and submergence of sea coasts, erosion and destruction of riverbanks, and so on, which at times noticeably complicate people’s lives and work, have a noticeable influence on the population settlement in Daghestan. They often curb the growth of and at times also destroy the local settlement systems. For example, as a result of the powerful earthquake on 14 May, 1970, villages in the Kum-torkala District were completely or partially destroyed. Subsequently, the Soviet state allotted funds to build the large new village of Kumtorkala.
Another example is the rapid rise in the level of the Caspian Sea (over a span of twenty years, beginning in 1978, it rose by 2.5 m), which led to the flooding and submergence of littoral settlements in the northern lowlands of Daghestan. The village of Ostrov Chechen has suffered the greatest damage from the sea’s transgression. At the beginning of the 1990s, the residents of this village were resettled in new high-rise apartment buildings in Makhachkala.3
Settlement of the population at high altitudes has changed at different times in history. In the past decades, three very important shifts in settlement trends have manifested themselves: a) territorially, the number of rural settlements and residents living at altitudes higher than 1,500 m above sea level is rapidly decreasing, and networks of settlements are evolving much more actively in the lowland than in the mountains; b) the percentage of the urban population is steadily growing, while the number of rural residents is declining; c) and the size of the population of administrative centers is on the rise, primarily in the republic’s capital of Makhachkala. The main reason for these changes is the relative improvement in the socioeconomic standard of living: first, in the lowlands compared to the mountains, and second, in the cities compared to the villages.
According to our estimates based on the statistics of the last all-Russian population census in 2002, 2.8% of the republic’s entire rural population lives at altitudes higher than 2,000 m above sea level, and 13.4% at altitudes of between 1,500 and 2,000 m.4 Since Soviet times, these areas have been equated with Russia’s northern regions: salaries are increasing by 20% and 15%, respectively. The entire population of the Agul, 95.6% of the Kuli, 88.4% of the Lakh, more than 70% of the Akh-vakh, Tliarata, Tsumada, and Charoda, and more than 50% of the Gumbet, Rutul, and Shamil districts live in the high altitude zone.
Ethnogeographic Factors
The nationalities of Daghestan are historically dispersed as follows: Nogais live in the north, Kumyks and Tabasarans in the Caspian Lowland and foothills, Dargins, Lakhs, and Avars in the cen-
3 See: D.R. Aliev, N.A. Sluka, E.M. Eldarov, Primorskiy Dagestan: problemy i perspektivy, Dat. TsNTI, Makhachkala, 1993, p. 89.
4 See: Sh.S. Muduev, E.M. Eldarov, Severnyy Kavkaz i Dagestan: sotsialno-geograficheskie problemy razvitiia gornykh regionov, Daghestani Scientific Center, RAS, Makhachkala, 2002, p. 48.
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tral region, and Tsakhurs, Rutuls, Lezghians, and Aguls in the basins of the Samur and Giulgerychai rivers. Numerically small ethnic groups which are closely related to the Avars mainly occupy the high mountainous areas. The fact that Azeris have deep historical roots in Daghestan is shown by the fact that they live in the rural areas of the republic’s south (mainly in the Derbent District), where the anthropogenic landscape and way of life of the local people are embellished by the ethnic culture and spiritual traditions of the Azeri people. Urban Azeri dwellers mainly live in Derbent and Daghestan-skie Ogni, where they comprise approximately one third of the population. Most Russians live in the lowland of the Terek delta and in the Kizliar and Tarum districts, although many also reside in the republic’s cities. Chechen-Aukhovs or Akkins live compactly in the foothills of the Novolakskoe District and the lowland of the Khasaviurt District.
In addition to the indicated nationalities, Tats have been living in Daghestan from time immemorial, who are said to have come from Persian migrants since as early as the pre-Islamic times. They mainly live in the mountains and in Derbent, as well as in the village of Majalis. In the past two decades, the number of Tats, like the mountain Jews, in Daghestan has dramatically decreased due to their emigration.
Before the October Revolution of 1917, the Daghestani population mainly formed from indigenous ethnic groups. During the years of socialism-building in the republic, the Russian diaspora grew more dynamically. When the northern plains (the Nogai, Kizliar, and Tarum districts) with places of compact Russian (Lower Terek Cossacks) residence were joined to the Daghestani A.S.S.R. in 1922, this gave reason for incorporating the Russian population into several of the indigenous ethnic groups of this republic.
During industrialization and the cultural revolution in the Soviet Union, there was mass migration of young Russians to the country’s southern national peripheries, including Daghestan. As a result, according to the results of the 1959 census, Russians were in second place in terms of numbers among the Daghestani nationalities (20%), yielding only slightly to the Avars. Since the 1960s, there has been an outflow of Russians, which was slow until 1970 and then gained in momentum. The number of Russians at the beginning of 1999 was 30% less than in 1959.5
On the contrary, the actual number of Daghestani or titular nationalities, i.e. those enjoying an “unofficial-privileged” ethnopolitical status in the republic, rose very quickly, primarily as a result of the high natural increment in the population. In the period between the censuses of 1959 and 2002, the size of most of Daghestan’s titular nationalities increased between 2.2- and 2.8-fold. Whereas in 1959, the non-titular indigenous ethnic groups accounted for approximately one third of the republic’s population, by 2002 this figure was approximately 9%. In this way, the national composition of the Daghestan population rapidly approached the state it was in at the beginning of the 20th century.
The titular ethnic groups of Daghestan actively spread throughout the whole of the U.S.S.R. and now Russia. In 1959, 21% of its titular ethnic groups lived beyond Daghestan on Soviet territory. Between 1959 and 2002, the size of these ethnic groups in Daghestan doubled, whereas in the rest of the Soviet Union, they increased three-fold, including five-fold in Russia. This was not so much due to the high birth rate among the Daghestanis, as to their migration outflow beyond the republic, primarily to the neighboring regions of Russia’s South.
The migration losses among the titular ethnic groups amounted to a total of 170,000 people during the period under review, or to approximately 15% of the residents of the Country of Mountains. This is only a little less than the loss in number of Russians, who constituted 22% during this period. So demographic pressure squeezed not only the incoming, but also the indigenous population from Daghestan.6
5 See: Demograficheskiy ezhegodnik. 2002 god.
6 See: Sh.S. Muduev, E.M. Eldarov, op. cit., pp. 81-82.
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An analysis of the evolutionary trends of mountain settlement during the period between 1959 and 2002 showed that they retained the main features established by K.P. Sergeeva for the previous ten-year period from 1959 to 1969: an axle vector of movement from top to bottom, to villages and towns in the lowlands, and accelerated depopulation of small rural population settlements.7 In so doing, the lowlands play the role of melting pot in Daghestan’s ethnic structure by intensifying the general Daghestanian identity of its nationalities. As many sociological surveys have shown, the selfidentification “I am a Daghestanian,” compared to “I am an Avar,” “I am a Kumyk,” “I am a Lezghi-an,” etc., is more characteristic of the residents of population settlements located in the lowlands than of Daghestan’s highland population. In the lowlands, the location of a rural area relative to some city center is still the determining factor in the dynamics of rural population settlement: the closer it is to such a center, the more active the growth of the rural population. Under highland conditions, on the other hand, the influence of this factor is much weaker. But with the development of transport and roads in the mountains, the influence of the Daghestani cities on mountain rural population settlement is growing.
Two main ethno-geographic trends are characteristic of the ethnocultural identification of the Daghestanian population during the restructuring period. On the one hand, under conditions of traditional fine networking of Daghestan’s administrative-territorial structure (the republic consists of 41 rural municipal districts, see Fig. 1), the trend toward not only economic, but also ethnopolitical isolation of many rural districts was revealed, particularly those in the mountains. Each district espouses the interests of a specific ethnic community. In many of the administrative structures in these districts, office work and socialization among workers is carried out exclusively in the language of the predominant ethnic group. This is posing a certain danger to the republic’s ethnopolitical development. The changes on the land market and inter-district redistribution of budget funds are particularly symptomatic in this respect. On the other hand, many settlements with a polyethnic structure are forming in the lowlands and foothills. In some cases, the ethno-settlement structure is a disorderly mixture of farmsteads, the owners of which belong to different nationalities, while in others, ethnically separate districts arise.8
In the republic’s far north, in the historical homeland of the Nogai ethnic group, there are many villages with Nogai-Kumyk-Avar and Nogai-Avar-Dargin ethnic structures. In the Tarum and Kizliar districts populated largely by Russians, most of the villages currently have a Russian-Avar-Nogai, Russian-Kumyk-Dargin, Lakh-Dargin-Avar, and other composition.
The Babaiurt District is Daghestan’s main granary, where numerous villages and large kutans with extremely diverse ethnic compositions arose as a result of the planned resettlement of highland residents to the lowlands carried out in Soviet times. There are villages there with Kumyk-Russian-Lezghian, Kumyk-Rutul, and Lezghian-Tsakhur districts. As in the Khasaviurt District, beginning in the 1990s, many ethnically mixed settlements began to arise with the inevitable presence of representatives of the Chechen nationality.
In the piedmont Buinaksk District, Kumyk-Avar and Kumyk-Dargin settlements traditionally form. In this same piedmont zone in the Karabudakhkent, Kayakent, Levashi, and Kaytag districts, many villages arose in the 20th century with a Kumyk-Dargin, Dargin-Avar-Kumyk, and Dargin-Lakh national composition.
It is generally difficult to find any mono-ethnic settlements today in the lowlands and highlands of South Daghestan, particularly in the border zone with Azerbaijan. Russian, Kumyk, Avar, and Dargin components have become common during the past century in the Lezghian-Azerbaijani and Tabasaran-Tat structures of settlements characteristic of the southern areas of the littoral lowlands. In recent decades, an increase in the size of all the mountain ethnic groups of South Daghestan (Lezghi-ans, Tsakhurs, Rutuls, Aguls, and Tabasarans) can be traced in this part of the littoral lowlands.
? See: K.P. Sergeeva, Naselenie Dagestana, Daguchpedgiz, Makhachkala, 1973, 84 pages.
7 <
8 See: Sh.M. Aliev, Ekonomicheskaia i sotsialnaia geografiia Dagestana, DGPU, Makhachkala, 2005, p. 115.
Figure 1
Dynamics of the Population Size in the Rural Districts of Daghestan between 1989 and 20029
Yuzhno-Sukhokumsk
Ratio of rural to urban population of the republic, %
Increase in the size of the rural population
< 10%
CZJ 10-30%
■ 31-60%
> 60%
Decrease in the size of the rural population
HyH < 2.5%
- Villages—district centers ' Urban-type settlements ■v- Cities and their territories
Rural districts: 1—Nogai, 2—Tarum, 3—Kizliar, 4—Babaiurt, 5—Khasaviurt, 6—Kiziliurt,
7—Novolakskoe, 8—Kazbek, 9—Kumtorkala, 10—Buinaksk, 11—Gumbet, 12—Botlikh,
13—Untsukul, 14—Gergebil, 15—Khunzakh, 16—Akhvakh, 17—Tsumada, 18—Shamil, 19—Gunib, 20—Tsunta, 21—Tliarata, 22—Charoda, 23—Karabudakhkent, 24—Kayakent, 25—Levashi,
26—Sergokala, 27—Kaytag, 28—Akusha, 29—Dakhadaev, 30—Lakh, 31—Kuli, 32—Derbent,
33—Magaramkent, 34—Tabasaran, 35—Khiv, 36—Suleiman-Stalskiy, 37—Agul, 38—Kurakh,
39—Rutul, 40—Akhty, 41—Dokuzpara.
9 See: E. Eldarov, E.C. Holland, Sh.M. Aliyev, Z.M. Abdulagatov, Z.V. Atayev, “Resettlement and Migration in Post-Soviet Dagestan,” Eurasian Geography and Economics, Vol. XLVIII, No. 2, March-April 2007, pp. 226-248; De-mograficheskiy ezhegodnik. 2002 god.
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Geodemographic and Ethnopolitical Factors and Problems
Between 1989 and 2002, the density of the rural population underwent significant changes. It decreased in the Kuli District and remained essentially unchanged in the Tarum and Charoda districts (see Fig. 1). At present, the highest population density is in the districts bordering on the Chechen Republic—the Novolakskoe (102 people/km), Khasaviurt (83), and Kiziliurt (109) districts, where demographic growth is caused, first, by the high birth rate and, second, by the active immigration from the economically depressed high altitude areas and from beyond the republic. Other areas of attraction for migrants from the mountains, as well as for compulsory migrants from beyond the republic from among the nationalities of South Daghestan (Lezghians, Tabasarans, and so on) are the Magarmkent (79 people/km), Suleiman-Stalskiy (70), and particularly the Derbent (98) districts. In these districts during the reform years, the population density increased approximately 1.5-2-fold in the same way as in the above-mentioned group of western districts of the republic. The main factors of such high dynamics were the natural population increment and positive migration balance, including compulsory, from the new Central Asian states and remote regions of Russia.
The Botlikh and Untsukul districts are mountainous territories characterized by highest indices of demographic growth: between 1989 and 2002, the size of their population increased by 70%. This was largely promoted by geopolitical and economic factors. The extensive mountainous section of the border with the Chechen Republic is part of the Botlikh District.
Under Daghestan’s conditions, the settlement enlargement policy had both positive and negative consequences. It had its own logic: it was easier to provide the residents of large settlements with a relatively higher level of servicing. Large investments were required for building roads and bridges and laying power transmission and telephone lines to the small mountain villages. What is more, industrialization in the country was oriented toward agricultural machine-building which ensured efficient labor primarily under conditions of large-network farming. However, auls with small populations are more expedient for the mountainous zone of the republic taking into account the local production, ethno-cultural, and environmental factors. In the mountains, land plots, which are finely networked and often terraced, largely belong to individual families and tukhums. So a small number of people are required for their upkeep. Small areas of cultivated land and hayfields and the absence of winter pastures limit the potential of the highlands to provide people with labor and food.
Some of the rural settlements have been absorbed by towns, and some have been transformed into urban-type settlements. The absence of means required to cope with the consequences of natural disasters such as earthquakes, landslides, avalanches, and torrential flooding, etc. is also a reason for the reduction in number of rural settlements. As a result, in the present-day structure of rural population settlement, medium-sized settlements predominate in terms of number of residents—there are approximately 60% of them.
In so doing, small settlements (of up to 100 residents) stand out in terms of size among the Daghestani villages, which is not characteristic of other regions of the Northern Caucasus. But the average population of settlements has noticeably grown from 289 in 1926 to 818 people in 2002. For comparison, we will note that the average population of rural settlements, according to the 1989 census, amounted to 255 people throughout Russia as a whole, and to 667 people in Daghestan.
District centers play a special role in the rural settlement structure. They are support centers for mountain and partially foothill population settlement. In five of the 41 rural districts, a town performs the role of center, while in the other 36, rural settlements play this part. Rural administrative centers form an important link in the territorial organization of the Daghestani population. According to the last census in 2002, there are 700 of them in the republic. Along with the central farmsteads of the former state and collective farms, of which there are more than 700, they constitute the foundation of
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rural settlement. New forms of production (farms, agricultural companies, joint-stock companies, and so on) are not yet having a noticeable influence on rural population settlement.
Along with auls, kutans are widespread at the sites where livestock is grazed. In the lowlands, as farming and the cattle breeding developed, many kutans turned into “branches” of the mountain villages, gradually acquiring the status of a settlement with the geographical name of mountain village, usually with the suffix “novo (new).” For example, the mountain settlement of Borch in the Rutul District in the lowland (in the Babaiurt District) was named Novoborch, and there is a host of such examples. The new railroad from Kiziliurt to Kizliar gave a boost to socioeconomic growth in areas along the axis of rural settlements located across the delta of the River Terek from the border with Kalmykia in the north to Kiziliurt in the south. The economic functions of some villages which recently became railway stations will increase in the future due to the building of transport service, carriage repair, lading-unlading, refrigeration-storage, elevator, and other enterprises.
In the northwestern part of mountainous Daghestan, a local system of rural settlement is forming with its center in the village of Botlikh. Its main axes stretch from Botlikh along the bed of the Andi Koisu up to the village of Agvali, down to the village of Mekhelta, and also up along the right-hand tributary of this river to the village of Karata. This network of settlements is compactly located within the boundaries of four of the republic’s rural districts—Botlikh, Tsumada, Akhvakh, and Gumbet. The Botlikh location of the rural settlements is essentially a branch of the Khasaviurt agglomeration.
The revival of industrial production (in the 1980s, a small industrial enterprise operated here that manufactured military production) could have turned this population point into a working settlement. In turn, reinforcement of the material-technical base of agriculture in the cluster of mountain villages under review will comprehensively promote economic activation and raise the standard of living of the highest altitude and most remote area in the basin of the Andi Koisu—the Tsunta District. It is obvious that the asphalted road being built, which will link the village of Botlikh with Buinaksk and Makhachkala, could assist in this.
In addition to the road from the Gimri junction to the west along the Andi Koisu, a shortened route is also being built to the more southerly rural locations of Central and Mountainous Daghestan with centers in the villages of Khunzakh, Khebda, Tliarata, and Bezhta, which will lead to a slowdown in migration from the mountain villages to the lowlands and help to stabilize the development of the mountain settlement system.
The motor road that crosses the border between the mountains and foothills through the villages of Levashi and Khajalmakhi has served as the main gates into Intermontane Daghestan for the past few decades now. The Levashi and neighboring Akusha districts are the most densely populated mountainous areas of the Caucasus. The transit function of these regions compared with the slopes of the mountain villages will continue to increase in the future too, particularly in the direction of the Karakoisu (Tsurib location of auls) and the Kazikumukh Koisu (location around the villages of Ku-mukh and Vachi) basins.
The social-geographic trends indicate that in the near future an urban-type settlement will grow in the very center of the Country of Mountains based on the present-day village of Levashi. Correspondingly, questions relating to the future industrialization of this population area must be preliminarily reviewed. The traditional vegetable-growing specialization of farming in the Levashi group of settlements will evidently leave its mark on the profile of the local processing complex. The groups of rural settlements in the southern part of the Daghestani foothills (the Dakhadaev, Tabasaran, and Khiv districts) are not in danger of depopulation either due to the high rates of natural population increment. The main problem of settlement development in the southern region of Daghestan relates to the formation of a large group of villages on the lower reaches of the Samur River. At present, residents from the highlands of the whole of South Daghestan are pouring into the Magaramkent and southern part of the Derbent districts. These are rural territories with the most favorable agroclimatic conditions in Daghestan.
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The main flow of Southern Daghestani migrants from different regions of Russia, Kazakhstan, and Central Asia is also striving for these districts. New villages are appearing one after the other on the outskirts and in the very depths of a unique forest with typical subtropical vegetation in the Samur delta. The forest is being felled to make room for new residential areas, which has reduced the area to 26,700 hectares. In the recent past, the forests of the Daghestani part of the Samur delta covered more than 100,000 hectares. As the workers of the republic’s environmental services claim, in another 10-15 years, only memories could remain of the Samur forests. The valley of the Samur River is a convenient road to the high altitude areas of the Greater Caucasus Mountain Range. The sources of the Samur (the Rutul District) are an extremely picturesque area with a gentle climate and virgin forests, which are justifiably called Daghestani Switzerland. There can be no doubt that when the sociopolitical situation in the Caucasus stabilizes, new possibilities will open up for rural population settlement development in the valley of this and other rivers along tourist routes that cover the main natural landscape steps “littoral-foothill-middle altitude-high altitude,” beginning with the resorts on the Caspian and ending with camps for mountaineers on the glaciers of the Greater Caucasus Mountain Range.
At present, military communities and border posts are being built in Daghestan along the border with the Chechen Republic and state border with Georgia and Azerbaijan. This helped to strengthen the material-technical base and improve the situation on the labor market in several border villages of the republic. This construction was prompted by the need to set up new borders of the Russian Federation and is opening up great possibilities for developing social and production infrastructure in the remote areas of Daghestan (road building, gasification, erecting power transmission lines). Some border posts are also being enlarged at the expense of forest areas within specially protected natural preserves (the Samur National Park, Khamamatiurt and Guton reserves) or by developing intensively used farm land, which at times arouses a negative response among the local population.
The contemporary transformation processes have changed the social and ethnic palette of Daghestan’s rural settlement. Functional reconstruction of villages and active, largely chaotic housing construction is going on. Often such processes give rise to acute ethnopolitical conflicts. For example, a settled form of animal husbandry has been established in the past few years in several villages of Daghestan’s northern lowlands, which arose on the basis of temporary kutans belonging to farmsteads of the mountainous regions. The population in them is mainly growing due to highland residents, which is arousing a protest among the indigenous ethnic groups of the lowlands.
Socioeconomic Problems and Prospects
One of the main negative consequences of today’s economic reforms was the significant reduction in agrarian production in the republic due to the low demand and high net cost of agricultural produce and the lack of organization and distance to its sales markets. Liberalization of domestic and foreign trade entailed a price disparity in agricultural and industrial production. The situation was simultaneously aggravated by the events in the Chechen Republic and neighboring countries, which led to a breakdown in economic ties and Daghestan’s transport blockade. As a result, the volume of production in most of the republic’s industrial branches in the 1990s decreased 10-15-fold. Rug-making, which is traditional for the republic’s rural zone, also underwent a slump. Although private enterprises were characterized by much higher productivity than public enterprises, at the end of the century the collective farm-state farm system still prevailed in Daghestan. This hindered land reform. A reduction in the wine-growing areas due to the anti-alcohol campaign during the second half of the 1980s could not help but have an influence on the economy
Figure 2
Daghestan’s Socioeconomic Basin Zones
Daghestan’s Historical Regions:
I - Northern
II - Central
III - Southern
Basin Zones:
IA - Terek IB - Aktash IIA - Sulak IIB - Gubden IIIA - Ulluchai IIIB - Samur
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of the agrarian sphere. It became clear that the republic not only needed to preserve the existing areas, but also significantly increase them.
So, during the 1990s, stagnation was characteristic of essentially all the branches of Daghestan’s economy. As for the republic’s resort and tourist complex, which has great potential with respect to stimulating economic growth in rural areas, it proved to be in complete ruin after the collapse of the U.S.S.R. and particularly after the beginning of the combat action in the Caucasus.
Since the beginning of the new century, there have been signs of a shift in the negative trends. By 2007, Daghestan began to outstrip many constituencies of the Southern Federal District in terms of growth rates of the main economic indices. The network of roads is widening in the republic’s mountains, and its energy capacities are increasing: the large Irganai Hydropower Plant is being completed with turbine installations and several small hydropower stations are being built in the basins of the main Daghestani rivers, the Sulak and Samur.
Great hopes are being placed on the North-South transnational corridor through Daghestan, which is one of the main Eurasian transport arteries crossing the Caspian Region. The projects for building this corridor envisage access of the Caspian republics to the European markets (particularly by means of the Caspian-Volga-Baltic waterway), and in the long term, to the countries of the Persian Gulf through Iran. The predicted volume of shipments on the key sections of this corridor is estimated at approximately 10 million tons/year.10
The development of the trans-Caspian trade route and assimilation of new raw hydrocarbon fields in the Russian and other sectors of the Caspian Sea will lead to the formation of a corresponding coastal infrastructure. The Makhachkala international sea port, which is already ferrying shipments of cargo going from the ports of Iran, Turkmenistan, and Kazakhstan, will be an important link in this transport chain. This is the only Russian port on the Caspian with a body of water that does not freeze in the winter. In so doing, it is believed that creating new production and transport facilities will serve as a significant source of funds for building up all of Daghestan’s littoral areas.
However, the development prospects of a transnational trade corridor through Daghestan should be viewed through the prism of economic growth not only in its littoral urbanized areas, but also in the republic’s mountainous rural zone. At present, a planned layout of interconnected development of the production systems of Daghestan’s littoral and mountainous zones is being drawn up in the republic on the basis of so-called “cluster” territorial and economic complexes. The gist of this idea is that the active trade contacts forming between Europe and Asia (which have in fact been acquiring a new lease of life since the time of the silk roads) should inspire new life in the still essentially impoverished mountainous regions of Daghestan.
The littoral-mountain production cycles will develop along the axes of Daghestan’s river basins. Established sections of subsurface use on the Daghestanian coast between the mouths of the Sulak and Samur rivers—in Makhachkala, Kaspiisk, Izberbash, and Derbent—will serve as the sea boundaries of the basin zones being formed. Correspondingly, the cities of Makhachkala, Kaspiisk, Izberbash, and Derbent will act as centers of economic growth with respect to specific foothill and mountain regions of the republic (Fig. 2). In so doing, it is expedient to combine the increase in transport-industrial potential of Daghestan’s littoral cities with a wide range of protectionist measures to stimulate the business climate in the highlands.
C o n c l u s i o n
To sum up the above, we will note that population settlement in Daghestan’s rural areas has taken different courses at different historical times. At the moment, development trends that are es-
See: Vital Caspian Graphics: Challenges Beyond Caviar, Published by UNEP/GRID-Arendal, 2006.
THE CAUCASUS & GLOBALIZATION
sentially typical for mountainous, primarily agrarian countries of the world are being seen: a) steady growth in the percentage of the urban and decrease in the percentage of the rural population; b) more active development of the network of settlements in the lowlands than in the highlands; c) rapid decrease in the number of rural settlements and rural residents living at altitudes higher than 1,500 m above sea level; and d) steady growth of the population in administrative centers of the rural districts. The reason for such changes lies in the more preferable socioeconomic living conditions, first, in the lowlands compared with the highlands and, second, in the cities compared with the villages.
It is not difficultto guess that this development of events will lead to an increase in the polarization of the standard of living on the Caspian coast, on the one hand, and in the mountainous rural zone of Daghestan, on the other. So, in particular, advertising future residential and tourist complexes as fashionable buildings on Daghestan’s azure beaches should harmoniously correlate with the advertising of no less enticing, favorable, and civilized forms of organizing rural life in the mountains. The mountain-dwellers need to have faith in the fact that national projects that are currently being implemented in the village designed to develop the agrarian and other branches of the regional economy, are only the beginning of the economic and social revival of their lands. The mountains must regain their dignity and glory as a unique civilization that provides the world with a highly developed culture of terrace farming and shows it the experience of many centuries of peaceful coexistence of various national-state formations within a single federation.
