DOES ETHNICITY REMAIN IN THE URBAN ENVIRONMENT?
SOME ANSWERS TO THE MYSTERIES OF THE BIG CITY 

Drobizheva Leokadiya Mikhaylovna, Doctor of historical sciences, professor, head of the Research center of interethnic relations of the RAS Institute of Sociology (Bldg. 5, 24/35 Krzhizhanovskogo street, Moscow, Russia), drobizheva@yandex.ru

304.323

Background. The processes of industrialization and modernization, according to classical sociologists, should lead to the blurring of ethnic differences, butpractice shows the opposite trend. The purpose of the paper is to identify the level of civil and ethnic identity in the settlements of different types (metropolis, town, village), and the impact of various factors on its formation.
Materials and methods.The implementation of the research tasks has been achieved on the basis of analyzing the data of the nationwide research by the RAS Institute of Sociology “20 years of reform as viewed by Russians”, a series of studies by the International Relations Research Center of the RAS Institute of Sociology in Moscow and the republics on a representative sample, a study conducted by the subdepartment of sociology and personnel management” of Penza State University under the grant “Dynamics of  students’ values and attitudes in the Volga Federal District under Russian sociocultural modernization”, as well as data of the European Social Survey. Sociological survey and secondary analysis methods have been used.
Results. The analysis of the research results showed that civil and ethnic identity in the cities not only lower than in the rural areas, but the significance of ethnic identity in the cities is even a little higher.
Conclusions. The nature of interethnic relations is influenced by many factors, such as the level of education, satisfaction or dissatisfaction with one’s life, the assessment of what people gained or lost in the last decade, the collapse of hopes, anger against corruption and injustice in life. In addition, each factor in conjunction with the others “works” in different ways on every territory.

civil identity, ethnic identity, xenophobia, identity matrix, ethnic tensions, immigrants.

1. Pokrovskiy N. E. Globalizatsiya. Postsovetskoe obshchestvo [Globalization. Post-soviet society ]. Moscow: Stovi, 2001, p. 51.
2. 20 let reform glazami rossiyan: opyt mnogoletnikh sotsiologicheskikh zamerov: pod red. M. K. Gorshkova, R. Krumma, V. V. Petukhova [20 years of reforms in the eyes of russians: experience of long-term sociological observation: edited by M. K. Gorshkov, R. Krumm, V. V. Petukhov]. Moscow: Ves' Mir, 2011.