Even though Russia and the post-Soviet states have the largest land area of any world region, and vast areas of lightly populated or uninhabited land, this is still largely a region of cities. This is especially true in the more European countries of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia, where 70 percent or more of the population lives in cities. The Caucasian republics of Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan are somewhat less urbanized (around 60 percent), and Central Asia is only 47 percent urban.

Russia’s capital city of Moscow, with 11.5 million people, is a primate city, as are all other capital cities of the nations in this region. The dominance of primate cities reflects the importance of politics and government in determining where economic development would happen during the Soviet and post-Soviet eras.

Urban life for most remains shaped by the Communist-era legacies of central planning. Giant apartment blocks, designed by bureaucrats and built for industrial workers, dominate most cities, especially on the fringes of the older, pre-Soviet urban cores. In cities that are growing, such as Moscow and St. Petersburg, the housing shortages of the Soviet era have continued since 1991. Cramped, drab apartments, badly in need of repair, with shared kitchens and bathrooms, are common. At the community scale, inadequate sewage, garbage, and industrial waste management pose serious long-term health and environmental threats.

In Moscow, housing shortages are irregular but particularly severe because the city has grown so rapidly since 1991, when it began receiving much of the new investment in the region. Due to high demand, the cost of housing has increased so dramatically that Moscow has one of the highest costs of living in the world. Shortages are also exacerbated by the ability of wealthy people to buy up multiple apartments and refurbish them into one luxurious dwelling.

Outside of Moscow, St. Petersburg, and a few other cities that have been growing because they are receiving revenues from energy exports (Figure 5.18C), many urban areas are suffering from general deterioration and the absence of funds for maintenance due to slow or absent economic growth. In some cases, this is causing overall housing shortages (see Figure 5.18B).

Urban Legacies of Soviet Regional Economic Development One of the more difficult legacies of the Soviet era involves the huge industrial cities in the lightly inhabited expanses of Siberia and the Pacific coast. Founded originally as trading posts and fortress towns during the pre-Soviet Russian empire, these towns became the focus of Soviet planners, who were eager to solidify their control of the vast interior east of Moscow. They became home to major extractive industries and defense-related infrastructure, but further growth was always hampered by the vast distances and challenging physical geography that separate them from the main population centers in the west of the region. Even so, nearly 90 percent of Siberia’s people are concentrated in the few large urban areas. Life in these cities is vastly different from the more traditional rural lifestyles that characterized this region only a few generations ago (Figure 5.19).

Because the region’s rivers run mainly north–south, there is a need for land transportation systems, such as railroads and highways, that run east to west to connect these cities with the west. The harsh climate of the region makes this infrastructure exceedingly expensive to build and maintain, and much has fallen into disrepair in the post-Soviet era. Only one poorly paved road and one main rail line—the Trans-Siberian Railroad (Figure 5.20)—runs the full east–west length, connecting Moscow with Vladivostok, the main port city on the Russian Pacific coast.

Urban Central Asia While Central Asia has historically had a relatively low rate of urbanization, recent expansion in the energy industries has fueled new urban growth. Cities here have also grown because of the region’s relatively high overall population growth. Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, has 2.3 million people, making it the fourth-largest city in the region, after Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Kiev. Almaty, the former capital of Kazakhstan, is the next-largest city in Central Asia, at 1.3 million, followed by Astana, the new capital of Kazakhstan, which has 750,000 people.