The population of Russia is regarded as being quite immobile compared to other countries. There have been some recent methodological advances and new datasets on internal migration which make cross-national comparisons, though these do not extend to Russia. This paper adds comparisons of levels of mobility in Russia with other countries. The study finds that the population of Russia is not significantly less mobile than other large countries and that part of the myth of immobility stems from a deterioration of the migration registration system in the post-Soviet period. There are inconsistencies between lifetime mobility derived from population censuses and annual mobility from a population register which originated during the central-planning period. Given changes in the economic structure at both national and regional levels during the period of economic transition, migration theory predicted significant migration movements, and it seems as if many were not captured by the statistical system. 1. Introduction In the closed economic system of the Soviet Union, regional wage disparities were minimal, and it was the state, not the market, which primarily determined the allocation of the population across Russia, territorially the world’s largest country. According to one of the most cited works on Russia’s post-Soviet human geography, what seems to be Russia’s greatest asset—its enormous size—also gave Soviet central planners enormous room for error [1]. The study does not only describe why there has been so much migration in post-Soviet Russia but also why mobility needs to increase for Russia to become a more productive economy. With the opening up of the country and the transition to a market economy, which has brought about large economic and regional disparities, the result should have been large increases in spatial mobility of the population. However, it appears from official statistics that during the post-Soviet period, mobility of the population has fallen by half from already low levels and the spatial misallocation of human resources in Russia lingers. This paper examines the puzzle of the immobility of the population of Russia by comparing mobility rates to those in other countries. Especially important for Russia are comparisons with other large countries, where distances of migration are long. Among the questions examined are the following. In Russia, what percent of the population changes place of residence in any given year as opposed to the populations of other countries? How many times do people in Russia move during their lifetimes
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