The practice of designing and transformation of rural population distribution of Tomsk Oblast in the 1970s

By the 1970s, Tomsk Oblast had planned quantitative and qualitative parameters of an organized bigger settlement network. In the 1970s, the reorganization of the rural settlement network became a priority of the agricultural policy. The Project of District Layout of Agricultural Areas of the Tomsk Oblast was developed at the end of the 1960s and approved in 1971. According to it, the number of settlements in the Oblast had to be reduced from 1,107 to 588. In the 1970s, some scientific and journalistic reflection arose concerning the transformations of the rural settlement network that were reduced in the minds of the reformers mainly to the resettlement of the "unpromising" villages. It particularly results in calls for caution in resettlement planning and conducting. However, despite the repeated failures in the implementation of these reforms, the government declared political will and administrative determination to follow the chosen way. The part of people who moved in a planned manner from unpromising villages to perspective ones was insignificant. In the 1970s, the migration of rural population played a decisive role in changing of the rural population distribution in Tomsk Oblast. Migration led to a reduction of the rural population of the Oblast, to its redistribution within the rural areas, to the polarization of the population distribution. The negative effect of large-scale population migration from the village caused concern of the authorities and the public, forced to study it, to develop measures for its optimization and limitation. Further development of the theory of rural settlement transformation was intensified. It resulted in the development of the theories of a unified settlement system, a population settlement group system, a settlement pattern framework. The District Planning Scheme of Tomsk Oblast (1978), as well as a number of publications of that period, names three group systems of population settlement (with centers in Tomsk, in Kolpashevo and in Nizhnevartovsk), parts of which were to be the rural settlements of Tomsk Oblast. However, it was obvious that the lack of city settlements, the low-density of rural population, remoteness of settlements from each other led to the fact that group systems could not cover all the territory of Tomsk Oblast. In the 1970s, the transformation of the rural population distribution began to be increasingly corrected by the undertaken concentration and specialization of agricultural production. Resettlement following manufacturing was to become even more concentrated. Thus, according to The District Planning Scheme of Tomsk Oblast (1978) only 389 villages were to be preserved. Great work conducted in these years on the theoretical development of the transformation of rural population distribution did not find an appropriate practical implementation. By the end of the 1970s, the reorganization of rural settlement network had not led to an increase in agricultural production. At that time, villagers could preserve themselves only by becoming passive objects of control. Therefore, the authorities, taking them under direct policy management, acquired all the expenses inherent to the degrading village.

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