State Policy of Population Retention in Particularly Significant Areas

The phrase “population retention” has entered the vocabulary of politicians and publicists and has come to denote not a ban on moving to a new place of residence, but, first, various methods of encouraging the local population to remain living and working in their region and, second, preferences for those who decide to move to work and live in territories of particular importance to the state. The article provides examples of such territories in prerevolutionary Russia, the USSR, and the Russian Federation, the legitimacy of their status and preferential regimes. The reasons for the creation of two enormous megaregions of special national importance—the Far East and Russian Arctic—are systematically analyzed. Their ambitious development plans require additional labor resources. The list and adequacy of the applied population retention measures, the objective difficulties in implementing state personnel policy and possible ways to overcome them are considered.