Editing Village (section)

====Russia====
[[File:Центр села Кичкальня.jpg|thumb|The village of ''[[Kichkalnya]]'', [[Tatarstan]]]]

In Russia, as of the [[Russian Census (2010)|2010 Census]], 26.3% of the country's population lives in [[Classification of inhabited localities in Russia|rural localities]];<ref name="2010Census">{{ru-pop-ref|2010Census}}</ref> down from 26.7% recorded in the [[Russian Census (2002)|2002 Census]].<ref name="2010Census" /> Multiple types of rural localities exist, but the two most common are ''derevnya'' ({{lang|ru|деревня}}) and ''selo'' ({{lang|ru|село}}). Historically, the formal indication of status was religious: a city (''gorod'', {{lang|ru|город}}) had a [[cathedral]], a ''selo'' had a church, while a ''derevnya'' had neither.

The lowest administrative unit of the [[Russian Empire]], a ''[[volost]]'', or its Soviet or modern Russian successor, a ''[[selsoviet]]'', was typically headquartered in a ''selo'' and embraced a few neighboring villages.

In the 1960s–1970s, the depopulation of the smaller villages was driven by the central planners' drive in order to get the farm workers out of smaller, "[[Unpromising villages|prospectless]]" hamlets and into the [[kolkhoz|collective]] or [[sovkhoz|state farms]]' main villages or even larger [[town]]s and [[City|cities]], with more amenities.<ref>[http://demoscope.ru/weekly/2006/0253/tema04.php "Российское село в демографическом измерении" (''Rural Russia measured demographically'')] {{in lang|ru}}. This article reports the following [[Russian Census (2002)|census]] statistics:

{| class="wikitable"
|-
! Census year
!1959
!1970
!1979
!1989
!2002
|-
| Total number of rural localities in Russia
|294,059
|216,845
|177,047
|152,922
|155,289
|-
| Of them, with population 1 to 10 persons
|41,493
|25,895
|23,855
|30,170
|47,089
|-
| Of them, with population 11 to 200 persons
|186,437
|132,515
|105,112
|80,663
|68,807
|}
</ref>

Most Russian rural residents are involved in agricultural work, and it is very common for villagers to produce their own food. As prosperous urbanites purchase village houses for their second homes, Russian villages sometimes are transformed into [[dacha]] settlements, used mostly for seasonal residence.

The historically [[Cossacks|Cossack]] regions of Southern Russia and parts of [[Ukraine]], with their [[fertile soil]] and absence of [[serfdom]], had a rather different pattern of settlement from central and northern Russia. While peasants of central Russia lived in a village around the lord's manor, a Cossack family often lived on its own farm, called ''[[khutor]]''. A number of such ''khutors'' plus a central village made up the administrative unit with a center in a ''[[stanitsa]]'' ({{langx|ru|станица|stanitsa}}; {{langx|uk|станиця|stanytsya|stanytsia}}). Such ''[[stanitsa]]s'', often with a few thousand residents, were usually larger than a typical ''selo'' in central Russia.