Kazan, Saratov, Volgograd, Ulyanovsk), the Central Chernozem Region (Voronezh, Lipetsk),
and the North Caucasus (Rostov-on-Don, Krasnodar) as well as in southern Siberia and the
Far East (Novosibirsk, Omsk, Tyumen, Tomsk, Barnaul, Kemerovo, Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk,
Khabarovsk, Vladivostok), one might find both winners within and losers of the current
transformational process. Because of the attractiveness of the large cities they profit above all
from the innovative changes of the economic structure (privatisation of the economy, starting
of deindustrialization, connected with the development of tertiary sector of economy).
The largest multifunctional centres of the land are faced with the problem of restructuring, in
which maintaining and further developing modern highly technological branches of
production is necessary. This includes a share of those branches of production which hitherto
had been set up for scientifically intensive mass production. So it came about, for example,
already in Moscow the forming of high technological branches in Air and Space Travel-,
Electronics-, Machinery- and the instrument-making industry with a same time decline in the
share of the metallurgical and textile industries. The number of such branches is still large,
such as in the production of heavy machinery and the iron and steel industry, or oil processing
industry. Required and to be expected, besides, is a considerable enlargement of the share of
the workforce in the entire tertiary sector, especially in the enterprise oriented goods and
services area, with further decline of the share of the workforce in the industry.
Although the correlation between the expert opinion of the development potential and the
number of residents of this or that city is very large, on the one hand, some cities have got a
relatively higher (Kaliningrad/Konigsberg, Vladivostok, Irkutsk, Arkhangelsk, et al.), or on
the other hand, lower (Ivanovo, Tambov, Saransk, et al.), evaluation, judging by the
development potential as would otherwise be indicated by the corresponding number of
residents (Brade, Perzik & Piterski 2000).
In this connection it is important to bear in mind that in the 90s it is observed the stabilisation
and sometimes even the decrease of the population in large cities and even in cities of more
than a million residents (Figure 2). On the grounds of this negative trend it is possible to
come to a conclusion, that this situation reflects a reversal of urban processes in Russia during
the 90s and a turning point in urban growth in this country (Medvedkov & Medvedkov
1999), but the problem of the length of this period of deceleration is a matter of opinion.